Enterprise storage specialist SolidFire has launched two all-flash storage nodes: the entry-level SF2405 and the mid-range SF4805.

The new additions dramatically reduce the cost of entry for flash-based infrastructure - customers need at least four SolidFire nodes to create a working system, and now they can do this for less than $100,000.

“SolidFire has proven our technology at scale in many of the world’s largest public and private clouds, but many of our enterprise customers and prospects are looking to accelerate individual workloads, while service providers would like to leverage SolidFire within their managed SAN and hosted private cloud offerings,” explained Dave Wright, founder and CEO of SolidFire.

“The SF2405 and SF4805 allow us to respond to these immediate demands and help customers set their foundation for greater consolidation, automation and scale.”

The company also announced that it secured US$82 million in its latest financing round.

Flash sale?
SolidFire is a US start-up headquartered in Boulder, Colorado. It specializes in scale-out flash storage designed for the cloud, made from Multi-Level Cell (MLC) memory – the same type used in consumer products such as smartphones, albeit with a longer lifespan thanks to clever storage controllers.

Today, the company unveiled the third generation of hardware to be released since the platform became publicly available in November 2012.

SolidFire often quotes the “effective capacity” of its storage nodes – the amount of storage space available when we take into account proprietary compression and deduplication algorithms.

For example, a four-node SF2405 system features forty 240GB SSDs, requires four standard racks and offers up to 35TB of effective capacity and around 200,000 IOPS. These entry-level nodes were designed for customers who want to accelerate individual applications or take their first steps towards deploying private cloud infrastructure

Meanwhile, a four-node SF4805 system features forty 480GB SSDs for 69TB effective capacity. That’s 44 percent more storage than the SF3010 which previously occupied the mid-range bracket. At the same time, the new array costs 30 percent less, offering what SolidFire claims is the lowest price-per-GB enterprise flash available today.

The SF4805 nodes are aimed at organizations that are looking to consolidate a mix of application workloads within a single infrastructure.

The obvious attraction of the new offerings is their low TCO. “Enterprises that think flash is still too expensive to deploy in their data centers are mistaken. IDC believes that all enterprises should be using flash in at least some capacity in their data centers today for both performance and economic benefits,” commented Eric Burgener, Flash Storage research director at IDC.

“Many enterprises getting comfortable with flash start by running it to solve performance issues with individual applications before deploying all-flash arrays throughout their data center to consolidate dense mixed workloads.”

All of the SolidFire storage nodes released so far are fully compatible with each other, so customers can add them to existing clusters or create new ones, as long as all the hardware uses the same version of software.

The start-up has just received $82 million from investors including Samsung Ventures and the Silicon Valley Bank. It plans to spend this money on expanding sales and marketing operations across the US, Europe and Asia.

“This round puts SolidFire’s total funding at $150 million, a significant amount, and more than was raised by virtually all of the previous generation of public storage companies,” said Wright.