Breathe normally: Oxygen coming to Solidfire's flashy folk

Revolution becomes evolution

How quickly yesterday's revolutionary product becomes a solid everyday reality. At least, that's how it seems even as all-flash arrays have yet to conquer the hearts and minds of the broad mass of disk array-using customers. So it is with Solidfire, whose first product was released in late 2012.

It is now bringing out its eighth Elements operating system release. It's called Oxygen and is an evolutionary release adding data protection and security features to reassure existing customers and attract new ones.

• Data protection features
• • Synchronous replication — as data comes into the system, it is written to the primary and secondary site at the same time
  • Snapshot replication to a second site
  • Snapshot Scheduler/Retention manager
• More multi-tenancy security
• • Expanded VLAN tagging
  • LDAP authentication

The LDAP authentication should help in enterprise accounts while the replication should reassure Solidfire's cloud service providers as well, providing better disaster protection.

The VLAN tagging means you can have up to 256 secure, logically isolated, per-tenant storage networks on a single Solidfire system.

Availability is for 18 June. From then customers can breathe in Oxygen non-disruptively for their existing arrays as well as for Element X, the software-only product for hyperscale customers.

Two and a half years after shipping its first product Solidfire is on its eighth major software release and has a mature-looking networked all-flash storage array product.

What's it got in its labs? We think capacity upgrades are coming with 3D NAND. It's main aim is to replace disk arrays for storing high-performance data in scale-out environments. Solidfire thinks that customer needs are coming its way, providing a large market for CEO Dave Wright's so-solid crew to go after. ®