SolidFire, a next-generation cloud computing storage platform, today announced that the company has closed $11 million in Series A funding led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA) with current investors Valhalla Partners and Novak Biddle Venture Partners participating. NEA is a leading global venture capital firm with more than $11 billion in committed capital and a 30-year track record of successful investing including enterprise storage companies such as Data Domain, 3ware, and Fusion IO.

The funding, which follows a $1 million seed round, will be used to expand the company in preparation for launch later this year. As part of this expansion, SolidFire has opened an office in Boulder, Colorado and will be hiring for engineering, marketing, and sales roles.

NEA General Partner Harry Weller will join SolidFire's Board of Directors alongside Valhalla General Partner Charles Curran and Novak Biddle General Partner Phil Bronner. Also joining the SolidFire board is former LeftHand Networks CEO Bill Chambers.

“SolidFire is attacking an incredibly difficult and important problem in cloud computing,” said Weller. “Offering reliable block storage as a service with consistent quality of service is a key requirement for supporting enterprise applications in both public and private clouds.”

SolidFire’s cloud-scale storage system provides reliable, high performance primary storage for demanding public cloud and enterprise private cloud environments. The company’s innovative solid state architecture independently virtualizes both capacity and performance, allowing complete flexibility in storage provisioning and management. SolidFire’s solution allows cloud providers and enterprises to take advantage of the performance, reliability and energy efficiency advantages of solid state storage at a price point comparable to conventional spinning disk.

Cloud providers interested in participating in the SolidFire beta program can contact Jay Prassl (jay@solidfire.com).