Flash array startup SolidFire has released a new perspective on its upcoming, solution expected to launch in Q2 2012, which reveals several interesting highlights.  One of them is that SolidFire may  prove to be particularly attractive to cloud providers looking to further optimize their resources.

SolidFire is focusing on increasing the RoI for its product. Specifically, it promises to cut costs per GB by bundling up in-line deduplication, compression and thin provisioning in the all-flash array.  This is added to the ability to scale performance and capacity separately, and set three I/O operations per second constraints on applications: a burst number, a minimum, and a maximum. This allows the company to deliver solid IOPS numbers, which should make it much easier for a cloud provider to bill its customers.  Wikibon’s Dave Vellante explained what IO tiering, or ‘performance virtualization‘ is all about in a blog post.

In addition to resource optimization, the offering also promises good performance. It’s powered by ten Intel 320 300GB SSDs that can pump out 230,000 to 395,000 IOPS. Only 50,000 IOPS are delivered to customers, though there’s more to it than that according to The Register:

“In other words, the SolidFire SSDs are running faster than the 50,000 IOPS made available for customers’ I/O, and this is a conservative number anyway, meaning SolidFire has performance headroom, which is reassuring.”

Some of the other advantages the array will feature include global dedupe across all volumes and a replication capacity will be made available in Q3 next year.

As launch day approaches, SolidFire is expanding. Just last week they hired former Xiotech exec Mark Glasgow as its new Vice President of Worldwide Sales, following a $25 million funding round earlier this month.  Existing investors New Enterprise Associates, Valhalla Partners and Novak Biddle Venture Partners all participated, raising the company’s total funding to about $37 million.