SolidFire Presents at Tech Field Day 8

Dave Wright, founder of SolidFire, presents the company’s architecture and vision at Tech Field Day 8. Drawing on his prior experience at Jungle Disk and Rackspace, Wright outlines the key storage challenges in cloud environments and how SolidFire built a solution from the ground up to meet the performance, efficiency, and automation needs of large-scale cloud service providers.

The presentation begins with Dave Wright recounting his background at Jungle Disk and Rackspace, where early exposure to cloud hosting challenges, especially around storage, served as the impetus for founding SolidFire. At Rackspace, he observed a lack of scalable, cost-effective, and high-performance storage solutions suitable for cloud infrastructures. These insights led SolidFire to focus specifically on building a platform designed for service providers, addressing the inadequacies of traditional enterprise storage systems that struggled with multi-tenancy, cost control, and consistent performance at cloud scale.

Wright explains that SolidFire’s value proposition is built on three foundational pillars: performance, efficiency, and automation. To handle multi-tenant cloud environments, SolidFire prioritizes consistent and guaranteed performance through a concept called “performance virtualization,” separating performance controls from capacity configuration. The system allows configuration of both IOPS and throughput per volume, with adjustable burst capabilities and enforcement mechanisms. This ensures predictable application behavior while mitigating noisy neighbor issues—a key capability lacking in traditional SANs. Equally important is efficiency: SolidFire’s scale-out architecture allows high utilization (up to 85% or more) and leverages real-time compression, deduplication, and thin provisioning to reduce unnecessary resource consumption.

Perhaps most distinctively, SolidFire embeds automation deeply into its DNA. Wright emphasizes that for service providers operating at cloud scale, human management does not scale. SolidFire circumvents this by leading with a comprehensive REST-based API for deployment, provisioning, and configuration. This enables rapid instrumentation of storage, akin to how compute is automated in data centers. Wright demonstrates that new nodes can be added or removed with minimal manual intervention, and SolidFire integrates natively with emerging cloud orchestration platforms like OpenStack and VMware vCloud.

From a technical perspective, SolidFire’s architecture diverges significantly from traditional RAID-based SAN technologies. Data is split into 4K blocks, deduplicated at ingest based on cryptographic hashes, and mapped to metadata volumes via a distributed system of BINs. The system utilizes standard x86 hardware with SSD-only drives, relying on replication instead of RAID for redundancy. This minimizes rebuild times—sometimes to mere seconds—while limiting the impact of failures to the smallest possible subset of the system. Storage snapshots and clones are created via metadata copies without performance degradation or data duplication, and the system is engineered to facilitate efficient backup and replication capabilities through its block identifier approach.

In conclusion, Wright underlines that SolidFire’s use of commodity hardware, all-flash design, and intelligent software stack allows a competitive price point—under $5 per gigabyte for effective, usable capacity. By combining high performance, cost-efficiency, granular performance guarantees, and true API-driven automation, SolidFire offers a compelling solution for cloud providers dealing with the complexities of multi-tenant environments and application performance SLAs. Wright’s presentation not only outlines a robust technical architecture but also makes a case for the alignment of SolidFire’s design principles with the real-world needs of next-generation cloud infrastructure providers.