The Business Value of Solidfire All-Flash Array Storage Systems

IDC White Paper | The Business Value of SolidFire All-Flash Array Storage Systems
Sponsored by: SolidFire
Authors:
The Business Value of SolidFire
Eric Burgener
Matthew Marden All-Flash Array Storage Systems
April 2016
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
All-flash arrays (AFAs) are transforming enterprise storage not only with their performance but also with
their ability to enable both IT infrastructure and business transformation. With their ability to consistently
deliver sub-millisecond response times in the face of varying workloads and handle hundreds of
thousands to millions of input/output operations per second (IOPS), AFAs are much better suited to
the workloads of today than legacy hard disk drive (HDD)based storage infrastructure. Often in the IT
industry, additional performance is assumed to come with additional cost, but against performance-
Business Value intensive primary storage workloads, AFAs are offering significantly better business value than enterprise
Highlights arrays that use only HDDs.
Three-year ROI
385% IDC interviewed seven organizations using SolidFire AFA storage systems to support their performance-
Total three-year benefits dependent business operations. These organizations indicated that they have leveraged SolidFire to
$3.13M improve their business prospects by cost-effectively delivering scalable, high performing IT and cloud
services offerings, while also lowering business, administrative and infrastructure costs by $147,700 per
Payback
5 months node (on average).. As a result, IDC projects that these organizations will realize an average three-year
return on investment (ROI) of 385% with SolidFire by:
Additional revenue per year
per SolidFire node inning more business through improved performance of IT and cloud services
W
$78,800 eing better able to meet customer needs of performance, reliability and scalability for internal users,
B
Higher productivity for
impacted users enterprise customers, and IT and cloud service customers.
7% Increasing employee productivity levels through improved systems and application performance
Less IT staff time to keep
the lights on equiring less IT staff time to maintain storage environments and support storage users
R
41% educing the impact of storage-related problems and meeting higher percentage of service-level
R
Less SLA-related fines
agreements (SLAs)
72%
aving SolidFire serve as a cost-effective AFA solution
H
Document #US41139516 2016 IDC. www.idc.com | Page 1

Situation Overview
Datacenter computing has undergone a significant change over the past 10 years, bringing
the industry into a new era that IDC refers to as 3rd Platform computing. This new era is built
around new technologies (such as virtual infrastructure, cloud, and flash storage media) and
hosts a mix of legacy applications (such as relational database, file sharing, and messaging
and collaboration platforms) and next-generation applications (such as mobile computing,
social media, and big data/analytics). The workload mix in 3rd Platform computing has
significantly changed I/O profiles, placing demands on storage infrastructure that HDDs and
legacy architectures cannot cost effectively handle. This has given rise to a new set of storage
architectures that leverage flash to meet todays stringent storage performance requirements.
When AFAs were first introduced, they were generally deployed as dedicated application
platforms for a single, extremely performance-intensive application. Over the past six years,
however, the arrays have matured in terms of availability and manageability, flash costs
have dropped significantly, and AFAs have increasingly evolved toward becoming general-
purpose computing platforms with the data services necessary to accommodate the dense
consolidation of mixed mission-critical workloads. All customers that deploy AFAs plan to
move more workloads to AFAs over time as legacy equipment is retired or new applications
are brought online. AFAs are broadly used for legacy applications such as relational databases,
file shares, enterprise resource planning, and messaging and collaboration applications and
even more intensely used for next-generation applications in the mobile computing, social
media, and big data/analytics arenas.
The widespread use of flash storage not only has met 3rd Platform computing storage
requirements but also has led to a broad range of transformational technical and business
outcomes. Flash has always been known for its performance, but other characteristics of
flash deployment at scale, such as improved reliability, far smaller storage infrastructures that
require significantly less energy and floor space, and increased server efficiencies that reduce
required server counts and software licensing costs, are opening up new opportunities for
businesses to increase revenue generation, lower infrastructure costs, redesign datacenter
workflows for improved efficiencies, and pursue new markets and customers.
In 2015, AFAs represented a $2.58 billion market. The AFA market is one of the highest-growth
market segments in enterprise storage and is expected to grow at a compound annual
growth rate (CAGR) of 21.6% over the next four years (through 2019) as enterprises replace
aging storage infrastructures with flash-optimized platforms. These platforms are required
to deliver the performance and agility that todays much more dynamic business model
demands. CIOs are increasingly committing to an all-flash datacenter for primary storage

