Description of SolidFire Systems¶

NetApp SolidFire is a scale-out, all-flash storage platform designed for large-scale infrastructure. SolidFire is unique in its ability to manage storage performance independent of capabilities, and guarantee performance, not just to one application, but to thousands of applications within a single storage platform. These capabilities, combined with a granular scale-out architecture and the ability to automate every aspect of the SolidFire storage platform, empower customers to streamline operations and respond to changing business and application demands faster and more predictably than ever before.

The agility, efficiency, and scalability benefits demonstrated from cloud computing infrastructure have raised the bar on expectations for IT service delivery. The pressure is on IT to:

• Rapidly deploy applications and service
• Provide more agile and scalable infrastructure
• Increase application performance and predictability
• Enable automation and end-user self service
• Raise operational efficiency and reduce cost

SolidFire is architected from the ground up to be the storage foundation of next generation data centers and is designed to:

• Consolidate: Reduce cost and complexity by safely consolidating mission-critical applications onto a single storage platform.
• Automate: Increase productivity with deep infrastructure integrations.
• Scale: Dynamically scale storage resources to meet business demands.

Each SolidFire storage node utilizes the Element OS software, which includes the following features:

Automated Management

• Automatic distribution and load balancing
• Comprehensive API
• Complete Management Integrations

Scale-out

• 10’s of TBs to multiple PBs
• Non-disruptive scaling and no downtime
• Mix nodes in same cluster

Guaranteed Performance

• Allocate storage performance independent of capacity
• Manage performance in real-time without impacting other volumes
• Guarantee performance to every volume with fine-grain QoS settings

Global Efficiency

• Inline and post compression
• Always-on deduplication
• Global thin provisioning

Data Assurance

• Helix RAID-less data protection
• Real-time replication (Asynchronous and Synchronous)
• Integrated backup and recovery (cloud)