SolidFire has released Oxygen, Version 8 of its Element all-flash storage operating system, which is meant to court data center operators looking for reliable performance to support cloud services.
SolidFire, as its name suggests, has an all-solid-state technology. It brings the known solid-state benefits to the table, like the reliability that comes from having no moving parts, and better performance. This, combined with the fact that the unit cost for solid-state storage is trending downwards, approaching that of traditional media storage, has piqued data center interest.
Oxygen takes the proposition and kicks it up a notch with enhanced data assurance functionality that reduces operational overhead and risk. This includes synchronous replication, which maximizes data protection against a disaster; snapshot replication, which replicates snapshots to a second site for rollback flexibility; a scheduler/retention manager for the scheduling and automation of snapshots, rollback points and retention duration; expanded VLAN tagging, which delivers support for up to 256 secure, logically isolated, per-tenant storage networks on a single storage platform; and LDAP Authentication for centralized user account administration.
“SolidFire’s Element OS powers IT infrastructure and accelerates the transition to the next generation data center, delivering agility, scalability, automation and predictability,” said SolidFire’s CEO and founder, Dave Wright. “For eight generations, Element OS has enabled our customers to transform their underlying data center infrastructure and achieve things they’ve never been able to before.”
Version 8 of Element OS can be delivered non-disruptively and takes advantage of Self-Healing High Availability Architecture, which has enabled thousands of in-field, in-production upgrades without disruption since the product was released for general availability in November 2012.
SolidFire’s Oxygen release can be used to upgrade existing SolidFire platforms including Element X, SolidFire’s software-only option for hyper-scale customers.
The company has also released a reference architecture that specifies pre-qualified server/storage/networking components comprising SolidFire storage, Cisco (News - Alert) UCS C-Class servers and Cisco Nexus networking hardware. This adds to existing SolidFire reference architectures that use Dell R630 servers.