strategy over time, reaping the advantages of smaller storage infrastructures that consume
less energy and floor space and offer improved device-level reliability (solid state storage
versus spinning disks). IDC expects that, by 2019, AFAs will be hosting 6070% of all primary
storage.
Solidfire
Founded in 2010, SolidFire is a Boulder, Coloradobased AFA vendor whose initial platform
became generally available in late 2012. Dave Wright, SolidFires founder and CEO, had a
strong background with service providers and had seen firsthand how difficult and expensive
it was to try and meet storage requirements in cloud environments with traditional storage
architectures built around spinning disks. Wright founded SolidFire with the objective of
building an enterprise-class storage platform that better met the needs of the Web-scale
environments that were hosting more and more enterprise applications. SolidFire developed
an all-flash platform built around a scale-out storage architecture that was simple and easy
to expand, included the quality-of-service (QoS) controls necessary to consistently deliver to
defined SLAs in the face of unpredictable workloads, and provided the granular, enterprise-
class management capabilities to securely administer dense, multitenant environments.
SolidFire initially targeted the service provider market where its platforms were heavily used
for mixed workload consolidation. SolidFires storage systems ran at rates of utilization, driven
by service providers desire to hone the efficiency and cost of their IT infrastructures, higher
than those of other AFAs on the market. While other vendors AFAs were being deployed for
dedicated application use at very low rates of overall utilization, SolidFires customers were
reaping the benefits of flash deployment at scale to move to smaller, more efficient storage
infrastructures that delivered consistent sub-millisecond performance, used less energy and
floor space, were more reliable than spinning disks, and drove higher rates of server utilization
to lower compute and software licensing costs. In September 2014, after establishing a
strong reputation for itself in the service provider space, SolidFire also began to sell into the
commercial enterprise market. SolidFire has been successful in both segments, and by the
end of 2015, enterprises accounted for over 50% of SolidFires revenue because the company
continued to grow overall at almost three times the rate of the AFA market itself.
SolidFires storage platform, the SF series, offers a full set of enterprise-class data services,
which include thin provisioning, snapshots, clones, inline data reduction (compression
and deduplication), encryption, replication, QoS (the companys classic strength), and rich
integration points with VMware vSphere, OpenStack, CloudStack, and Flexiant environments.
SolidFires scalability is unmatched by other vendors AFA platforms, with an ability to support

up to 7.5 million IOPS, multiple petabytes of effective storage capacity (taking inline data reduction
into account), up to 50GBps of overall bandwidth, and 100 1U nodes. SolidFires ability to just add
nodes as a business grows, automatically and transparently redistributing workloads across available
resources, increases administrative productivity, while the companys ability to accommodate new
technology generations in the same cluster gives customers more options for staying abreast of the
latest technology developments.
The Business Value Of Solidfire

Study Demographics
IDC interviewed seven organizations that have deployed SolidFire as an AFA storage solution.
These SolidFire customers not only were weighted toward the service provider space but also
represented the experiences of the enterprise sector and government. In deploying SolidFire, the
organizations generally shared the common objective of ensuring the performance and scalability
of key services and applications. For the most part, these organizations added SolidFire to their
datacenter environments rather than using it to replace existing storage resources. Table 1 shows that
the organizations had deployed an average of nine SolidFire nodes with 130TB of effective storage
capacity at the time the interview was conducted, and on average, SolidFire constituted somewhat
less than one-quarter of their overall storage environments. Four of the interviewed organizations are
based in the United States, and the remaining interviewees are based in Australia, South Africa, and
Jersey (off the coast of France).
TABLE 1
Demographics of Interviewed Organizations

Average Range
Number of employees 301 111,500
Number of IT staff 9 130
Number of IT users 301 111,500
Number of business applications 87 15250
Number of TBs (total IT environment) 595 2001,000
Number of SolidFire nodes 9 423
Number of TB (SolidFire environment) 130 50400
Countries United States, Australia, South Africa, and Jersey
(off the coast of France)
Industries Cloud services provider, application services provider,
government, shipping, and architecture
Source: IDC, 2016

Migration to SolidFire
As is common with most customers that purchase an AFA, SolidFire customers interviewed
for this study had concluded that managing application performance to their customers
expectations with traditional storage platforms was becoming increasingly difficult and
expensive and thus were looking to newer storage architectures that leverage flash to
help them address this issue. Performance issues were the key driving factor in SolidFire
purchases (as they are for most AFAs), but SolidFires particular ability to deliver guaranteed
performance levels in the face of growing and unpredictable workloads (because of the
companys industry-leading QoS controls) is considered the critical competitive differentiator
among most of its customers. The storage performance and capacity expansion necessary to
keep up with the high growth rates of successful businesses loomed large as well, marking
easy platform scalability as a key purchase driver for most of SolidFires customers in both
the service provider market and the commercial enterprise market. SolidFire customers
interviewed for this study repeatedly referenced performance and scalability as driving their
AFA vendor selection:
G
uaranteed performance: As an IT director at Immedion, a datacenter and
infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) provider, explained, The most significant benefit of
SolidFire is that were able to guarantee consistent performance of our cloud services to
our customers.
S
calability: As a cloud services provider noted, Before SolidFire, we struggled to keep up
with our customers changes because of expanding resource requirements. With SolidFire,
every time you add a node, you add compute so when you add redundancy, youre
also adding compute.
Most of the customers interviewed for this study added the SolidFire platform to their
existing storage infrastructure. Moving their most performance-intensive applications to
SolidFire allowed their legacy storage platforms (which most retained) to perform better for
the less performance-intensive applications that continued to run on them. The addition of
SolidFire drove transformations not only on the IT operations side (improving administrative
productivity for routine tasks such as provisioning, storage performance tuning, and system
expansion) but also on the business side (leading to increased revenue generation, improved
customer service, competitive differentiation, and the ability to offer services that allowed
SolidFire customers to pursue new markets and customers). All study participants planned to
move more workloads to the SolidFire platform over time, and nearly all the study participants
felt that the industry would move to an all-flash datacenter for primary storage strategy
within a few short years.

