The fourth in SolidFire’s series of Agile Infrastructure architectures, this one facilitates the design and deployment of dynamic virtual infrastructure to deliver secure multi-tenancy.
Mark Conley, SolidFire’s Director of WorldWide Channels
AUSTIN—At Dell World, SolidFire announced a new reference architecture for its pre-validated OpenStack converged infrastructure designs. The new design combines Dell and VMware technology with SolidFire’s all-flash scale-out storage system.
“This is the fourth in our series of Solidfire reference architectures, which allow for the building of complex systems,” said Mark Conley, SolidFire’s Director of WorldWide Channels.
Boulder-based SolidFire, which makes all-flash, scale-out storage solutions for the service provider and large enterprise markets is a long-time Dell partner.
“We have had a long relationship with Dell, since the beginning of our history, and the appliance we sell is based on a Dell PowerEdge 630 platform,” Conley said. “Of our three previous reference architectures, two of those were also for Dell.”
This particular architecture combines SolidFire’s all-flash scale-out block storage platform, Dell PowerEdge R630 servers, Dell Networking S55 and S4810 switches, and VMware vSphere into SolidFire’s AI for Virtual Infrastructure architecture. It allows storage policies to be provisioned and enforced to isolate and guarantee performance to each workload while running thousands of workloads simultaneously within a single, shared infrastructure.
“Customers take the plans and buy what they need and customize what they need,” Conley said. SolidFire provides configuration guidance for individualized small, medium and large-size Virtual Infrastructure deployments.
SolidFire AI for Virtual Infrastructure with Dell and VMware enables IT organizations to consolidate, automate and scale business-critical virtualized environments. They can automate all of the complex storage management tasks and deliver deep management integration, and deliver secure multi-tenancy if required to support the delivery of It-as-a-service. Conley said that’s functionality that most of their customers — typically service providers and larger enterprises – need today.
“We originally started aiming at service providers, but enterprises are really service providers in disguise, especially telcos,” he stated. “They need things like multitenancy, as well as the ability to support applications like eBay and PayPal.”
SolidFire has a relatively large channel considering the high-end nature of its market. They started out selling direct, but added a Fueled by SolidFire program for service providers early in 2013. The Cloud Builder program for solution providers was set up later in 2013.
Their Cloud Builder community has grown to 180 worldwide solution providers and VARs in less than 18 months – and up from nine partners at the beginning of 2014. Of their three types of clients – service providers, government and enterprises – the service providers have the smallest channel component, and even there, there is a 50 per cent channel contribution of some type. At the other end, nearly 80 per cent of total enterprise bookings involved a Cloud Builder partner.
