OnApp and SolidFire integration

With SolidFire and OnApp, cloud providers can provision storage performance and capacity to customers independently, and guarantee disk performance for individual workloads by enabling them to choose IOPS (Input/output Operations Per Second) for their virtual machines. The combination of guaranteed disk performance and the speed and scale offered by SolidFire’s all-solid state architecture – with up to 7.5 million IOPS and 3.4PB available in a single cluster – enables OnApp customers to launch new high-performance cloud services for disk-intensive applications and databases that would normally rely on dedicated servers.

The integration uses the SolidFire API to enable SolidFire clusters to be managed through the OnApp control panel. Cloud providers can specify minimum, maximum and burst IOPS for OnApp datastores based on SolidFire, and enable customers to select guaranteed IOPS for their hosted applications through the OnApp control panel, in just the same way as they configure disk space, CPU, RAM, network and other cloud resources. Billing for guaranteed IOPS is fully integrated with OnApp billing plans.

“SolidFire storage is designed for performance and scale in multi-tenant clouds, so it’s a perfect fit with OnApp and its focus on the cloud service provider market,” said Jay Prassl, VP Marketing, SolidFire. “One of the great things about using SolidFire storage with OnApp is how easy it is for a service provider to take our fine quality of service (QoS) control, and present it directly to customers - it’s right there in the OnApp control panel. Now customers running disk-intensive apps and databases on dedicated hardware can get the same or better performance in an OnApp cloud - guaranteed.”

SolidFire storage clusters are managed in just the same way as other forms of storage in OnApp Cloud. Storage for virtual machine disks is provisioned automatically when a customer configures a virtual machine, and customers can also use SolidFire’s cloning feature to take virtual machine snapshots, complementing the backup features available in OnApp Cloud. SolidFire storage can be used with OnApp Cloud alongside other hardware and software SANs, and OnApp’s own distributed storage system.

“The OnApp platform has always offered service providers a very broad range of storage choices, and SolidFire is an important new option for customers who need consistent high disk performance,” said Kosten Metreweli, OnApp’s Chief Commercial Officer. “OnApp customers like Crucial Cloud Hosting have already shown that there is real appetite for guaranteed IOPS in the market, and we’re looking forward to seeing what other cloud providers can do with SolidFire, too.”