SolidFire, ranked the #1 Solid-State Array, today announced its expansion into the Australian market with the official opening of its newest office in Sydney, led by HP and IBM storage veteran Steve Kelly. Establishment of SolidFire’s Australian office follows the company’s rapid growth in the Asia Pacific market, opening offices in both South Korea and Singapore in 2014.

SolidFire’s expansion into the Australian market comes as flash storage is set to become a transformative element within Australian data centers as indicated by a recent survey of 309 Australian IT decision-makers, with results showing that use of all-flash is set to double over the next three to five years.

SolidFire Founder and CEO Dave Wright stated the company is witnessing a growing demand for its technology from large enterprise and service providers within the Australian market. “Companies are not only looking to solve their current performance challenges, but are seeking out solutions that allow them to solve broader, more complex challenges around scale, performance predictability and automation. Large-scale customers have quickly moved past leveraging flash as a point solution and are deploying flash to support their Tier-1 and a growing set of Tier-2 applications within a single shared infrastructure. Only SolidFire is purpose-built to meet these requirements.”

One of the first companies to deploy SolidFire in Australia is Hosted Network, Australia’s only white-label cloud provider specialising in delivering Desktop (DaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). Hosted Network worked closely with SolidFire and VMware to launch a best of breed VMWare Horizon DaaS offering for its network of channel reseller partners.

“Pushing forward into a VDI environment, the I/O requirements are staggering,” commented Hosted Network’s Managing Director Ben Town. “Our disk-based arrays and even our hybrid arrays just weren’t going to cut it for a single VDI instance, not to mention running multiple instances on a single array. Every single client we have is doing something slightly different. We needed an adaptable storage platform that allows us to cope with the unique and changing I/O demands of each and every customer.”

Town continued, “Unlike a lot of the other vendors that require us to fork out a huge amount of capital up front for their solutions, we’re able to grow our SolidFire infrastructure as demand dictates, node-by-node, all while maintaining guaranteed performance. We can go to market with industry leading storage and still have money left over for our marketing campaigns and other things that grow our business.”

Regional Manager for Australia, Steve Kelly added, “Enterprises are quickly realising that simply throwing more traditional hardware at the data centre to respond to performance challenges is just a band aid. Forward-looking executives and IT leaders understand the criticality of an agile storage platform and the impact it can have on both innovation as well as the reduction of complexity and risk.”

SolidFire has proven its technology in the world’s most demanding data centers and continues to raise the bar for its peers in the all-flash market with a series of recent announcements made at its Second Annual Analyst Day.

The announcements include:

• Launch of SolidFire’s Element X Program, which enables hyper-scale enterprise and service provider customers to combine the software of SolidFire’s award-winning storage platform with their own hardware - a development aligning SolidFire, more than any other storage company, directly with the needs of hyper-scale customers.
• Expansion of the SF Series product line with the introduction of the SF9605, which delivers 34.5TB effective capacity and 50,000 predictable IOPS at the lowest $/GB cost within the portfolio.
• SolidFire’s new FlashForward Program delivers Platform Compatibility and Unlimited Drive Wear Guarantees designed to assure customers that their flash investments will continue to scale and remain current as new flash geometries, performance and price points enter the market.
• Closing out 2014 with an average 50 percent increase in sequential quarterly bookings, while SolidFire’s Enterprise customer bookings grew 570 over the previous year.