Business Value Analysis

SolidFire customers reported to IDC that they have leveraged the SolidFire AFA solution to better
position their businesses and benefit from operational efficiencies. As a result, IDC calculates that
these organizations will record business benefits worth an average of $147,700 per SolidFire node
per year over three years ($1.31 million per organization) in the following areas (see Figure 1):
usiness productivity benefits: Being able to guarantee performance levels and offer services
B
demanded by their customer bases enables SolidFire organizations to win more business.
Meanwhile, improved application performance increases the productivity levels of certain
groups of employees. IDC puts the value of higher operating margin and employee productivity
attributable to SolidFire at an average of $82,900 per SolidFire node per year over three years
($733,800 per organization).
I T staff productivity benefits: Requiring minimal time to deploy, maintain, and support makes
IT staff operations more efficient and productive. IDC calculates that these organizations will
realize IT staff efficiencies worth an annual average of $54,100 per SolidFire node over three years
R
isk mitigation user productivity benefits: Ensuring resilient and high-performance
services and applications helps organizations meet more SLAs and experience less storage-
related downtime. IDC projects these improvements will have a value worth an average of
$9,200 per SolidFire node per year over three years ($81,900 per organization).
I T infrastructure cost reductions: Reducing certain datacenter costs, including cost for servers,
power, and floor space, helps interviewed organizations realize cost savings. IDC projects that
these organizations will save an average of $1,500 per SolidFire node per year over three years
FIGURE 1
Average Annual Benefits per SolidFire Node

$1,500
160,000
140,000 $9,200
120,000
$54,100
100,000
($)
80,000
60,000
40,000 $82,900
20,000
0
Business IT staff Risk mitigation IT infrastructure
productivity productivity user productivity cost reductions
benefits benefits benefits
Average annual benefits per SolidFire node: $147,700

Source: IDC, 2016

TABLE 2
Business Productivity Benefits

Per Organization Per SolidFire Node
Revenue impact
Additional revenue per year $698,000 $78,800
Assumed operating margin 15%
Net operating margin gain per year $105,000 $11,800
Enhanced performance
Number of users impacted 125 14
Average productivity gain impacted users 7% 7%
Average productive hours per impacted 134 134
user per year gained
Equivalent FTE gain 9 1
Source: IDC, 2016
Impact on Business
All commercial organizations interviewed for this study either attributed additional revenue to
their deployment of SolidFire or believe that the deployment of SolidFire will enable them to
capture more revenue going forward. Those organizations that have already seen an impact
with SolidFire will realize an average of $78,800 per SolidFire node per year ($698,000 per
organization) in additional revenue. SolidFire has supported the ability of the organizations to
win, support, and retain their customers by providing the levels of performance, flexibility, and
reliability required from their storage systems.
IT managers at interviewed organizations, particularly service providers, described the

persistent and evolving challenge of meeting their customers needs and cited SolidFire
as a major contributor to their success in expanding their businesses. The ability of the
organizations to guarantee performance levels, provide services such as encryption, and scale
their storage infrastructures to meet business growth with SolidFire has been a differentiator.
A service provider commented on how SolidFire figures into its growth efforts, When we talk
to potential clients about what we can do, out of the six main points we stress, half of them
relate to capabilities of SolidFire. So it has a very direct positive impact on our ability to sell our
services. We just closed a deal and the ability to guarantee performance and encryption was
the reason we won the business.

Interviewed organizations provided other examples of how SolidFire improves their business
prospects:
G
uaranteed performance levels. Several interviewed organizations mentioned being
able to guarantee service performance levels with SolidFire as critical to their business
prospects. The CTO at RSAWEB, an Internet service provider in South Africa, explained,
[T]he main benefit of SolidFire is that we can cast the net wider and attract more
customers who may not be considering hosting their workloads. However, by being
able to guarantee a very high level of performance, we believe that we can attract those
prospects.
S
upport cloud services. A cloud service provider noted that only SolidFire could support
its operations, We looked at other solid state storage offerings, and everything came back
to the fact that they werent designed for the cloud, which was the major decision point
for us in choosing SolidFire.
S
upport additional services. A service provider explained how it is leveraging SolidFire
to offer incremental services, With SolidFire, were able to run bigger reports in a shorter
amount of time frame without bottlenecks. So if customers want the history of all of their
transactions with us, we can now do it, whereas before it might have timed out. So now
were starting to charge for that type of functionality.
R
educe impact of noisy neighbors. The CTO at Richard Fleischman and Associates
(RFA), a United Statesbased IT services provider, commented, Weve reduced the impact
of problem areas with SolidFire. We have multiple clients with identical systems that
create massive peaks and resource pressure, and SolidFire has helped us to eliminate
this problem. This has played a role in our being able to capture substantial additional
revenue.
Improved Operations
SolidFire customers are also more operationally efficient with SolidFire supporting key
workloads and applications. For these organizations, the same qualities that improve business
prospects performance, scalability, and reliability result in improved application
performance, savings, and enhanced capabilities. SolidFire customers were unanimous
in praising SolidFires performance. As one organization said, Theres been improved
performance on all applications, across the board, while the CTO at RFA reported, Theres
been a positive impact on all of our applications that require high performance. As Figure 2
demonstrates, interviewed organizations have recorded significant improvements in storage
performance with SolidFire.

