Data Backup Digest

SolidFire are a storage company based in Colorado that specialise in all-SSD solutions. The company have recently raised $82 in investment through Series D funding. This investment takes the total funding of the company to $150 million, which CEO David Wright claims is more than was raised by nearly all the public storage companies from the previous generation.

New investor Greenspring Associates led the investment round with participation from current ivnestors NEA, Novak Biddle, Samsung Ventures and Valhalla Partners.

“From SolidFire’s top rankings in independent industry analyst reports to its growing list of enterprise customers, SolidFire is shaking up the storage market,” said Harry Weller, a member of SolidFire’s board of directors and general partner at NEA.

This new funding will help the company continue their rapid and sustainable growth. While some competitors also continue to grow, they do so while incurring losses that continue to increase, which Wright says “won’t likely find a receptive audience” with their IPOs.

SolidFire was established in 2009 and offers data storage that can be scaled for cloud providers and enterprise users. A report from Gartner, an analyst firm, said that the products the company offer make it an attractive platform for those who are using big data workloads. However, one drawback noted by Gartner was the high costs that are initially required from the users. This is something that SolidFire are looking to change.

SolidFire announced two new flash storage nodes to their offerings. One of these, the SF2405 four-node configuration, offers 35TB of capacity and 200000 input/output operations per second for below $100000. Compared to what the company used to charge, this is a more affordable option for those beginning in their use of a private cloud infrastructure.

The company also announced the SF4805, which offers double the amount of density of the SF2405 and 44 percent more capacity. Jay Prassl, vice president of marketing at SolidFire, claims that the SF4805 offers 69TB of capacity at the lowest dollar-per-gigabyte rate that the industry offers.

In an interview with Data Storage Today, Prassl said that the company have focussed on enterprise and service provider customers from the beginning, but they put the emphasis on three main benefits: the ability to consolidate a number of workloads, to automate, and to deploy a system that scales seamlessly over time.

“We allow customers to mix and match," said Prassl. “You never obsolete your storage platform.”

He said that customers don’t begin looking to deploy flash from wall to wall, but that they generally begin using SolidFire to meet a specific need and then work their way up from there.

Further information about the $82 million raised in Series D funding can be found on SolidFire’s official blog post regarding the news. More information about SolidFire, along with details on all the solutions they offer and how to buy them, can be found at their official website. Consumers can also ring or email the company in order to get the conversation rolling on how they can help you with your storage solutions.