SolidFire named #1 in Gartners Magic Quadrant

We'd like to say a big 'congratulations' to our partner SolidFire, who were not only named as the leading visionary in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Solid-State Arrays (SSAs), but they were also named as the number one SSA use-case overall.

In their first Magic Quadrant report dedicated entirely to Solid-State Arrays, the analyst firm praised SolidFire for how far the company had come considering its relative immaturity in the SSA market.

Solid-State storage provides performance levels much faster than disk-based storage can, and with services maturing and prices per GB becoming more competitive, the report predicts a much wider uptake in the near future. For years we've all pondered when the time would come for SSD to really play a major part in the data centre and now a dedicated MQ for the market really marks that we have reached that point.

Fast storage is great, but what SolidFire does very well is actually going beyond just SSD to solve specific business issues.

A recent survey revealed that 90% of CIOs in the UK view over-provisioning of cloud capacity as a "necessary evil", with most admitting they are paying for at least twice as much as they need. Most respondents also admitted to throttling performance at peak times in order to keep costs under control. SolidFire challenges this problem by decoupling storage from performance. It allows users of our IaaS platform to set minimum, maximum and burst performance settings, meaning they only pay for exactly what they use. And because users are allocated a guaranteed pool of IOPs, performance remains unaffected by 'noisy neighbours'.

Again, SSD on its own would give us great I/O figures, but using SolidFire means we can guarantee storage performance and customers can chose exact storage and I/O settings depending on what they need.

We were one of SolidFire's first public customers back in 2012, when they were still relatively unknown. We have consequently gone on to see the company grow into the leading storage visionary it is today. With their simple pricing strategy and unbeatable performance figures, SolidFire not only appeals to cloud service providers like us, but they are also making a name for themselves with enterprise users. And with such high-praise from top industry analysts, they look to have a promising future ahead.