For interviewed organizations, the performance and reliability of SolidFire translate to

employee time savings and efficiencies. They provided a number of examples:
I mproved application performance. The interviewed governmental organization

attributed productivity gains of up to 20% for certain employees as the result of much
improved performance of virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and Web-based applications.
E
nhanced application capabilities. A service provider reported up to 10% higher
productivity for individuals using applications to record and report on its environment
because SolidFire supports higher performance and capabilities.
A
pplication development efficiencies. Several organizations reported shortening their
application development life cycles with SolidFire, thanks to its scalability, and another
organization cited its ability to perform load testing with SolidFire as a benefit for its
developers.
FIGURE 2
Storage Performance Improvements with SolidFire

156
113 109
91
74 70
Average input/ Random data Read performance Write Transactions per Average Latency
output operations throughput speed (MBps) performance minute (TPM) (milliseconds)
per second (GBps) (MBps)
Source: IDC, 2016
IT Staff Efficiencies
Interviewed organizations also reported that deploying SolidFire has helped them make
their IT operations more efficient. These SolidFire customers reported that they are
achieving time savings as a result of the ease of deploying, maintaining, and managing
their SolidFire environments. One interviewed organization indicated that SolidFires node-
based architecture enabled it to deploy and scale its storage environments more efficiently.
As a result, interviewed organizations reported needing 41% less IT staff time to keep the

lights on, freeing up time to work on other initiatives and to support business growth. One
organization explained the benefit to its business of using SolidFire as follows: Id say we now
spend half our time keeping the lights on with SolidFire, whereas before we were spending
80% of our time keeping the lights on. With the time that were saving, we are spending more
time on strategy and creating value for the business. Another organization cited benefits
in the ease of deploying SolidFire: The ease of deploying SolidFire increases our margins
because we dont have to pay staff to deploy a new array, which takes them away from doing
other things, so I keep my overhead down.
In addition to day-to-day efficiencies, SolidFire reduces the frequency of problems, for

both internal users and customers, which means that less IT staff or help desk time is spent
supporting these parties (84% less time on average). Figure 3 shows other IT staff efficiencies
being achieved with SolidFire in areas such as incident response (76%), storage administration
(47%), backup and disaster recovery (DR) (35%), and storage deployment (32%).
FIGURE 3
IT Staff Efficiencies with SolidFire

84
76
47
41
35 32
Call center Incident Storage Day-to-day Backup and Storage

support response administration operations disaster recovery deployment
Source: IDC, 2016
Risk Mitigation User Productivity Benefits

Interviewed organizations also reported minimizing operational and business interruptions
caused by storage-related outages and better meeting SLAs since deploying SolidFire. The
impact in terms of unplanned downtime on internal users is substantial in a relative sense,
with interviewed organizations experiencing almost no loss of productive time from SolidFire-
related storage outages.

Because a number of interviewed customers are service providers, SolidFires resiliency and
reliability in terms of supporting customers and meeting SLAs are of greater impact for them.
In addition to improved service reliability and performance, interviewed organizations also
reported that they are able to meet a higher percentage of their SLAs, which reduces the fines
or penalties they must pay for breaching SLAs by an average of more than $80,000 per year
per organization (see Table 3). In particular, interviewed organizations mentioned their ability
to guarantee quality of service and use multitenancy to create separate environments for
customers as benefits of SolidFire.
TABLE 3
Risk Mitigation Unplanned Downtime and SLAs

Before SolidFire With SolidFire Difference Benefit (%)
Unplanned downtime
Number of instances per year 8.0 0.1 7.9 99
MTTR (hours) 1.1 0.6 0.5 42
Productive hours lost per IT user per year 0.8 0.0 0.8 99
Equivalent FTEs 0.1 0.0 0.1 99
SLAs
Percentage of SLAs met 92 98 6 6
Cost per SLA percentage not met ($) 14,810 14,810
SLA fines per year ($) 114,330 32,580 81,750 72
Source: IDC, 2016
IT Infrastructure Cost Reductions

Because interviewed organizations are mostly using SolidFire in an additive fashion rather
than as a replacement for other storage hardware, they are realizing relatively minimal
cost savings. Nonetheless, interviewed SolidFire customers described it as a cost-effective
solution for meeting their storage infrastructure needs. In particular, organizations attributed
efficiencies in servers, power, and floor space to SolidFire as they have used it to support key
business applications.

