I’ve heard the same question so many times since I announced that I have moved to SolidFire that I figured I should probably try to address it. Folks who know me, know that I don’t find storage to be an exciting topic. I still hold onto that belief despite working for a storage company. But here’s the thing, SolidFire isn’t just a storage company, I have written before that you have to be solving a problem with your products. Failure to solve a problem means your adoption rate is going to be low and your product is either without a market or too far ahead of it’s time. If it’s the latter great for you, if it’s either of the former two well that sucks for you.

I don’t say that to be an ass, honestly I don’t I have been partnered with vendors where products weren’t selling. It’s not fun, to see customers not get the go to market (GTM) strategy of a vendor, nor your own campaign strategy.

This brings me back to SolidFire, you see the problem that many companies face is that infrastructure is expensive, and buying specific hardware for specific use cases is the logic of yesteryear. Specific hardware is not the way cloud solution providers build out their own infrastructure needs, the do it in scalable chunks. I know that I have already written about this several times so I won’t dwell on it.

SolidFire is an all flash solution but that’s not even the point.  Sure AFAs solve performance issues but that’s just low hanging fruit.  Some people say that SolidFire is great because of the ability to leverage QoS for mixed workloads and guarantee the quality of service. Yeah that’s super great but most customers aren’t even leveraging it. Dedupe, ease of use, and recoverability are just table stakes for storage solutions so it can’t be that. So what makes it interesting? It’s the ability to scale!

Seriously it just comes down to that, scalability to 100s of nodes and petabytes of data. That scalability transcends individual clusters, allowing for reconfiguration and resource mobility.

When someone asks me what made SolidFire interesting or why SolidFire? My answers are as follows:

First, because the team I get to be a part of. I covered that in my announcement to come to SolidFire, but it is worth mentioning again. I am truly excited about the team I am a part of.

Second, the solution is different and solves an actual problem, that means I get to talk about something that people will understand. Woot that’s exciting.

Lastly, I love to be challenged and I think what is ahead of me will make me learn to do things that I have never done before. I am excited for what is ahead and hope this puts some of the questions to rest.