CloudStack Collaboration Conference, Budapest, 19 November 2014
ShapeBlue to bring next-generation storage benefits to public and private cloud environments
ShapeBlue, the leading independent global CloudStack integrator, today announced that it has forged a new strategic partnership with SolidFire, the storage industry’s #1 Solid-State Array, to deliver next-generation storage solutions to organisations running IaaS cloud environments. ShapeBlue historically has been storage vendor agnostic, citing a lack of clear differentiation in block storage solutions for implementing public and private cloud environments.
With the new partnership, ShapeBlue now intends to leverage SolidFire’s full enterprise feature set including Guaranteed Quality of Service (QoS), complete system automation and scale-out storage design to bring its customers radical increases in functionality and efficiency in delivering cloud-based services.
Giles Sirett, CEO of ShapeBlue commented today: “We are delighted to be taking our relationship with SolidFire to the next level as they have a genuinely unique proposition for organisations running, or planning to run, an IaaS infrastructure. That proposition comes from four elements of their technology:
“First, only SolidFire can give us guaranteed storage performance in a multi-tenant environment with the ability to dedicate IOPS to individual tenants or applications, removing the “noisy neighbour” problem often experienced in cloud. Next, SolidFire’s unique design offers the ability to deliver a much higher IOPS density than with traditional storage vendors. This helps overcome the need to over-specify storage in virtualised environments. Third, SolidFire also has deep integration with Apache CloudStack, allowing storage to be automated and provisioned on the fly. Finally, the scale-out architecture of SolidFire perfectly suits the capacity and growth models we usually specify for our customers.”
ShapeBlue have already worked on a number of customer projects with SolidFire and have seen the benefits that its technology can bring to customers. Going forward, SolidFire will be ShapeBlue’s primary block-storage recommendation for IaaS builds.
“We already have a standardised reference architecture that accommodates SolidFire’s technology,” said Giles, “and we will be looking to make that public in due course. We will become the go-to partner for companies who wish to benefit from the efficiency and automation that SolidFire brings to their cloud environments.”
As part of the partnership, ShapeBlue have become a SolidFire Gold Cloud Builder partner and built-out significant technical capability for advising and providing SolidFire expertise to its customers. ShapeBlue is the first SolidFire partner outside of the U.S. to achieve this prestigious status.
Dave Cahill, VP of Corporate Development & Strategy for SolidFire commented: “ShapeBlue’s expertise in designing and building cloud infrastructures will drastically simplify deployment and accelerate time to value, enabling customers to take advantage of SolidFire’s ability to scale granularly , automate storage management and consolidate mixed application workloads – all while delivering guaranteed performance.”
About ShapeBlue
ShapeBlue are the globally leading independent integrator of Apache CloudStack. The company provides a range of services to enable its customers to operate automated, reliable and secure IaaS cloud environments and has customers including Cisco, Evry, TomTom, Colt, Interoute and SunGard Availability Services.
Learn more: www.ShapeBlue com | www.twitter.com/shapeblue |
About SolidFire
SolidFire is the market leader in all-flash storage systems designed for next generation data centers. Leveraging SolidFire’s all-flash architecture, with volume-level Quality-of-Service (QoS) controls, customers now can guarantee storage performance to thousands of applications within a shared infrastructure. Coupling this functionality with in-line data reduction techniques and system-wide automation results in substantial capital and operating cost savings relative to traditional storage systems.
Learn more: www.solidfire.com
* The Gold Tier membership is intended for organisations which are able to help customers design, plan and deploy both traditional computing infrastructures and virtual infrastructures in a high performance, multi-tenant cloud scale environment.
Strong technical knowledge, planning and design best practices, and a clear understanding of the technical capabilities of SolidFire’s solutions are essential. To achieve Gold level, partners must complete a Partner Agreement, the required SolidFire Sales Training and Technical Training, and show a base level SolidFire selling success and achieve SolidFire competencies to attain the Gold Tier.
Giles is CEO and founder of ShapeBlue and is responsible for overall company strategy, strategic relationships, finance and sales.
He is also a committer and PMC member of the Apache CloudStack project and Chairman of the European Cloudstack User Group, actively helping promote brand awareness of the technology.
Giles can regularly be heard speaking at events around the globe, delivering visionary talks on cloud computing adoption and more specifically on Cloudstack technologies.
Before ShapeBlue, Giles held C-Level technology positions for 15 years including founder and CEO of Octavia Information Systems, a leading UK Managed Service Provider.
Giles holds a BSc in Engineering Physics from Sheffield Hallam University. Outside work, Giles is married with two teenage children. He coaches children’s rugby, is a competitive masters swimmer and can regularly be seen crying when his beloved Tottenham Hotspur lose.
