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SolidFire Aims SSD System At Cloud Providers: Page 2 of 2

Rather than use conventional RAID across the 10 SSDs in each enclosure, SolidFire mirrors each data chunk across two nodes in the cluster. They promise to support three-way mirroring in a subsequent release.

The SolidFire OS also includes multi-tenancy features including LUN by LUN quality of service
including minimum and maximum IOPs and both IOP and throughput burst control. This allows service providers to ensure that one customer’s IO sucking application doesn’t slow everyone else down.

When asked about pricing, SolidFire would only say that the system would be cost-competitive with a spinning disk system. Since that spinning disk system could be anything from a Clariion with equivalent capacity on 300-GByte 15K RPM drives to a universal storage platform (USP) with hundreds of short-stroked drives, "cost comparable to spinning disk" sounds like it might be a bit expensive to me.

All in all, I’m impressed by the SolidFire system. Scale-out, 10-Gbps iSCSI with real multitenancy support looks like just what cloud providers should be looking for to build their equivalent of Amazon’s EBS (Elastic Block Storage).

At the time of publication, SolidFire is not a client of and has no business relationship with Howard Marks.