Traditional enterprise storage is no fit for today’s cloud computing needs—a concept that drives the flash-fueled future. Flash storage looks to be quite promising, with so many organizations’ affinity for cloud computing. Flash memory solutions were Fusion-io’s ticket to their recent IPO, giving the business a staggering valuation of $1.4 billion. It also recorded one of the strongest entrees of an IT company in the stock market.

This trend seems a lucrative one to follow. SolidFire, an innovative solid-state data-storage systems provider that delivers high performance storage solutions, launches SSD storage systems. These SSD appliances hope to radically decrease providers’ storage footprints while extensively boosting performance and improving speed of cloud storage.

SolidFire Founder and Chief Executive Dave Wright explains what transpired from their consultations with cloud providers on how to manage the scope and scale of workload today. He noted, “Our discussions with cloud providers continue to show that traditional disk-based architectures are not suited for broad-scale deployment within the cloud.

“These systems quickly become I/O-bound at cloud scale, leaving customers with poor and unpredictable performance.  In addition, traditional storage system are complex to manage, expensive and lack the automation that cloud service providers require.”

The CEO continues to talk about the road blocks they are currently looking at, saying, “the problem is that this model doesn’t scale. For a large-scale cloud, where you are growing quickly and deploying new storage on a weekly or even daily basis, and adding customers 24 hours a day, hiring an army of storage administrators to setup, configure, provision, manage, and troubleshoot that storage is not a viable option. The efficiencies of the cloud are not based on armies of administrators; they are based on efficient management through automation. Service providers don’t want to administer their storage; they want to automate it.”

Wright visited theCube during EMCworld 2011. Here, the chief touched base on topics like cloud, flash and start-ups. In just a span of just two years since its founding, SolidFire has come a long way and is now one of the leaders in serving the needs of cloud service providers. In fact, the Atlanta-based company was able to raise $11 million additional funds to spur their cloud storage pursuit. The services they offer primarily streamline and maximize all capacity in your primary storage infrastructure.