ShapeBlue, a leading global CloudStack integrator, announced that it has entered into a strategic partnership with SolidFire, the storage industry’s leading Solid-State Array, to deliver next-generation storage solutions to organizations deploying Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud environments. Under this agreement, ShapeBlue will leverage SolidFire’s full enterprise solution – which includes such features as guaranteed Quality of Service (QoS), complete system automation and scale-out storage design – to offer better functionality and efficiency when delivering cloud-based services to customers.
“We are delighted to be taking our relationship with SolidFire to the next level as they have a genuinely unique proposition for organizations running, or planning to run, an IaaS infrastructure,” said Giles Sirett, CEO of ShapeBlue. Sirett identified the four most important elements of SolidFire’s technology:
- Offers guaranteed storage performance in a multi-tenant environment with the ability to dedicate IOPS to individual tenants or applications, solving the “noisy neighbor” issue often experienced in cloud;
- Unique design enables the delivery of a much higher IOPS density than with traditional storage vendors, which helps prevent the need to over-specify storage in virtualized environments;
- Has deep integration with Apache CloudStack, allowing storage to be automated and provisioned on the fly;
- Scale-out architecture is perfect for the capacity and growth models usually chosen for ShapeBlue customers.
This partnership follows a number of customer projects the two companies have worked on together. ShapeBlue has indicated that as a result of this extensive collaboration it now has significant technical capacity for advising and providing SolidFire expertise to its customers.
“We already have a standardized reference architecture that accommodates SolidFire’s technology,” said Giles, “and we will be looking to make that public in due course. We will become the go-to partner for companies who wish to benefit from the efficiency and automation that SolidFire brings to their cloud environments.”
From now on SolidFire will be ShapeBlue’s primary block-storage recommendation for IaaS builds, and ShapeBlue is the first company outside of the U.S. to become a SolidFire Gold Cloud Builder partner.
Dave Cahill, vice president of corporate development & strategy for SolidFire, said, “ShapeBlue’s expertise in designing and building cloud infrastructures will drastically simplify deployment and accelerate time to value, enabling customers to take advantage of SolidFire’s ability to scale granularly, automate storage management and consolidate mixed application workloads – all while delivering guaranteed performance.”
Edited by Rory J. Thompson