Flash-storage system market leader SolidFire got some good news recently when its CEO Dave Wright was named CEO of the Year by the Colorado Technology Association (CTA). The award was one of 10 presented at the 15th annual APEX Awards, held earlier this month at the Sheraton Denver Downtown Hotel. Wright’s personal award accompanies numerous other awards SolidFire has earned recently.
Wright, according to his LinkedIn (News - Alert) profile, has worked in the storage business before. In 2007, he founded Jungle Disk, an online storage and backup platform. He was the company’s CEO until it was acquired by Rackspace (News - Alert) in late 2008. From that point on, he served as company president before leaving in 2009. In January 2010, Wright became SolidFire CEO, and has held that position continuously ever since.
CTA’s awards cover different sectors of the economy with some going to individuals and others going to companies or organizations. Startups, advocates, educators, talent champions, CIOs, companies, projects, and lifetime award recipients earned awards this year.
Boulder, Colorado-based SolidFire, Inc. develops all flash storage systems for data centers. The company claims that its all-flash arrays perform better than the competition. By comparison, the company’s SF9010 has a capacity of 3.4 petabytes, and can perform 7.5 million 4k random IOPS.
By comparison, a NetApp array with the same capacity allegedly can only do one million 4K random IOPS. If these claims are true, this would make SolidFire storage much more scalable than other flash arrays, since a significant increase in storage capacity has a significant corresponding increase in performance to go along with it.
SolidFire has also been recognized as one of the top visionaries in Gartner’s (News - Alert) Magic Quadrant for solid-state arrays, receiving the top score in five different categories. Based on Gartner’s scoring system, the company fell slightly short of appearing in the leaders’ quadrant because of a minor weakness in its ability to execute. According to SolidFire’s website, the company has received a total of 14 awards from various organizations based on its technology and being a great company to work for.
Good news continues to come in for SolidFire in terms of the technology of its products and the company’s reputation in its industry. If its claims about performance and cost when it comes to flash arrays are true, it would not only put the company in Gartner’s leaders’ quadrant, it could disrupt the storage industry as we know it.
Edited by Rory J. Thompson