All-flash array maker SolidFire bags $82 million, adds entry-level products

SolidFire Inc., one of the numerous startups that have sprung up in recent years to capitalize on the market’s growing appetite for solid-state memory, has netted another $82 million from investors to help it push back against increasing competition. The company said that the funding will go towards scaling global operations and advancing the development of its all-flash storage architecture, which attempts to set itself apart with software-based capabilities aimed at allowing users to make more out of their speedy drives.

But while it’s neither the first nor the only vendor to take the fight up the stack, SolidFire has nonetheless succeeded in carving out a niche for itself thanks to a number of distinguishing capabilities. Most notable is a patent-pending virtualization feature that makes it possible to independently allocate performance and storage capacity for better utilization. The software also includes reliability functions, such as the ability to define a minimum speed at which a mission-critical application must run, and a web-based management interface.

SolidFire has quickly found footing in the service provider market, where it lists top industry names such as CloudSigma Ltd. and ViaWest Inc. as customers. The array maker is now working on extending its success into the enterprise space, which also seeing a surge in demand for all-flash arrays.

The new funding puts SolidFire in a better position to go up against fellow startups such as Pure Storage Inc. and established vendors like EMC Corp. The funding was led by new investor Greenspring Associates together with an unnamed “major sovereign wealth fund” and saw the participation of existing backers NEA, Novak Biddle Venture Partners, the Vienna-based Valhalla Partners and Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd’s venture capital arm.

This brings SolidFire’s total funding to %150 million, which is impressive for a four-year-old startup but just a fraction of the nearly $480 million Pure Storage has received from investors. That firm owes much if its advantage to the fact that it hit the market several quarters ahead of SolidFire.

Not wasting any time, SolidFire followed up the announcement with the introduction of two new systems that constitute the third generation of products to implement its architecture. The SF2405, one of the appliances, offers 35 terabytes of raw storage that can handle up to 200,000 input/output operations per second for under $100,000. By all-flash array standards, that’s affordable.

The SF2405 is designed to give SolidFire a foot in the door of more accounts. The relatively low price tag reduces risk for enterprise buyers who are just kicking the tires of flash arrays. The high-end SF4805 appliance packs nearly twice the density at the same 200,000 predictable IOPS (input/output operations per second) speed.

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