How ShapeBlue aims to bring next-generation storage benefits to cloud environments

ShapeBlue, an independent global CloudStack integrator, has forged a new strategic partnership with solid-state array SolidFire 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.

New partnership

With the new partnership, announced at CloudStack Collaboration Europe Conference in Budapest this week, ShapeBlue 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, said: “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 has already worked on a number of customer projects with SolidFire and has seen the benefits that its technology can bring to customers. Moving forward, SolidFire will be ShapeBlue’s primary block-storage recommendation for IaaS builds.

Giles added: “We already have a standardised reference architecture that accommodates SolidFire’s technology, 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 has 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 US to achieve this prestigious status.

Dave Cahill, VP of Corporate Development & Strategy for SolidFire, said: “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.”

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