Coming off a year in which it claims enterprise sales grew by nearly 600%, SolidFire, Inc. is introducing its latest all-flash array, citing forward-compatibility guarantees and flexible deployment options as incentives. The company is also unbundling its Element OS storage operating system for licensing by vendors building hyper-scale computing systems.

The five-year-old startup, which has raised $150 million in the white-hot market for solid state memory, says its new SF9605 array delivers 34.5 TB of effective capacity and 50,000 predictable input/output operations per second (IOPS). The company is positioning the product as a lower-priced, lower-performance alternative to its SF9010 scale-out array for cost-conscious customers for whom speed isn’t the primary goal. The 9010 has a published performance rating of 75,000 IOPS, “but costs 25% more per gigabyte,” said Dave Wright, founder and CEO.

SolidFire is sweetening the deal with an unusual guarantee that ensures that all of its future flash technology will interoperate with existing infrastructure. The company is topping the offer with an unlimited drive wear guarantee that promises to replace any flash storage that wears out for the life of the array.

The deal probably won’t surprise SolidFire customers, who appreciate its investment-protection pitch and promise of being able to mix multiple workloads on the same device. Flash has been one of the most difficult technologies to scale for the cloud, in part because of the so-called “noisy neighbor” problem, in which one application drags down the performance of others sharing the same media.

SolidFire claims to solve this problem in software, making it possible for customers to consolidate workloads on fewer arrays, save on floor space and scale without “forklift upgrades” and the attendant data migration hassles. Other standard features of the new array include guaranteed quality of service, data compression and deduplication at roughly a 2:1 ratio and scale-out platform design.

The new system is the first from SolidFire to feature flash storage made by SanDisk Corp. By not tying itself to one supplier, SolidFire is able to take advantage of the best price-performance flash products at any given time, Wright said.

Unbundling the software is an attempt to build a new line of business with makers of all-in-one hyper-converged devices. Those companies can now license Element OS for use on qualified platforms, which currently include the Dell, Inc. PowerEdge and Cisco Systems, Inc. UCS C-Series Rack-Mount server. The deal is available only to developers and there are no current plans to certify other platforms, but Wright said alternatives will be supported on a case-by-case basis.