ROI Analysis
IDC interviewed seven organizations using SolidFire and recorded their results to inform this
studys analysis. IDC used the following three-step method for conducting the ROI analysis:
G
athered quantitative benefit information during the interviews using a before-
and-after assessment. In this study, the benefits included staff time savings and
productivity gains, user productivity increases, increased revenue, and device-related cost
reductions.
C
reated a complete investment (three-year total cost analysis) profile based on
the interviews. Investments go beyond the annual costs of using SolidFire and can
include additional costs related to the solution, including migrations, planning, consulting,
configuration or maintenance, and staff or user training.
C
alculated the ROI and payback period. IDC conducted a depreciated cash flow
analysis of the benefits and investments for the organizations using SolidFire over a three-
year period. ROI is the ratio of the net present value (NPV) and the discounted investment.
The payback period is the point at which cumulative benefits equal the initial investment.
Table 4 presents IDCs analysis of the average discounted benefits, average discounted
investment, and return on investment for the SolidFire customers interviewed for this study.
IDC projects that these organizations will invest a discounted average of $73,000 per SolidFire
node over three years ($650,000 per organization) and realize three-year discounted business
benefits of $353,700 per SolidFire node ($3.13 million per organization). This would result in an
average three-year ROI of 385% for these organizations, with breakeven in their investment in
SolidFire occurring in just over five months.
TABLE 4
Business Productivity Benefits

Per Organization Per SolidFire Node
Discounted benefit $3.13 million $353,700
Discounted investment $0.65 million $73,000
Net present value (NPV) $2.48 million $280,700
Return on investment (ROI) 385% 385%
Payback period 5 months 5 months
Discount rate 12% 12%
Source: IDC, 2016

Case Studies
Immedion is a cloud Immedion
and datacenter services
provider with locations Immedion is a cloud and datacenter services provider with locations in South Carolina, North
in South Carolina, North Carolina, and Ohio. As a cloud provider, Immedion requires the ability to deliver predictable,
Carolina, and Ohio. ultrafast performance over time, consistent with its customers expectations. In addition to
delivering reliable performance in a multitenant environment with unpredictable workloads,
Immedion also needs to provide its customers the ability to quickly and easily adjust resource
allocation through a self-service portal, spinning virtual machines (VMs) up and down as
needed to meet evolving business requirements. Immedion is a fast-growing company
and requires a storage architecture that allows the company to easily expand over time in a
nondisruptive manner to accommodate increased business.
To deliver the flexibility its customers need, Immedion runs a heavily virtualized IT
infrastructure based around VMware vCloud. Immedion wanted to set itself apart from its
competition by offering reliable, high-performing cloud storage solutions to its customers.
Further, Immedion wanted to avoid excessive administrative time associated with storage
tuning to address the noisy neighbor problem during periods of high utilization, such as
during snapshot backup operations and data migrations (for onboarding new customers
or retiring aging arrays) and storage infrastructure expansion tasks. Immedion wanted to
integrate flash into its IT environment to address performance concerns and was particularly
interested in evaluating the ability of scale-out storage architectures to address ease-of-use
requirements around expansion.
SolidFires scale-out architecture, guaranteed quality-of-service capabilities, and strong

multitenant support in vCloud environments attracted Immedions attention, and during a
proof of concept, the SF series system proved its ability to deliver consistent performance
across widely varying workloads. With SolidFire, storage latencies dropped from a widely
variable 515ms to consistently in the range of 23ms, allowing Immedion to implement
a three-tiered storage service offering with guaranteed service levels. After the SolidFire
storage system was implemented in mid-2015, storage tuning tasks literally dropped to zero,
significantly lessening the administrative time each week. SolidFires inline data reduction
allowed Immedion to manage its high-growth environment with a significantly decreased
storage footprint and lowered energy costs as well. Administrative span of control more than
doubled, and Immedion predicts that SolidFires easy expansion and automatic workload
rebalancing will save the company a substantial amount of money relative to what it would
have spent with its legacy storage infrastructure to keep up with growing demand.

Hosted Network is Hosted Network

a Sydney, Australia
based cloud service Hosted Network is a Sydney, Australiabased cloud service provider that offers white-labeled
provider that offers cloud services for desktop as a service (DaaS) and IaaS to managed service providers, IT
white-labeled cloud integrators, and software vendors as well as end users. As is true for most service providers,
services for desktop as a creating a cost-effective infrastructure to deliver consistent performance in the face of
service (DaaS) and IaaS unpredictable workloads is a key challenge. To better respond to burgeoning customer
to managed service requirements, Hosted Network planned to move its DaaS offering from an application
providers, IT integrators, virtualization (Citrix XenApp) approach to VDI based on VMware Horizon. The workload profile
and software vendors between application virtualization and VDI is very different, and consistent performance is
as well as end users. of particular concern in VDI environments where routine I/O spikes, driven by boot, log-on,
and log-out storms; rebuild times; and virus scans, can be as much as 10x the steady-state
IOPS requirements. Response time and overall usability are key concerns of Hosted Networks
customers, and the companys legacy storage infrastructure, built around scale-up array
designs, would not be able to meet these requirements as Hosted Network moved to a VDI
environment. Internal concerns for Hosted Network in managing its own IT infrastructure to
meet customer requirements included ease of expandability and ongoing management.
Hosted Network knew that it wanted to incorporate flash into its new DaaS environment and
was, in particular, interested in newer storage architectures built around scale-out designs
what Hosted Networks Managing Director Ben Town referred to as storage 2.0. SolidFires
features not only broadly met Hosted Networks preliminary requirements but also provided
some new capabilities that quickly became foundational in Hosted Networks IT infrastructure.
Storage latencies dropped from
520ms to consistently under 2ms, even in the face of the huge I/O bursts generated by
VDI for boot storms and virus scans. Inline compression and deduplication was delivering a
data reduction ratio of 10:1 for Hosted Networks VDI environment, allowing the company
to significantly decrease floor space and energy requirements relative to what it would
have spent with legacy storage infrastructure. The simplicity of SolidFire management
also appealed to Hosted Network storage tuning time dropped to zero (a considerable
advantage since those managing storage at Hosted Network were virtual, not storage
administrators) and system expansion was easy just add a node and the system rebalanced
the workload automatically with no manual tuning. Given that SolidFire could expand to 100
nodes and nondisruptively accommodate new-generation technologies, Hosted Network
expected that it would be able to use the single system over a much longer depreciation
life cycle, delaying the capital costs for system replacement by two to three years without
jeopardizing its ability to meet customer requirements. The redundancy inherent in the scale-
out design has also provided Hosted Network with a better fault management capability

