Yesterday I was at the Solidfire Analyst day and this idea about the cloud-enabling vendor popped up just after a couple of hours of presentations and demos. The new licensing model, new features and also how the software works and is presented is unbusual, not only from traditional storage vendors, but also from many storage startups.
From this point of view, also looking at the “good enough” AFF, the role of Solidfire in NetApp’s product family is even more defined and forward looking.
The news
You actually don’t need to get the news from me. My friend Chris Mellor has already written some good stuff about it and Solidfire’s website is also full of info about the new HW and ElementOS.
If I were you I’d pay special attention to this new capacity-based licensing model, which makes it possible to buy SW and HW separately.
What I liked the most is the new FlashForward licensing program. If I were you I’d pay special attention to this new capacity-based licensing model, which makes it possible to buy SW and HW separately. It adds a lot of flexibility and freedom of choice for end users… also for those (relatively) small customers who aren’t sure what will happen in the future regarding capacity/performance growth. This, again, is a sign of the spirit of the company, which wants to align storage acquisition/consumption to new cloud infrastructure models.
It’s all about cloud after all
NetApp already has plenty of products to cover traditional storage markets. Yes, we all agree that this company needed a breath of fresh air and a stronger Flash-based strategy/product (if nothing else, they needed it from the market perception standpoint). And even though NetApp has been showing less than brilliant results for a while now (but who has among primary vendors?), it’s plain to see their message is now much more diversified than in the past (e.g. StoreGRID Object storage, AltaVault cloud-based VTL among others).
NetApp, thanks to Solidfire, hasn’t just added a fancy All-Flash array, but much more. In fact, Solidfire is what makes the difference in cloud-based environments.
NetApp, thanks to Solidfire, hasn’t just added a fancy All-Flash array, but much more. In fact, Solidfire is what makes the difference in cloud-based environments (VMW, OpenStack and containers… that’s where we’re going after all, aren’t we?). Openstack counts for 30% of Solidfire’s revenues for example!
Furthermore, excluding Ceph (and without counting how many times Ceph is deployed only for non-production workloads), Solidfire is very relevant when it comes to OpenStack storage! And, as far as I know, Solidfire is working hard to repeat this success with Docker/Containers.
Once again, what struck me the most during the day about Solidfire is that they are really trying to change their role from being a storage vendor to being a cloud-enabling vendor!
It’s not unusual now, but the fact that several presenters (especially during demos) mentioned that a Storage Admin is no longer needed to manage your storage resources is quite interesting. Policies, APIs, QoS and many other details can help you do it all from vCenter, scripts or whatever can use their APIs.
Once again, what struck me the most during the day about Solidfire is that they are really trying to change their role from being a storage vendor to being a cloud-enabling vendor!
The paradigm has changed drastically. Thanks to the introduction of Flash, IOPS and latency are less of an issue… hence, capacity and resource management at scale are major concerns now. If you can do that granularly with QoS, VVOLs, APIs and so on, storage can be automated and management moved to the upper layer, contributing to overall infrastructure simplification and agility.
Closing the circle
The storage admin is dead… I’ve already told you that. But that’s not the point today or, maybe, it’s exactly that.
The number of innovative startups like Solidfire is growing like crazy. Different ideas? Yes. Different products and philosophies? Yes. But they are all storage vendors that don’t look like storage vendors anymore but enable the end user to buy, deliver and consume storage in a much cloudier way. They are working to make storage transparent and easy to consume from the upper layers of the stack… and without human intervention. Exactly as is happening for all other resources available in the datacenter that are targeted towards the realization of cloud infrastructures. (Again, farewell “traditional” storage admin!)
One last thing, I can confirm what I wrote a few months ago… high spirit and, for once, NetApp is not messing up with this acquisition… or, at least, it’s not visible yet!
Disclaimer: I was personally invited to attend this event, with NetApp covering my travel and accommodation costs. However I was not compensated for my time. I am not required to blog on any content; blog posts are not edited or reviewed by NetApp before publication.
