This week, public cloud IaaS vendor CloudSigma announced it decision to transition its storage infrastructure to solid-state drives (SSD) as opposed to hard-disk drive (HDD) storage in an effort to increase the performance and reliability of its storage solutions. CloudSigma’s SSD storage will be powered by SolidFire. CloudSigma CEO Robert Jenkins believes that SSD can remove “storage bottlenecks and inconsistent performance” in ways that revolutionize standards for storage within the public cloud industry. SolidFire CEO and founder Dave Wright elaborated on the innovation of wholesale adoption of SSD by an IaaS provider as follows:
Our SSD storage system is designed specifically for cloud providers like CloudSigma to help bring their customers’ business-critical and performance-sensitive applications to the cloud without concern of disruption. Performance predictability starts with guaranteeing quality of service, which is why we’re the first to deliver it, and challenge the industry to follow suit. This partnership enables CloudSigma to deliver more consistent quality for the thousands of applications within its shared public cloud infrastructure.
CloudSigma’s SSD storage platform will be priced equivalently to its HDD storage infrastructure at $0.14 GB per month. Customers have the option of purchasing its SSD storage solutions separately from the rest of its public cloud infrastructure. According to The Register, Databarracks and ViaWest have SSD storage options but very few IaaS vendors have moved their storage infrastructures entirely to SSD, an option available to Zurich-based CloudSigma by virtue of its relatively small operational scale.
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