application services are not impacted even in the event of a node failure as the workload is
rapidly redistributed across remaining resources, all without operator intervention.
SolidFires QoS capabilities, while not part of the original purchase criteria, enabled Hosted
Network to much more cost effectively establish (and charge for) guaranteed service levels.
Hosted Network uses SolidFire for its Gold service tier and is tracking flash price-per-gigabyte
costs closely to determine when it can move its Silver service tier to SolidFire as well,
using the QoS controls to deliver performance to the levels required for each tier. Although
originally Hosted Network had expected to deploy a storage silo for its new VDI environment,
SolidFires QoS controls have allowed Hosted Network to colocate other Gold workloads
onto SolidFire without having to worry about the noisy neighbor problem, allowing Hosted
Network to make more efficient use of its storage infrastructure to deliver its premium service
tier. SolidFires strong multitenant capabilities in VMware environments (which is what Hosted
Networks virtual infrastructure is based on) will be critical in meeting customer requirements
as Hosted Network continues to move more workloads to the platform over time.
California Public Utilities Commission

The California The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) is a San Francisco, Californiabased agency
Public Utilities that regulates privately owned electric, natural gas, telecommunications, water, railroad,
Commission (CPUC) rail transit, and passenger transportation companies. With the business growing at 2530%
is a San Francisco, per year, the CPUC has been virtualizing its environment to leverage the administrative
Californiabased benefits that server consolidation on virtual infrastructure offers. Storage performance has
agency that regulates been a factor limiting the ability to virtualize certain applications, which include relational
privately owned
database, messaging and collaboration, enterprise resource planning, and high-performance
electric, natural gas,
computing applications. As part of the migration, the CPUC also wanted to virtualize
telecommunications,
desktops, and because of performance concerns, the CPUC planned to add a siloed storage
water, railroad, rail
environment to ensure that noisy neighbor problems would not impact the performance of
transit, and passenger
transportation other applications. With CPUCs legacy storage infrastructure, latencies were typically in the
companies. range of 1520ms and creeping higher as the environment expanded, limiting consolidation
densities in the agencys virtual environment. Because of high IOPS requirements in VDI
environments, driven by boot, log-on, and log-out storms as well as virus scans, the CPUC did
not consider using hard disk drives and was looking at flash-based systems.
The CPUC installed two SolidFire systems (one in a primary site and one in a DR site) as the
VDI storage platform. Storage latencies with the SolidFire system were sub-millisecond,
handling the routine performance spikes in the VDI environment with ease. The performance,
ease of use, high-availability, and flexibility benefits of the SolidFire system prompted
the CPUC to think about using it with other applications, particularly because the QoS

capabilities could ensure that the CPUC could dial in predictable performance as needed on
an application-by-application basis in a multitenant environment. SolidFires performance
enabled the virtualization of applications that could not have been virtualized before because of
performance concerns, and more applications were moved to SolidFire. In moving applications
off physical servers and the legacy storage architecture, the CPUC achieved 3040% increases
in application performance across the board and reduced the storage footprint and power
consumption by 2550%, while SolidFires ease of use reduced storage administration time by
up to 90% on a monthly basis. Virtualizing the CPUCs SQL databases alone (something which
could not have been done without SolidFire) allowed the agency to reduce the x86 server count
required to drive the necessary storage performance, lowering software licensing costs.
For the CPUC, the most important features of the SolidFire platform were its ability to guarantee
IOPS through its QoS controls and the inherent redundancy of its scale-out architecture to
transparently recover from failures and enable online system expansion. The CPUC expects to be
able to expand the system, accommodating its growth while enabling more applications to be
virtualized, with less cost and fewer administrative resources than it could have done with legacy
storage designs.
Richard Fleischman and Associates
Richard Fleischman Richard Fleischman and Associates is a New Yorkbased IT services provider with global
and Associates is a datacenter operations that offers technology solutions to financial services companies,
New Yorkbased IT including hedge funds, private equity funds, private wealth management, and alternative asset
services provider with management funds. RFAs cloud platform, which the company launched in 2013, is growing
global datacenter at a very high rate, and RFA found that its conventional storage array could not meet the
operations that offers performance demands of its financial services client base. In particular, RFA wanted to eliminate
technology solutions all noisy neighbor performance issues; it has many clients that run very similar systems that run
to financial services tasks at about the same time, resulting in potential usage peaks and performance pressure on
companies, including
the storage hardware underlying its cloud platform.
hedge funds, private
equity funds, private These challenges pushed RFA to evaluate flash storage solutions to support its cloud platforms
wealth management, growth and performance demands. In 2014, RFA chose SolidFires all-flash array storage
and alternative asset solution, deploying five SolidFire nodes with plans to expand the environment as required to
management funds. accommodate business growth. According to RFA, SolidFire has substantially improved key
storage-related performance metrics, increasing its random access latencies by about 400% and
improving its average throughput (in IOPS) by about 150%. RFA also reported storage and server
hardware efficiencies with SolidFire, estimating that it would need about 30% more terabytes of
storage with the other flash solutions it considered and several more servers.

