SolidFire announced the launch of its worldwide Early Access Program. The company is also revealing details about its all-SSD storage technology that addresses the unique technical and economic requirements of primary block storage in the cloud.

The company’s exclusive use of solid-state drives in combination with a high-efficiency scale-out storage architecture enables cloud service providers to significantly increase system performance while simultaneously increasing capacity utilization to more than 85 percent. Performance within a SolidFire system is virtualized separately from capacity, allowing cloud service providers to prescribe and guarantee performance to every volume within the system. Inline deduplication, compression, and thin provisioning technologies operate in real-time across the entire system and are capable of reducing capacity requirements by up to 70 percent.

“From its inception, SolidFire has been committed to solving the problems that surround providing primary block storage at cloud scale,” said Harry Weller of NEA. “We are pleased to see the company’s progress these past few months and are impressed with the feedback received from customers who visited their new office in Boulder, Colorado, for hands-on time with the product.”

“This is certainly one of the most comprehensive approaches to the use of flash within a primary storage system,” said Mike Karp, vice president and principal analyst at Ptak, Noel Associates. “SolidFire clearly understands cloud service providers’ storage issues, and the company has tackled not only the issue of storage performance and how to guarantee it, but also storage efficiency and management challenges through an innovative all-SSD architecture. We will keep an eye on them as they bring their product to market in an effort to provide high-performance, reliable storage for thousands of servers in cloud environments.”

The SolidFire scale-out architecture combines nodes in parallel over a 10 GB iSCSI Ethernet grid. A single system can scale to 100 nodes, 1 PB of capacity, and can host more than 100,000 tenant volumes. Built from the ground up upon a REST-based API, the SolidFire system fully automates storage deployment, management, and reporting. SolidFire Helix™ Data Protection eliminates the need for traditional RAID and isolates device failures without affecting performance.

“Our discussions with cloud providers continue to show that traditional disk-based architectures are not suited for broad-scale deployment within the cloud. These systems quickly become I/O-bound at cloud scale, leaving customers with poor and unpredictable performance. In addition, traditional storage system are complex to manage, expensive and lack the automation that cloud service providers require,” said Dave Wright, founder and CEO of SolidFire. “At SolidFire, we are changing the way primary block storage services are deployed and managed within the cloud. The Early Access Program that we are announcing today will take our fully tested all-SSD systems into cloud providers’ environments with guaranteed Quality of Service, inline data efficiencies, and automated management - all at a price comparable to spinning disk.”