SolidFire – Quality Of Service For Multi-Tenanted Storage

SolidFire Highlights

• This is a different approach – storage redesigned to deliver predictable performance and guaranteed QoS within a multi-tenant infrastructure
• A storage start-up with $37 million investment and 95 employees
• Sells 2 SSD-based arrays used in scale-up architectures with massive capacity and IOP potential (SF3010 and SF6010)
• Enables CSPs to deploy different performance/QoS bands to overcome the ‘noisy neighbors’ problem of multi-tenanted solutions
• Should benefit IaaS as well as Hadoop, SAP, noSQL and Oracle applications hosted as SaaS by Cloud providers

While most of our industry keeps banging on about Big Data and SSD, it’s interesting to find a supplier doing something different. You’ll want to know more about how SolidFire aims to guarantee IOP bands for storage users and overcome the ‘noisy neighbour’ issues currently limiting the complexity of both public and private Cloud Computing infrastructures.

The SolidFire Company And Products

We had a chat last week with Jay Prassl of SolidFire – it’s a storage hardware and software company based in Boulder Colorado with $37 million investment backing from NEA, Valhalla Partners, Novak Biddle companies, as well as Frank Slootman (ex-CEO of Data Domain), Jay Schneider (ex-sales head at EMC) and Greg Papadopoulos (ex-CTO of Sun – as we remember from some years ago).
Founded at the end of 2009 by Dave Wright after leaving Rackspace, SolidFire currently has 95 employees. It specialises in ‘virtualized scale-out storage for the cloud’.
It has 2 products, the SF3010 and SF6010 – storage nodes with SSD capacity of 3TB and 6TB raw respectively: these are be deployed via a scale-out architecture creating a maximum single system capacity of 2PB and 5 million IOPS in clusters of up to 100 nodes. It claims a ‘redundant usable capacity’ of under $4/GB and a price/performance ration of less than $1/IOP. Its products are sold directly.

The First Storage Supplier To Focus On Guaranteed Quality Of Service (QoS)

Jay notes that there are severe limitations to delivering performance sensitive applications within a multi-tenant cloud infrastructure. One of the biggest limiters is the performance variability caused by what he terms ‘Noisy Neighbors’. This is when one applications consumes the majority of the performance resources and severely effecting the performance all the other applications on the system. SolidFire’s unique selling point is applying QoS, which allocates applications into performance tiers with the possibility to change application performance on the fly with immediate effect. Consumers of cloud infrastructure Fueled by SolidFire will be able to buy into performance bands, measured in guaranteed IOPS. We’ve borrowed its slide to illustrate the before and after effects in Figure 2.
He argues that traditional RAID-based architectures offered by companies such as 3Par (now HP) and EMC make these systems unable to gurarantee storage Quality of Service do to the performance degredation that occurs during a RAID rebuild.  Bolt-on QoS technologies like Rate Limiting are also unable to guarantee application performance and are designed more to protect the storage system, rather than guarantee application performance, which is what SolidFire does.

Which Applications And Users Will Benefit?

The company’s customer references include viawest, calligo (headed up by Julian Box from Virtustream), CloudSigma and Databarracks – all Cloud providers.
The ‘noisy neighbour’ issue affects performance sensitive applications such as Oracle databases, SAP R3, Hadoop and noSQL analytic systems. Since the major saving for end-users of Cloud services are in adopting multi-tenanted solutions, removing contention between applications and users will prove an important driver of more.

Some Conclusions – A Different Approach

Jay’s company has a refreshing angle – their focus on the Cloud Service Provider (CSP) marketplace and ability to deliver guaranteed Quality of Service (QoS) is a very powerful combination.  CSPs and really anyone building large cloud infrastructures stands benefit by being able to extend their cloud infrastructre to encompass more of their customer’s business-critical and performance-sensitive applications.  For cloud providers, new applications, and more of them backed by firm performance SLAs can have a huge impact on differentiation not to mention profit.
Users of Cloud services will have to get used to paying different rates for different performance levels, but there is plenty of scope for the Cloud providers to offer variable weekend, late-night or other discounted schema.
Like other start-up storage companies (Tegile, Xio, Avere, Violin Memory, etc.) SolidFire has the challenge of persuading customers to trust their priceless data assets with a relatively unknown supplier (see Figure 1). Their reticence in the past has been a driver of company and technology acquisition by the biggest vendor shown in Figure 1. It may be the first, but we doubt if it’ll be the last storage company to offer QoS bands to users – it’s such a great idea.