The new offerings will significantly decrease the cost of entry for the SolidFire array.
Jay Prassl, Vice President of Marketing at SolidFire
Boulder CO-based all-flash storage systems vendor SolidFire has expanded its flagship SF Series product line, with two new storage nodes, the SF2405 and SF4805. They will significantly decrease the cost of entry for the SolidFire array.
Solidfire has a single platform, and its customers build their environments by adding 1U nodes to the platform.
“Now we are adding two new nodes to the family,” said Jay Prassl, Vice President of Marketing at SolidFire. They represent the third generation of SolidFire hardware on the present platform.
The SF2405 expands the low end of the SolidFire product family. It starts at 35TB of effective capacity and offers 200,000 predictable IOPS at a sub-$100,000 price point.
“The SF24005’s unique element is it delivers a smaller foundation storage footprint in the same capacity, for below $100,000,” Prassl said. “It is for enterprises who don’t want to use flash wall to wall, but who have some specific performance problems, like a slow Oracle database. It’s also for organizations deploying their first private cloud environment, The SF24005 lets you take those actions to solve those problems at a lower price point.”
The other new node is the SF4805, which doubles the density of the SF2405 while providing 44 per cent more storage capacity at a 30 per cent lower cost than the SolidFire’s SF3010 node. The SF4805 has a starting 4-node footprint providing 69TB of effective capacity and 200,000 predictable IOPS.
“The SF4805 node delivers the lowest dollar per GB of any SolidFire node, which makes it a great node to add as you scale,” Prassl said.
Prassl also stressed the improved mixed node cluster support and improved ability to mix and match these nodes together.
“This is what separates us from everyone else,” he said. “If you bought a competitor’s tiny platform, it will only go so far. But you can start small with us, and add to that cluster a larger node like the 48005 mode. That ability to scale out is unique. If you start small, you don’t have to keep adding small. You can add whatever node size you like.”
This also highlights SolidFire’s flexibility, Prassl added.
“As you grow you can change the trajectory of your environment over time, while never turning the storage system off,” he said. “SolidFire can upgrade systems non-disruptively, and it eliminates generational upgrades every 3-5 years. You can add in new modes with the newest technology, but you don’t have to reset any QOS settings. Taking nodes away has zero impact on the functioning of the system as well.”
Prassl said the less expensive nodes doesn’t really change the size of clients SolidFire will go after, but it does give it a better priced option.
“A lot of people think smaller storage node equals smaller customer target, but that’s not the case with us,” he said. “We are not going to the midmarket with the smaller product, but are still focused on service providers and large enterprises. However, if you are a reseller, you will have a broader addressable market to deliver SolidFire to because in the past we have been in the $200,000-$250,000 market, and the ability to deliver it at half that cost is a powerful tool for a reseller.”
Prassl also stressed the importance of another SolidFire announcement, that it has secured an $82 million series D round of funding, bringing its total funding to $150 million.
“This new financing on the horizon for SolidFire will help us accelerate to get into these areas where we have struggled because of price point and capacity issues,” he said.
