SiliconAngle and Wikibon set up shop at this week’s OpenStack Summit in Portland to bring you the latest on the project, including news and insights from the executives who attended the event. David Cahill, the director of strategy alliances for SolidFire, stopped by theCube and provided us with his insider’s take on the company’s recent announcements and its involvement with OpenStack.

SolidFire sells all-flash arrays to organizations with large, multi-tenant cloud environments, namely service providers and large enterprises.  The firm attended this week’s Summit to get the word out about two major updates:  its partnership with Rackspace and Nebula, and the introduction of API compatibility with Cinder, the Block Storage component of OpenStack.

Cahill says that API compatibility enables SolidFire customers to tap into the advanced functionality built into their arrays without having to implement a second or third integration point between the infrastructure and the platform that sits on top. He explains that SolidFire’s goal is to optimally deliver a balance between performance and capacity so that it’s made possible to maintain quality of service across thousands of apps running on the same system.

“For us, the reason customers seek out and choose SolidFire is very much around business enablement, evolving from a hosting or managed hosting business to take the flag in this cloud opportunity. They used SolidFire as a bit of an arms deal in that regard to help them capture this flag. Brinkster [an Arizona-based IaaS provider] has looked at a lot of different technologies from a cloud perspective and settled on SolidFire, but more importantly settled on OpenStack. A key piece of that was that we have the industry’s most comprehensive support for Cinder,” he says.

SolidFire is a major backer of the project, but Cahill stresses that the company has not made itself dependant on the success of one particular platform. Doing so would involve a great deal of unnecessary risk for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the growing presence of major vendors in the OpenStack scene.