SolidFire's Time has passed
The SolidFire architecture, although brilliantly conceived and marketed by Wright et al, never quite lived up to expectations and competitive pressure.
Although it is, obviously, an all-flash array, there is a little too much to do for the Element software to distribute and collected copies of the data on multiple nodes over a 10Gb network to provide the kind of performance that Pure and others can deliver on all-flash appliances. As a person on the front lines for SolidFire, one of the most successful people ever selling this product, we found very little technical attraction other than the use of a REST api and the ability to deploy/undeploy and redeploy nodes in a service provider environment. In performance bake-offs, we routinely LOST business to Pure and XTremeIO. At the time I left SolidFire, a single LUN was limited to 20,000, 4k IOPs before the "QOS" features were defeated and the highly touted deterministic IO delivery model was defeated.
But Dave Wright is a good guy and team builder. His wealth and success reflects that. But, with the ability of the latest storage technologies to far outstrip disk interface limitations, the "all flash SAN" is becoming another temporal milestone in the history of performance computing and is rapidly being replaced by hyperconverged infrastructure where the storage access path is evolving to look more like memory IO and less like external device IO. Witness the success of Nutanix and the recent products announcements from Pure where there IS NO SAN!