Flash storage vendor SolidFire has announced new levels of interoperability with VMware’s vSphere storage input-output controller as it seeks to underpin its support for the software-defined data center.

This is designed to help data centers avoid management issues by controlling data more definitively, it said.

SolidFire's technology now allows the volume sizes and numbers of input-output operations per second (IOPS) to be tightly defined for each unit of storage for every application.

This could solve many of the problems experience by operators of shared-storage environments, where some over-active users (or ‘noisy neighbours’) can hog resources at the expense of other customers.

Solidfire’s tighter integration with VMware brings data centers closer to the original premise of virtualization, it claimed, as now the entire data center stack can become more fluid.

According to the flash storage vendor its potential for quality of service can combine with VMware’s vSphere Storage I/O Control to cut manual intervention.

It will also end the wasteful over provisioning of resources that over-cautious data center service providers are prone to.

SolidFire's automated performance control should now dynamically adjust volume IOPS allocations, as dictated by the global settings in the VMware system.

Together they create a tunable and predictable storage infrastructure for each virtual machine datastore, said SolidFire’s CEO Dave Wright.

“VMware managers can oversee provision storage policies that are enforced down to every virtual single disk in the SolidFire storage system,” said Wright.

VMware’s senior director of product management for software-defined storage Gaetan Castelein, said that controlling the dynamic allocation of resources in a virtualized environment is important.

“Now you can isolate the quality of service to predict performance for each virtual machine,” Castelein said.