Video: SolidFire's CEO David Wright talks flash storage and OpenStack

At VMworld in San Francisco at the end of August, SolidFire offered me the opportunity to sit down with their CEO, David Wright. SolidFire makes what it describes as "scale-out high performance storage systems built to deliver guaranteed performance for public and private clouds." We talked about why flash-based storage products--including SolidFire's--are coming on so strong. (They were a number of flash examples at VMworld in spite of this being a general category of product that didn't really go much of anywhere for a number of years.)

We also discussed SolidFire's integration with OpenStack. They joined the Red Hat OpenStack Partner Network back in June.

Flash-based storage is interesting in the context of cloud computing partly because overall performance typically much higher than rotating media (which, while continuing to increase in capacity, has largely plateaued in performance). However, as the SolidFire graphic below shows, flash can also help deliver predictable performance in concert with appropriate software hooks and management.

(At Red Hat, we've also been working on both quality-of-service and security for multi-tenant environments. We deliver Linux features such as cgroups and SELinux through Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which allows Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform to take advantage of them. Higher up the stack, Red Hat CloudForms hybrid cloud management provides policy-based quotas and other controls that can span a heterogeneous infrastructure. Those are just a few examples.)