Hey, you just picked up a Solidfire flash box? Dude, you bought a Dell

Dell is selling Solidfire's all-flash arrays to service providers.

Although Dell flogs its own all-flash Storage Centre arrays, it has an agreement with Colorado startup Solidfire to push the latter's scale-out all-solid-state-drive arrays.

Dell spokesperson Lon Levitan told The Register:

Yes, it’s true. The SolidFire relationship actually started long before we had our current flash offerings. At present, we position SolidFire in cases where QoS (Quality of Service) is a requirement, particularly with service providers.

We do not yet offer QoS in our Dell Storage SC or PS Series products, so this relationship helps fill a spot in our portfolio, allowing us to help our customers with best in class QoS along with a broad portfolio of Dell data centre solutions.

It is not a one-way deal. Levitan said: “The relationship is reciprocal. SolidFire is a Dell Technology Partner, and their arrays run on Dell server hardware through an OEM agreement."

We have heard that Dell and Solidfire have won deals in Spain against Pure Storage bids, and that severe discounting has taken place – with figures as high as 80 per cent mentioned.

The competition for sales in the all-flash array market is becoming titanic, with so many large mainstream vendors and well-funded, momentum-gaining startups. This, along with hyper-converged systems, is one of the hottest areas in the storage market right now, if not the hottest one of all. There will be blood. ®