SolidFire is a company that was founded in 2010, whose original concept was to sell its software-defined storage systems to private cloud storage companies. Since that time, the company has tripled in size with many of its recent hires being in the field of engineering and marketing.
With the amount of data that is being collected these days, datacenters are increasing in size and the need to store all of this big data is also growing exponentially. An all-flash storage array is a solid state storage disk system that contains multiple flash memory drives instead of the traditional spinning hard disk drives.
SolidFire recently concluded an analysis of what is driving storage automation. More than 300 IT professionals from around the world were surveyed and an interesting twist is that none of them were SolidFire customers.
"The insights gleaned from this report confirm that storage automation is one of the key goals in transitioning to a next generation datacenter,” said SolidFire's VP of corporate development and strategy, Dave Cahill. “While storage infrastructure has long been the least extensible component of the data center, the flexibility and simplicity of SolidFire's API and integrations with leading management frameworks, like OpenStack, vSphere and PowerShell, allow organizations to completely automate their datacenters and realize the full value of their storage investment without compromise."
Considering the growth of data collection, it is not surprising to see that storage automation and managing the automation process top the list. The survey found that IT professionals are expected to manage thousands of business-critical applications while handle increasing amounts of data.
In addition, they need to identify processes for automation so that production and application deployment times can be reduced, giving them the ability to efficiently respond to daily business demands. The key to accomplishing this is storage automation.
SolidFire gives its customers the ability to automate the entire storage system through its comprehensive REST-based API. This enables its users to use automation in every aspect of cloud storage management from deployment to provisioning, to security, reporting and billing. In turn, this allows for complete performance automation and the development of end user self-service tools.
It is important to improve reliability, which also increases efficiency. The majority of respondents feel that automating the storage process is a way to easily manage all aspects of storage provisioning, management, monitoring and reporting.
Edited by Rory J. Thompson