Editor’s note:
Test report by third party groups are often used to provide an unbiased analysis of a product or solution’s capabilities relative to vendor claims. Of course, most such reports are performed in ideal situations and occasional under imperfect conditions as what happens under real world circumstances.
 
PRESS RELEASE
 
SolidFire, Inc. announced that Enterprise Strategy Group's (ESG) hands-on lab testing of its all-flash array technology validates the agility, scale and automation of its scale-out storage architecture.
 
SolidFire says: "It is ideally suited to meet the current and ever-changing demands of the next-generation data center."
 
ESG's June 2014 Lab Review SolidFire for the Enterprise concludes: "If your organization is frustrated with the limitations of traditional storage for scale-out workloads and you're striving to deliver IT-as-a-Service from a next-generation data center, ESG Labs strongly recommends that you consider SolidFire for the enterprise."
 
ESG Lab has evaluated more than a dozen emerging flash-based storage solutions and highlights the focused and pragmatic approach SolidFire is taking in its development and go-to-market efforts. Instead of trying to compete with emerging flash versions of the traditional modular disk arrays, ESG points out that SolidFire is focused on scale-out needs of enterprise data centers and the largest cloud service providers.
 
"SolidFire has been anticipating the needs of the next-generation enterprise data center since its inception," commented ESG Lab Analyst, Aviv Kaufmann. "The system was designed to solve the problems that were frustrating cloud service providers who years ago were far ahead of the enterprise in trying to cost-effectively meet the extreme agility, scalability, and guaranteed performance requirements of a multi-tenant service provider."
 
An IT research, analysis and strategy firm, ESG visited SolidFire's HQs to perform hands-on validation of its all-flash array technology. Three storage clusters were made available for testing in the following categories: agility and automated management; efficiency and reliability; guaranteed performance and scalability. Tests were run against two cluster configurations to simulate management, provisioning, replication and performance testing in a VDI environment.
 
Select findings from the report include:
Agility and Automated Management

• By providing an open RESTful API that is easy to integrate into any application, SolidFire offers application administrators the ability to provision storage in an agile manner while specifying the level of guaranteed performance that their application demands.
• ESG Labs was able to deploy virtual desktops, volumes, and cloud-based OS instances on a SolidFire storage system ins, from native application use interfaces like VMware and OpenStack, with just a few clicks.

 
Efficiency and Reliability 

• Although every use case is different, it was evident that the efficiencies built into the SolidFire array allow users to deploy less physical capacity to achieve their goals - ultimately resulting in a far better TCO.
• ESG Lab validated the efficiency and reliability of the SolidFire storage system. An ESG Lab audit of a SolidFire cluster deployed at a typical enterprise production customer site yielded a combined capacity efficiency of over 12X savings, with roughly 5X of this attributable to compression and deduplication savings.

Guaranteed Performance and Scalability 

• Perhaps the most important feature of the SolidFire storage array is the ability of the array to assign and guarantee a level of performance that can scale to meet the growing needs of each application and the business.
• ESG Lab testing confirmed that only SolidFire uses a pacing approach that can be used to deliver a guaranteed minimum number of IO/s to every volume, resulting in predictable performance for all of the applications sharing a SolidFire cluster.