Blaze Combines OnApp’s Cloud Management Platform with All-SSD Storage from SolidFire to Enable Crucial to Guarantee IOPS for Storage-Intensive Applications

London – February 5, 2013 – OnApp has announced that it was selected, along with SolidFire, to help Crucial Cloud Hosting launch Blaze – a new high-performance cloud service that offers guaranteed performance for storage-intensive applications. Blaze combines the OnApp Cloud platform and control panel with SolidFire’s all-SSD storage system.

Traditionally, the best way to guarantee storage performance for a hosted application has been to run it on a dedicated server. With OnApp and SolidFire, however, Crucial has created a high-performance cloud that offers guaranteed Input/Output Per Second (IOPS) for each application. Using the new Blaze cloud, Crucial customers can specify IOPS for their hosted applications, and control their cloud service with OnApp’s intuitive cloud control panel.

Crucial’s Managing Director, Aaron Weller, said: “The combination of SolidFire’s all-SSD storage systems and the OnApp Cloud management platform allows us to provision storage with guaranteed performance levels, all backed by our proven commitment to the highest levels of security, service and technical expertise. Now, customers have complete control over their cloud environment and can use the OnApp control panel to change the configuration of their server in real-time.”

Crucial is targeting its new Blaze cloud at companies using dedicated servers to ensure disk performance for their hosted applications, enabling them to take advantage of the flexibility and scalability of cloud hosting while guaranteeing storage performance. Crucial is also targeting companies such as online retailers and digital agencies, which can reduce cost by scaling their cloud service on demand to respond to promotions, or as their business needs change.

“Today’s applications need to be fast and available, no matter what the demand – and that is exactly what OnApp and SolidFire have helped Crucial to deliver,” said OnApp CEO, Ditlev Bredahl. “By evolving their infrastructure with OnApp Cloud, and SolidFire's all-SSD storage, Crucial can meet the growing need for cloud services that can handle the most demanding applications.”

Although developed initially for Crucial, the OnApp/SolidFire platform integration that powers Blaze will be available to other cloud providers in the near future.