SolidFire has unveiled two low-end flash products that it claims dramatically cut the cost of entry for customers hoping to take advantage of all-flash cloud-scale arrays.

The solid state flash storage vendor believes its two new nodes, the SF2405 and the SF4805, give it a broader market reach by offering customers a minimum 35TB capacity and 200,000 IOPS for less than $100,000.

Marketing VP Jay Prassl told CBR the products open up a market that some businesses may have previously felt priced out of.

"In the past customers were looking to Solidfire to speed up applications and deploy their initial private cloud, and in some cases the system was too large for them to do that," he admitted.

"Below $100,000 opens up a broader market for Solidfire and allows our target customers, large enterprises, to deploy the platform much more quickly and easily than previously."

He added: "You can start very small with a SolidFire system [now]. If you start in a solid state environment you can scale out into a large web-scale environment."

The SF2405 and SF4805 are targeted at IT managers looking to speed up applications or begin building a private cloud, with Prassl labelling the firm’s new offerings as ‘IT-as-a-Service’.

He said this term encompassed an ability to consolidate applications into a single system while ensuring their performance, as well as automating every aspect of that system with RESTful APIs. The last part of the definition was the new products’ ability to scale incrementally to meet IT departments’ requirements.

The new SF4805 doubles the density of the SF2405 with 69TB capacity while providing 44% more storage capacity at a 30% lower cost than the previous SF3010, according to SolidFire.

The products are the third generation of SolidFire hardware since the platform became available in November 2012, and are available from today, sold directly or through UK distribution partner Arrow ECS.

SolidFire has just announced an $82m funding round and Prassl confirmed much of the cash will go into R&D, as well as bankrolling the company’s push into EMEA and Asia-Pacific.