SolidFire sells an all-flash storage platform, but it is trying extremely hard to broaden beyond that and become the enabler of new approaches to storage for enterprises and large service providers. It is with this in mind that at the beginning of the year company founder Dave Wright said that its flash products will never become obsolete.
Over the past five years the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) has been virtualizing its IT environment VMware. After already achieving about 80 percent virtualization, it was announced earlier this month that the CPUC is now very close to the 100 percent mark. This was accomplished by leveraging the scale-out architecture of all-flash storage from SolidFire.
The market for flash as an enterprise storage media has considerably grown over the past few years. Although it was once seen as an expensive alternative to spinning disk technology, the realization that savings could be realized due to the technology’s smaller footprint, smaller data center power requirements and ultimately, the increase in processing speed have made it the storage device of choice.
When you consider the fact that California is typically on the cutting edge when it comes to environmental policy, it should come as no surprise that CPUC has made the switch to an all-flash storage solution. In fact, analysts predict that within the next 10 years flash-based storage systems are set to overtake traditional HDD solutions.
“We're a regulatory agency for energy, so we need to set an example,” said Infrastructure Manager for CPUC, Albert Fuller. “We reduced our physical footprint significantly through virtualization, but that remaining 20 percent was our pain point. Scale-up storage solutions didn't let us close that gap. SolidFire’s scale-out storage is something new that enables us to do what we could not before — approach 100 percent virtualization, with guaranteed IOPS and the ability to scale out."
According to CPUC, SolidFire has gone more than four weeks without a reboot, and the fact that the previous SAS (News - Alert) disk storage solution required weekly reboots gives you an idea of not only cost savings, but the efficiency achieved using an all-flash storage solution. A new in-house application for content management will also begin to take advantage of SolidFire.
It seems that CPUC found an unforeseen advantage in using SolidFire with respect to an intuitive interface designed to provide ease of use. SolidFire was able to give CPUC a fast, reliable and cost-effective storage solution eliminating latency, performance degradation and the need for resource-intensive scale-ups.
Edited by Rory J. Thompson