Storage vendor SolidFire says that Calligo, “the UK Channel Islands’ only complete cloud service provider,” is using its all-flash storage appliances to power its application environment.

The company says that Calligo chose its product because it offered the performance and scale that the provider required to support a portfolio of several thousand applications.

“We chose SolidFire after extensive research and development work, initially with systems that were not designed for large scale multi-tenant user environments, then with SolidFire itself. With SolidFire’s guaranteed QoS, we now offer hard SLAs around exact performance metrics while remaining in compliance with local data residency and data protection mandates. Outside of backups, everything we do is fueled by SolidFire; we don’t require a unique storage infrastructure for each of our PaaS, SaaS, or IaaS offerings.”

This deal is a big win for SolidFire, which is becoming more and more aggressive about differentiating itself from the other emerging players in the flash market. A few months ago it unveiled a next generation appliance that improves on the older SF3010 configuration with a capacity of up to 24 terabytes and the ability to scale up to as much as 100 nodes.

Fusion-io is the much bigger name in this industry, and it has also been beefing up its R&D. Its newest product is the Fusion ION acceleration software, which runs on ioDrives and can turn two or more into a centralized SAN that can be used to provision resources much more efficiency. More notable however is that it enables admins to take a software-defined approach to address a need that would traditionally be fulfilled by buying specialized networking equipment. Fusion-io’s solution eliminates this part, potentially reducing a lot of overhead and complexity in large scale environments.