RFA reported that SolidFire has helped it provide higher-quality cloud services and support
expansion of its cloud services client base. In particular, RFA cited its ability to guarantee
performance of its services as a differentiator; it attributed one recent client win in large part
to its ability to guarantee the performance level of the clients high-performance analytics
application. Meanwhile, RFA explained that it requires less time to provision resources with
SolidFire, allowing it to deliver services to its clients in less time. As a result, RFA credits
SolidFire with helping it earn substantial additional revenue. In addition to these business
benefits, RFA benefits from SolidFires reliability (no unplanned downtime since deployment),
which is of critical importance to RFAs client base, and efficiencies in administering and
maintaining SolidFire. According to RFA, it is now looking to extend its use of SolidFire to
support more big data/analytics operations and transaction processing systems.
Challenges And Opportunities

For organizations For organizations working with 3rd Platform computing workloads, there are few downsides
working with 3rd when deploying AFAs to replace legacy storage infrastructure. Acquisition cost (in terms of
Platform computing price per gigabyte for raw flash capacity) still comes up as an issue despite the fact that AFAs
workloads, there are have offered considerably faster payback and lower total cost of ownership (TCO) than HDD-
few downsides when based systems since 2014 for the consolidation of performance-intensive primary storage
deploying AFAs to workloads. The acquisition cost comparison is not a very relevant one for AFAs because their
replace legacy storage inline data reduction (a feature generally not available on HDD-based primary storage systems
infrastructure. because of latency considerations) allows them to store so much more data on terabytes
of storage than an HDD-based system. Average data reduction ratios across all workloads
vary from 4:1 to 6:1 for most customers (with certain workloads like relational databases
performing more in the range of 2:1 and VDI and other clone-intensive environments
performing more in the range of 8:1 and higher). Price per gigabyte for raw storage capacity
is a metric that has been in long-term use though, and IT organizations may have difficulty
getting finance and accounting personnel to understand why the price per gigabyte is the
proper metric for effective storage capacity that takes into account data reduction and other
storage efficiency technologies enabled by high-performance flash storage.
As organizations deploy their first AFAs, they often learn about the valuable benefits they
bring to the table, which could have helped justify the purchase only after production
deployment. The SolidFire customers in this study were no different they often cited how
important some of these features, which included ease of management (storage tuning
tasks drop to zero), an ability to cohost workloads such as VDI that they thought they would
have to keep separate (because of QoS capabilities), and an ability to extend their enterprise
storage depreciation life cycles by a year or two (because of the ease of expansion and

the ability of the scale-out design to easily accommodate new technology generations),
became clear to them after they understood their true impact. Everyone understands flash
performance, but AFAs offer so much more in terms of both IT infrastructure and business
transformation for those that can think outside the box to improve existing datacenter and
business processes and offer new services that werent even feasible before. This can serve as
a caveat to enterprises looking to deploy an AFA for the first time: Make sure you understand
all the ramifications of flash deployment up front so that you can reap the maximum benefit
from flash in the shortest time.
Summary And Conclusion

It is interesting to note that interviewees did not identify any downside to AFA deployment.
In general, the path to AFA deployment started with an identified performance problem that
legacy storage infrastructure could not meet, progressed to an evaluation of different AFA
offerings that not only proved out flash performance but also highlighted the importance of
scale-out architecture and good QoS capabilities, and moved to a production deployment
that eventually led to additional discoveries about the benefits SolidFire brought to the table.
Those additional discoveries included cost savings because of the secondary economic
benefits of flash deployment at scale, an ability to leverage SolidFire to offer new premium
services that opened up new markets and generated additional revenue, significantly
reduced storage administration (particularly around storage tuning tasks), and an ability to
pursue denser multitenancy without fear of the noisy neighbor problem to further lower
operating costs.
Business value was undeniably strong around the SolidFire deployments: a definitive
resolution to storage performance problems, a five-month payback that led to a three-year
ROI of 385%, and an average of $78,800 per SolidFire node year per in additional revenue.
In all cases, interviewed customers deployed SolidFire as an addition to their datacenter
environment (rather than as a replacement to their existing storage resources) but quickly
began to move additional workloads onto the SolidFire solution, improving the performance
of legacy infrastructure by offloading the more performance-sensitive applications onto flash.
All interviewees were interested in deploying a storage infrastructure optimized for Web-scale
environments, and SolidFire fit this bill admirably.

