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| SolidFire | |
|---|---|
| Name | SolidFire |
| Industry | Data storage |
| Fate | Acquired by NetApp in 2015 |
| Founded | 2007 |
| Founders | Dave Wright; Dave Hatfield; Anand Babu; Jeff Rao |
| Hq location | San Jose, California |
| Key people | Dave Wright; Sunil Potti |
| Products | All-flash storage arrays |
SolidFire SolidFire was an American technology company specializing in all-flash storage systems and software-defined storage appliances for cloud service providers and enterprises. Founded in 2007 and headquartered in San Jose, California, the company developed distributed storage architectures, quality of service controls, and scale-out clusters to address demands from Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, and telecommunications operators. SolidFire’s innovations influenced designs adopted by NetApp, EMC Corporation, Dell EMC, and other storage vendors before its acquisition by NetApp in 2015.
SolidFire was founded by engineers who previously worked at companies such as Sun Microsystems, LSI Corporation, Broadcom Inc., and Cisco Systems. Early funding rounds included investors like Accel Partners, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Battery Ventures, and Sutter Hill Ventures. In the 2010s SolidFire competed in markets alongside Isilon Systems, Data Domain, Pure Storage, and Nimble Storage. The company announced major product milestones and raised capital in rounds that involved firms including Greylock Partners and Sequoia Capital. SolidFire’s growth paralleled industry shifts led by VMware, OpenStack, Red Hat, and cloud-native platforms such as Kubernetes and Cloud Foundry. In 2015 SolidFire was acquired by NetApp; post-acquisition leadership engaged with organizations including Rackspace, AT&T, Verizon Communications, and CenturyLink to integrate SolidFire technology into broader portfolios.
SolidFire developed a clustered, distributed block-storage platform optimized for flash media, drawing on techniques from prior work at EMC Corporation and NetApp (earlier) design teams. The software stack included elements comparable to concepts from Ceph, GlusterFS, and architecture patterns used by Google File System. SolidFire implemented per-volume QoS controls similar in intent to mechanisms in VMware vSphere storage policies and OpenStack Cinder drivers. The platform interfaced with orchestration and automation tools such as Ansible, Puppet, Chef, and SaltStack. APIs exposed RESTful endpoints used by cloud management projects like CloudStack and Eucalyptus.
SolidFire’s product lineup centered on scale-out all-flash arrays and software including platform management and multi-tenant controls. Models and SKUs targeted service providers and enterprises, competing with arrays from Pure Storage, Tintri, and Violin Memory. Software offerings provided functionality that mirrored features found in NetApp ONTAP and EMC ViPR ecosystems, and integrated with virtualization platforms such as VMware ESXi and Microsoft Hyper-V. The company also offered support and professional services analogous to offerings from IBM Global Services and Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
SolidFire’s architecture used a distributed clustered control plane and data plane, employing techniques similar to those in Paxos-based consensus implementations used by Google Chubby and replication strategies like those in Apache Zookeeper. The design emphasized sharding and striping of data across nodes as seen in systems like Amazon S3 backend architectures and distributed databases such as Apache Cassandra. Key features included per-volume IOPS guarantees, thin provisioning, snapshots, and synchronous replication comparable to features in Dell EMC Unity and NetApp E-Series. Integration points and interfaces supported SNMP, iSCSI, and NFSv4 environments used by enterprises and cloud providers including Salesforce, Dropbox, and Spotify.
SolidFire published performance metrics addressing latency, IOPS, and throughput to validate multi-tenant performance similar to benchmarks produced by SPEC and storage industry analyses from IDC and Gartner. Independent test reports compared SolidFire arrays to competitive products from EMC Corporation, Hitachi Data Systems, and NetApp in scenarios reflecting workloads from Oracle Database, MySQL, MongoDB, and Microsoft SQL Server. The company emphasized linear scaling properties akin to systems engineered by Google, Facebook, and Netflix for distributed storage, and highlighted QoS stability under mixed workloads comparable to claims made by Pure Storage and Nimble Storage.
SolidFire targeted cloud service providers, telecommunications carriers, hosting companies, and enterprises running multi-tenant platforms. Notable deployments and references connected to companies in cloud infrastructure such as Rackspace, Linode, DigitalOcean, and service offerings by Verizon Communications and AT&T. Use cases included virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) deployments with Citrix and VMware Horizon, database consolidation for SAP, Oracle, and high-performance web-scale services used by platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram. The platform was also used in disaster recovery and hybrid cloud designs referenced alongside VMware vCloud Air and Microsoft Azure Stack initiatives.
In 2015 NetApp announced an acquisition of SolidFire, integrating its technology into NetApp’s product families and aligning engineering teams with NetApp divisions and global accounts including AWS Marketplace customers, Google Cloud partners, and enterprise channels such as Deloitte, Accenture, and Capgemini. Post-acquisition, SolidFire’s technology influenced NetApp offerings and appeared in joint sales motions with cloud providers like IBM and Microsoft. The acquisition followed consolidation trends also seen in deals involving EMC Corporation and Dell Technologies and was covered in industry analyses from Gartner, Forrester, and IDC.
Category:Computer storage companies