After much anticipation, SolidFire has rolled out ‘Oxygen’ which is Version 8 of its Element operating system for storage systems.
“SolidFire’s Element OS powers IT infrastructure and accelerates the transition to the next generation data center, delivering agility, scalability, automation and predictability,” SolidFire CEO and founder Dave Wright said in announcing the new product. “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.”
The company provides storage systems that are completely solid-state, free of the mechanical problems of hard drives and promising greater reliability.
The company has added some extra features to better appeal to data centers.
Oxygen offers a “scale out” strategy where administrators add new nodes to a storage array instead of moving to a larger machine, or “scaling up.” This minimizes disruption to users during upgrades.
It also replicates data snapshots to a separate facility, effectively providing offsite backups. Synchronous replication offers greater protection against data loss. The new version includes a snapshot/retention manager to automate snapshots and rollbacks.
Oxygen includes VLAN tagging to support up to 256 logical networks. It also supports LDAP, which is used to provide a central place to authenticate users.
The new version is immediately available to SolidFire customers.
While SSD devices are still relatively expensive, providing lower capacity for higher prices compared to hard drives, since they have no moving parts, they’re theoretically more reliable, though there are still concerns about reliability in the long term. SolidFire’s hardware and software platform has special appeal to companies that can’t afford to lose data. The company offers good support plans to entice them to switch.
SolidFire is unusual in that it guarantees future support on current hardware for software updates in the future, though in practice customers would likely upgrade at some point in the future. Prices will likely keep dropping and reliability will improve. This support appears to be to entice customers who might be leery of flash technology in the meantime. The company has already secured $150 million in venture capital funding.