Appendix
IDCs standard ROI methodology was used for this project. This methodology is based on
gathering data from current users of SolidFire as the foundation for the model. Based on these
interviews, IDC performs a three-step process to calculate the ROI and payback period:
easure the savings from reduced IT costs (staff, hardware, software, maintenance, and
M
IT support), increased user productivity, and improved revenue over the term of the
deployment.
scertain the investment made in deploying the solution and the associated migration,
A
training, and support costs.
roject the costs and savings over a three-year period and calculate the ROI and payback
P
for the deployed solution.
IDC bases the payback period and ROI calculations on a number of assumptions, which are
summarized as follows:
T ime values are multiplied by burdened salary (salary + 28% for benefits and overhead) to
quantify efficiency and manager productivity savings.
owntime values are a product of the number of hours of downtime multiplied by the
D
number of users affected.
T he impact of unplanned downtime is quantified in terms of impaired end-user

productivity and lost revenue.
L ost productivity is a product of downtime multiplied by burdened salary.
L ost revenue is a product of downtime multiplied by the average revenue generated per
hour.
T he net present value of the three-year savings is calculated by subtracting the amount
that would have been realized by investing the original sum in an instrument yielding a
12% return to allow for the missed opportunity cost. This accounts for both the assumed
cost of money and the assumed rate of return.
Because every hour of downtime does not equate to a lost hour of productivity or revenue
generation, IDC attributes only a fraction of the result to savings. As part of our assessment,
we asked each company what fraction of downtime hours to use in calculating productivity
savings and the reduction in lost revenue. IDC then taxes the revenue at that rate.

Further, because IT solutions require a deployment period, the full benefits of the solution
are not available during deployment. To capture this reality, IDC prorates the benefits on a
monthly basis and then subtracts the deployment time from the first-year savings.
Note: All numbers in this document may not be exact due to rounding.
IDC Global Headquarters
5 Speen Street
Framingham, MA 01701
USA
508.872.8200
Twitter: @IDC
idc-insights-community.com
www.idc.com
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IDC White Paper | The Business Value of SolidFire All-Flash Array Storage Systems

Sponsored by: SolidFire

Document #US41139516 2016 IDC. www.idc.com | Page 1

Document #US41139516 2016 IDC. www.idc.com | Page 2

Document #US41139516 2016 IDC. www.idc.com | Page 3

The Business Value Of Solidfire

Demographics of Interviewed Organizations

Source: IDC, 2016

Document #US41139516 2016 IDC. www.idc.com | Page 4

Document #US41139516 2016 IDC. www.idc.com | Page 5

Business Value Analysis

Average Annual Benefits per SolidFire Node

Average annual benefits per SolidFire node: $147,700

Document #US41139516 2016 IDC. www.idc.com | Page 6

Business Productivity Benefits

Source: IDC, 2016

IT managers at interviewed organizations, particularly service providers, described the

Document #US41139516 2016 IDC. www.idc.com | Page 7

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For interviewed organizations, the performance and reliability of SolidFire translate to

I mproved application performance. The interviewed governmental organization

Storage Performance Improvements with SolidFire

Source: IDC, 2016

Document #US41139516 2016 IDC. www.idc.com | Page 9

In addition to day-to-day efficiencies, SolidFire reduces the frequency of problems, for

IT Staff Efficiencies with SolidFire

Call center Incident Storage Day-to-day Backup and Storage

Source: IDC, 2016

Risk Mitigation User Productivity Benefits

Document #US41139516 2016 IDC. www.idc.com | Page 10

Risk Mitigation Unplanned Downtime and SLAs

IT Infrastructure Cost Reductions

Document #US41139516 2016 IDC. www.idc.com | Page 11

Business Productivity Benefits

Source: IDC, 2016

Document #US41139516 2016 IDC. www.idc.com | Page 12

SolidFires scale-out architecture, guaranteed quality-of-service capabilities, and strong

Document #US41139516 2016 IDC. www.idc.com | Page 13

Hosted Network is Hosted Network

Document #US41139516 2016 IDC. www.idc.com | Page 14

California Public Utilities Commission

Document #US41139516 2016 IDC. www.idc.com | Page 15

Richard Fleischman and Associates

Document #US41139516 2016 IDC. www.idc.com | Page 16

Challenges And Opportunities

Document #US41139516 2016 IDC. www.idc.com | Page 17

Summary And Conclusion

Document #US41139516 2016 IDC. www.idc.com | Page 18

T he impact of unplanned downtime is quantified in terms of impaired end-user

L ost productivity is a product of downtime multiplied by burdened salary.

Document #US41139516 2016 IDC. www.idc.com | Page 19

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I mproved application performance. The interviewed governmental organization

T he impact of unplanned downtime is quantified in terms of impaired end-user

L ost productivity is a product of downtime multiplied by burdened salary.