SolidFire unveils benchmark to guarantee quality of service in the Cloud

Even as enterprise adoption of cloud matures, performance variability remains one of the largest barriers to deploying business-critical applications from a cloud infrastructure. While most cloud providers can only offer best-effort performance, only the SolidFire QoS Benchmark ensures guaranteed application performance regardless of system condition or application activity.

"Service providers are consistently telling us that they need to be able to guarantee Quality of Service in order to host mission critical applications in the cloud. The reality is that this is much easier said than done. QoS functionality has largely been bolted on as an afterthought in legacy storage products, resulting in performance that can still be unpredictable,” said Simon Robinson, Storage Research Vice President at the 451 Group. “By incorporating QoS functionality into the fundamental design of its storage platform, SolidFire is offering service providers an alternative to sub-optimal workarounds such as rate limiting, ring-fencing and prioritisation schemes."

Quality of Service: An Architecture, Not a Feature
The ability to guarantee performance in all situations—including failure scenarios, system overload, variable workloads, and elastic demand—requires an architecture specifically designed to support Quality of Service. SolidFire's all-SSD storage solution is the first architecture to fulfil all six requirements of the definitive QoS Benchmark, allowing cloud service providers to guarantee storage performance for every application:
• All-SSD Architecture
o Enables the delivery of consistent latency for every IO
• True Scale-out Architecture
o Allows for linear, predictable performance gains as systems scale
• RAID-less Data Protection
o Ensures predictable performance in any failure condition
• Balanced Load Distribution
o Eliminates hot spots that create unpredictable IO latency
• Fine Grain QoS Control
o Completely eliminate noisy neighbors, and guarantee volume performance
• Performance Virtualisation
o Control performance independent of capacity and on demand

“Cloud service providers should be looking at quality of service with the long term goal of writing firm SLAs against storage performance,” said Dave Wright, SolidFire Founder and CEO. “SolidFire’s QoS Benchmark educates providers with a clear methodology for understanding the conditions that are necessary to deliver Guaranteed Quality of Service. Without it, cloud providers will remain unable to efficiently meet the rising performance requirements of their enterprise customers.”

SolidFire Customers Thrive with QoS Guarantees
SolidFire continues to attract attention from global cloud providers looking to offer new services based on their new ability to guarantee storage Quality of Service. In conjunction with the new QoS Benchmark SolidFire revealed three new customers “Fueled by SolidFire” that highlight the global reach of cloud computing and the growing movement of business-critical applications to the cloud. The following companies join the revolution in predictable, high-performance cloud computing: Brinkster in Phoenix, Arizona, Elastx in Stockholm, Sweden, Crucial Cloud Hosting in New South Wales, Australia.
“Quality of Service capability is crucial for both cloud providers and cloud consumers, and SolidFire is the only storage system with the architectural expertise to make QoS part of its core system design,” says Aaron Weller, Managing Director at Crucial Cloud Hosting. “Through this architecture, we are able to deliver consistent performance to our end users regardless of failure condition, system status or application activity.”