Technology  November 27, 2015

SolidFire drives make splash with flashy storage solutions

BOULDER — In the last six years since SolidFire chief executive David Wright set out to create storage arrays of flash or solid-state drives, a lot has changed, but certainly not his dedication to the technology.

“It really came from my experience at Rackspace, where I had sold my last startup in ’08, where I got to see some of the challenges in large-scale, traditional enterprise storage,” Wright said. “It was clear that solid-state drives were a better solution, but you had to figure out a way to engineer a system to get the costs down.”

Today, these all-flash drives are key to developing enterprise storage solutions, especially cloud solutions that may host thousands of individual clients. The No. 1 reason is the speed with which data can be retrieved compared with disc storage, something everyone knew about but only a few had begun working on in 2009.

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Wright started SolidFire that year with a small team of engineers in Atlanta, moving to Boulder in 2011.

SolidFire chief executive David Wright. Courtesy SolidFire

“We were about a year into our working prototype when we moved here,” he said. “It was another 18 months until we had another shipping product.

Since then, all-flash drives have appeared to drop about 25 percent in cost on a yearly basis, but to truly address the biggest obstacles to bringing an encompassing solution to market, took a little time, Wright said.

“Some of the first things we addressed were arrays that delivered in-line (data) compression, and deduplication,” the elimination of data stored in more than one location, Wright said. “Much of it was not just around the flash, but the other capabilities such as our scale-out approach.”

The modular system produced by SolidFire “snaps together multiple systems like Legos,” he said, although perhaps more importantly SolidFire can predict performance of varied applications even under this modular approach.

“We have some very unique guaranteed workloads,” he said.

SolidFire also seems in line for some guaranteed work if everything keeps working the way it is today. Employing 419 people around the world, SolidFire accounts for somewhere between 7 percent to 9 percent of the all-flash array market, according to the IDC, a market that almost reached $1.6 billion in total sales in 2014.

Those sales totals were reached two years earlier than IDC had expected, leading the organization to project total 2015 sales of $2.24 billion. While the hybrid market – which includes disc-based storage together with SSD arrays – is much larger today, Wright said his firm will stay focused on all-flash arrays.

Quite simply there doesn’t seem to be a big reason to change. Helping drive the price of SSDs further down is their widespread consumer usage — from thumb drives to cell phones — and the 3D technology NAND flash manufacturing that SolidFire embraced more than a year ago creates even greater savings and enhancements in storage solutions.

Comparing prices between disc drives and SSDs isn’t really that easy, but Wright said he believes the time already has arrived for most enterprise solutions to turn to flash.

“Flash has already moved in at the top of the market. It can replace the performance-based disc market (on a price basis),” he said. “It is rapidly approaching the point where disc will only be used for coldest, slowest most archival uses.”

Virtually every company in the storage game now is involved with SSD arrays, and certainly the SolidFire solution is available to hybrid developers. However, Wright said focusing on the leading edge of data-center technology has helped keep his company focused.

The company has partnerships with Dell and Cisco that include some marketing agreements. However, Wright said the partnerships with those server giants are mainly hardware-oriented arrangements.

“The growth we’re seeing is the broader channel – about 150 channel partners worldwide,” he said. “The larger section of the company’s sales have come from about 150 channel partners.”

Pure Storage was another pure all-flash array company that was started about the same time as SolidFire. Wright said the major difference is that Pure Storage was looking to replace current disc systems on a 1-on-1 basis, while SolidFire was looking for a whole new ecosystem for streamlined data centers.

SolidFire has raised a respectable $150 since its inception. Although Pure Storage raised more than $500 million before recently going public, it also was burning through money a lot more quickly.

“We’re continuing to invest in growth and growing very quickly, but we’ve always had a focus on sustainable growth,” he said. “We’re building a long-term sustainable business model – we’re growing in a very rapid but very smart fashion.”

Speaking of building, SolidFire also will be putting all of its 250 current employees – a number that may soon reach 400 – underneath one roof at PearlWest, a four-story office and retail building going up at the former site of the Daily Camera at 11th and Pearl streets in Boulder.

While now housing its employees in four separate buildings on Pearl, SolidFire will triple its space and add space for another 150 workers. Wright said this move reflects the thinking which brought his company to Boulder in the first place.

“We were really looking for a market to grow in that had a strong history of storage technology,” Wright said, “and was attractive from a recruiting perspective.”

BOULDER — In the last six years since SolidFire chief executive David Wright set out to create storage arrays of flash or solid-state drives, a lot has changed, but certainly not his dedication to the technology.

“It really came from my experience at Rackspace, where I had sold my last startup in ’08, where I got to see some of the challenges in large-scale, traditional enterprise storage,” Wright said. “It was clear that solid-state drives were a better solution, but you had to figure out a way to engineer a system to get the costs down.”

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