We performed a comparison between NetApp (All Flash FAS) and SolidFire based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Based on the parameters we compared, NetApp AFF (All Flash FAS) came out ahead of SolidFire. Even though the two products are straightforward to deploy and have good support, SolidFire has fewer valuable features and more areas that require improvement.
"The most valuable feature of this solution is reliability."
"What I really like about this program, is that it is easy to use and easy to configurate."
"The most valuable features of this solution are its ease of use and performance."
"The solution is scalable."
"It has benefited my organization because it has reduced time to insights."
"Technical support has been helpful and responsive."
"One of the best features is the support, which is excellent."
"It has good, reliable, fast storage."
"The most valuable feature is the support. If we have any issues, we can call into NetApp and their support is really good."
"The NVMe flash cache is the most useful feature. It lowers transactional speed even more."
"The most valuable aspect of NetApp AFF is the money it saves our organization."
"I like the ability to snapshot, and the cloning features are valuable to us as well. I like that I can quickly and efficiently snapshot the data and move it to wherever I need to locally or in the cloud. Also, I know that when I take the snapshot that all of the data will be there and that it will be usable when I need to use it."
"The speed is great. That's probably number one in terms of features we appreciate."
"One of the main features that we love about the system is the ability to create snapshots. NetApp makes a lot of snapshots in a short space of time. Also, the speed of data recovery with NetApp, at the time we need it, is an important feature that we love."
"I think that the DR applications are the most valuable, including Snapshots and SnapMirror."
"It is a stable solution."
"Templates are already predefined for it. If you're coding it up, it will take two days. You can pick up a template right there from the API, and it just works for you. Implementation done in 10 minutes."
"Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"The provisioning process is efficient and doesn't demand higher latency, ensuring optimal data transfer performance which is particularly valuable for tasks like data mining, where quick results are essential."
"If you buy the solution for its specific purpose it will work well."
"The scalability and being able to implement it quickly."
"I would say in terms of architecture and in terms of functionality, the product is quite good."
"It is very easy to scale up SolidFire."
"The square footage for doing development is at a premium when dealing with government networks. To be able to put a lot of IOPS in a lot of high-speed performing drives in a very small location which requires very little HVAC with very little power, it is very valuable to us."
"Many options to check performance, like read, writes, random writes, and random reads, are missing in Pure FlashArray X NVMe."
"I'd like to see the product implement active replication for vehicles such as VMware."
"The tool's pricing is higher than competitors."
"The tool's portfolio is minimal. It is expensive."
"We have run into a couple of instances recently where we are running out of space. So we have had to buy some more packs for it and they have deployed fine and it has increased smoothly."
"We would like to see more visibility into garbage collection and CPU performance in the GUI."
"It is on the expensive side."
"We need better data deduplication."
"The procurement process could be improved. It takes a long time for us to receive stuff. The product is good. It's not the product, it's just that it takes forever to get it. It's not our reseller's problem; it's usually held up at NetApp."
"It would be much better if you had it more like the way they do Metro Clusters, where they have a switch, and the storage is all attached to a switch."
"With some of the larger clusters being able to do a patch upgrade is helping. They still take three, four hours by the time you get the night started, finish things up, do the upgrade."
"This solution should be made easier to deploy."
"I think adding more features to make it more cloud enabled will help us with cloud tiering and simplify the whole cloud operations when it's integrating with our on-prem AFF products. That is one area where we would like to see more improvements from NetApp."
"The SRA stuff that intergrades with SRM is a problem point. It's a pain point. The support personnel aren't always knowledgeable on that product. At times, they are not even aware what product is supported and what is not, when one has been deprecated and there is a new one out, and what the bug fixes of the newer version are."
"There is room for improvement with the user interface. There are a few things that cannot be done in the GUI. We do a lot of things through the CLI, but that's grown out of a lack of ability to do them in the GUI. An example is QTrees. You can manage them within the GUI, but the GUI is missing a few options."
"It would be very useful if we could do the NFS to CIFS file transfer, but it is not supported at this time."
"This solution would be improved if it were made to be more compatible with other products."
"I think there is room for improvement needed with its storage capability. A bigger node is needed."
"A little better segregation of the multi-tenancy. Right now, it's just VLAN-specific, that's all you can do."
"It's a very good Windows-type solution. But we do a lot of legacy systems and the like. So it's getting that incorporated into it that would help us."
"There is room for improvement with a focus on creating a centralized storage system, functioning similar to AWS."
"The technical support is really bad and has to be improved."
"SolidFire could improve in terms of hardware robustness."
"We have a large fiber channel infrastructure, and that's one area that we haven't seen implemented in SolidFire, its more iSCSI."
NetApp AFF is ranked 2nd in All-Flash Storage with 281 reviews while SolidFire is ranked 19th in All-Flash Storage with 33 reviews. NetApp AFF is rated 9.0, while SolidFire is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of NetApp AFF writes "Since switching, our clients have reported improved performance and reduced latency". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SolidFire writes "A versatile storage solution suitable for various workloads in cloud environments providing scalable architecture, granular Quality of Service and consistent performance". NetApp AFF is most compared with Dell PowerStore, Dell Unity XT, Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series, Pure Storage FlashArray and VMware vSAN, whereas SolidFire is most compared with Dell PowerStore, VMware vSAN and Pure Storage FlashArray. See our NetApp AFF vs. SolidFire report.
See our list of best All-Flash Storage vendors.
We monitor all All-Flash Storage reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.