We performed a comparison between SolidFire and VMware vSAN based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, NetApp, Pure Storage and others in All-Flash Storage."Technical support has been helpful and responsive."
"Offers excellent features like efficient data reduction, a reliable SafeMode, and a great support model for continuous assistance and updates."
"It's incredibly easy to use and greatly simplified our ability to both deploy and manage our storage subsystems."
"The initial setup was extremely simple and straightforward."
"The most valuable features of Pure FlashArray X NVMe are its superior performance compared to other flash tiers, as well as its ease of use, with an intuitive user interface that is simple to deploy and use."
"We're able to get higher-density workloads on the same infrastructure, and we have a smaller physical footprint. The performance is excellent – during our test the bottlenecks are never on the X array, it just keeps picking up the pace to match what you need. The real-time visibility is a differentiator in my opinion."
"It is very easy to install and configure. It has got excellent diagnostics. If you really need to see how the box is performing, the console gives you a lot of information. You can set thresholds as well as alerts based on the thresholds, which is a very powerful functionality. They are very proactive. They know how to monitor and manage the systems. They see a problem, and they are all over it before us. They see the problem before we see it, which is very good."
"The Pure1 component is most valuable at this point in time when comparing it with EMC. Pure1 is where you can have your diagnostics in the cloud, so you can look at things from your mobile phone."
"It's got full API functionality and the performance is pretty steady."
"The dashboard is such that you don't need to be a storage expert to administer it."
"If we get complaints about any kind of performance metric issues, whether it's storage related or something on the virtual side, we use it to pinpoint what the actual issue is."
"Feature-wise, it is a good solution allowing users to monitor and simplify their networks. The solution also provides its users with flexibility by enabling them to utilize its extensions."
"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."
"It is very easy to scale up SolidFire."
"I would say in terms of architecture and in terms of functionality, the product is quite good."
"If you buy the solution for its specific purpose it will work well."
"The product’s most valuable features are performance and expandability."
"The most important feature to me, in my role, is cost. In the renewal cycle for storage, it was about a 40 percent saving compared to going to an all-flash array, which is what we first looked at doing. Secondly, performance: we need clinical data access in five seconds and need to do everything we can to retain that metric. Thirdly, I was really pleasantly surprised during the data migration across to vSAN, that it happened almost instantly whereas, in the past, migrating from array to array was an arduous and fraught process."
"The product's initial setup phase is simple."
"It is easier to deploy than the traditional SAN."
"Easy-to-use, and easy-to-scale product."
"The implementation is simple, it was very straightforward. It took us approximately three weeks because it was installed in four locations."
"I like the scalability and the fact that it reduces your total cost for storage over several years."
"The solution has high performance."
"The software layer has to improve."
"If the customer only needs 500 terabytes and doesn't care how much data they'll put in the server, IBM is cheaper than Pure."
"There is room for improvement in catering to midrange storage needs, especially for customers seeking Enterprise-class features."
"There is room for improvement in the pricing of the product."
"Our use cases require more multi-tenant capabilities and additional VLAN interfaces for separating different customers. We currently use it to provide storage, sometimes shared storage, to different customers, but it is less flexible in comparison to a dedicated solution."
"You cannot tag a LUN with a description, and that should be improved. What I like on the Unity side is that when I expand LUNs or do things, there is an information field on the LUN. This is the Information field that you can tag on your LUNs to let yourself know, "Hey, I've added this much space on this date". Pure lacks that ability. So, you don't have a mechanism that's friendly for tracking your data expansions on the LUN and for adding any additional information. That's a downside for me."
"I'd like to see the product implement active replication for vehicles such as VMware."
"Many options to check performance, like read, writes, random writes, and random reads, are missing in Pure FlashArray X NVMe."
"This solution would be improved if it were made to be more compatible with other products."
"They could do a file-based NAS: SolidFire NAS-based. It's probably not its niche, but that is our direction, not to use block, and it's block. Solid state block is what it is."
"One of the challenges we faced while using SolidFire was that the product line that we were using in our company was discontinued."
"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."
"It would be good to provide administrative access at the root level to be able to do things with the system, if need be."
"I think there is room for improvement needed with its storage capability. A bigger node is needed."
"The upgrade process could be better."
"We have a large fiber channel infrastructure, and that's one area that we haven't seen implemented in SolidFire, its more iSCSI."
"It is an expensive solution."
"The platform’s pricing needs improvement. Additionally, there should be an appliance module included in it."
"We want see a better monitoring tool in vSAN. Monitoring is not that great as of now because it shows us false alarms in the Health status. We would like that to be improved."
"I would like compression and deduplication to be offered for offloading hardware, instead of doing it with software. That would be nice."
"Troubleshooting tools could be improved."
"The big thing is pricing, and the rest of it is mostly good. From a scalability point of view, scaling the storage from network or compute should be easier. It is again all around the cost, and it would be good if it was easier to scale your storage separately from your compute."
"I am looking for more of a software-defined storage platform that uses different protocols, such as iSCSI, NFS, and CIS, and maybe also has an object as part of that. They should 100% make it more of a storage-based product where it is not linked just to VMware, and it also has NFS and iSCSI built-in at a scalable level. They should turn it more into a dedicated storage-as-a-service platform instead of just being built into the VMware kernel. Their level one and level two support is not at all good, and it should be improved."
"Its price could be improved. It is too expensive for our clients."
SolidFire is ranked 18th in All-Flash Storage with 33 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 2nd in HCI with 227 reviews. SolidFire is rated 8.2, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.4. 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". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSAN writes "Very stable, easy to set up, and easy to use". SolidFire is most compared with NetApp AFF, Dell PowerStore and Pure Storage FlashArray, whereas VMware vSAN is most compared with VxRail, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, HPE SimpliVity, Red Hat Ceph Storage and Dell PowerFlex.
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