Flash arrays may be miles ahead of their disk-based predecessors when it comes to performance, but there’s still a lot of catching-up to do up the stack in the software layer, at least for some of the newer players that haven’t had much time to build out their management software yet. SolidFire Inc. is now trying to narrow that gap with a new release of its storage operating system.

The arguably biggest addition in Oxygen, the eighth iteration of the element-themed managment platform, is synchronous replication. That makes it possible to continuously propagate changes to backup installations, which is essential for mission-critical workloads such as databases containing sensitive information records that the organization can’t afford to lose in the event of an outage.

It’s joined by a complementary function for replicating snapshots, which is useful for workloads that don’t change frequently enough to justify the operational cost of continuous synchronization but require a great deal of bandwidth to backup when they do. One example would be a price list at a larger retailer that is only updated once every quarter.

Administrators can handle both types of operations through a dedicated replication management console added in conjuction that makes it possible to create schedules for copying workloads that are executed automatically. The interface also includes options for defining how long information should be held at a backup site before deletion and makes it possible to recover to.a specific point in time before an outage.

Coupled with new user directory support that allows for centralized access management, the Oxygen release brings SolidFire’s platform considerably closer up to par with traditional systems it seeks to displace and makes flash that much more viable of a replacement to disk as a result. The upgrade also makes its value proposition more competitive against fellow flash array startups such Pure Storage Inc., which likewise enhanced its replication capabilities recently.

Photo via SolidFire