Brisk VC activity surrounding makers of flash storage systems continues apace. The latest funding success is Solid Fire, which just added $25 million to its bank account.

It’s not hard to see why it was able to pry open those checkbooks. The Boulder, Colo.-based startup combines two of the hottest trends in IT, SSDs (solid state drive) and cloud computing. You guessed it, the firm specializes in SSD storage systems for cloud providers like the SF3010 Storage Node pictured above.

SolidFire takes aim at storage underutilization (a symptom of big, power hungry storage infrastructures that only use a percentage of their total capacity), and the performance penalties therein, with all-SSD primary storage arrays.

SSDs, by and large, outpace traditional hard drives when it comes to performance — a compelling selling point for companies that value fast and responsive cloud services. Oh, and since they lack moving parts, they’re energy efficient too.

In a blog post, SolidFire’s VP of Sales & Marketing, Jay Prassl explains what the company’s tech means for cloud providers, along with an impressive list of interested parties (future acquirers?).

Currently there are a number of world-class cloud service providers evaluating over 500TB of SolidFire’s all-SSD storage technology. They are evaluating the solution technically, but also evaluating it from a business perspective as well. …These IaaS providers are now able to invite new mission critical and performance sensitive applications into their cloud, and build new revenue streams and customer value around guaranteed performance. There is a very good reason that 3Par, EMC, and NetApp customers have all joined our Early Access program.

This all seems to have impressed investors that include New Enterprise Associates, Valhalla Partners and Novak Biddle. The money will go towards “investing in our sales and marketing teams to broaden our reach, and will be accelerating our technical development as well,” blogs Prassl.

To date, SolidFire has attracted $37 million. It joins other startups like Violin Memory and Pure Storage is in bagging tens of millions in flash storage funding this year. Who’s next?

Image credit: SolidFire