SolidFire Reviews

We're currently working on the Element X operating system with SolidFire, because we're trying to break the combination of hardware and software. We're going for the Element X implementation, where you can use any hardware you like. That's also something where SolidFire's very supportive. Maybe we end up buying the SolidFire hardware anyway, but it's a nice option. You have no vendor-lock; you can purchase the software from SolidFire and use some appliance from other vendors.

I have been using it for about two years now. We launched our new product at the beginning of 2015 in Europe and deployed it in the US in the middle of 2015.

It's absolutely a consistently stable solution. We have, currently, up-times of 100% and no data loss at all, not even the slightest. That's one of the major points why we went for flash array storage and not local SSD storage, which is, of course, faster, when you look at the IOPS, but the redundancy is just missing. SolidFire was delivering not only stability, but also a lot of efficiency with the data storage.

Scalability is a very interesting point for us, especially with the new licensing model SolidFire now offers. We can just add new appliances without purchasing new software. That will be very relevant for us in the future, especially since we added new data centers all the time over the last year. We started with one data center in Europe, we added another one and another one, and now we're provisioning it in four data centers all around the globe.

Technical support is very good. We had some minor issues when we started the US data center, because we did not reach the performance level that we were promised and that we had in the European data centers. We figured out, it cannot be a hardware problem; it must be somewhere within our implementation. The SolidFire guys were very, very supportive and now, with over-provisioning, we reach levels that are far beyond the guaranteed levels.

The product we have been building was brand new, so we didn't have any legacy we had to deal with.

For us, it was very easy to do the initial setup because we built part of the building blocks just around the storage appliance. That made it very easy for us to grow with SolidFire in, basically, the storage.

We were really looking for the highest performance combined with very specific requirements regarding the platform. Of course, we looked at the NetApp portfolio, but they couldn't offer anything that matched our requirements in both ways. All of a sudden, our upper management came up with, "Look at these guys. they're doing great job.", and that's how we ended up with SolidFire.

Of course, we evaluated some other vendors, as well, but the package that SolidFire delivered was simply the best. It was not only the performance or price. In fact, the price is quite high compared to other vendors, but what we really loved about SolidFire was the agility of the team. If you deal with really large vendors, like EMC, NetApp, or HPE, you do not have much leverage when it comes to, “We want that, we need that and please change the product this way.”

SolidFire was very open, their support was great, and they fixed a lot of problems on our side with their solution.

When my company selects a vendor, the reputation is not a key factor for us. That's why we looked at SolidFire in the first place. For us, it was very interesting to work with a small provider. We always try to get some leverage there; that we can influence the development. That's why we focus, in the evaluation also, on small vendors. Of course, we looked at different providers, like Pure Storage, Nimble and so on, but in the end, SolidFire delivered the perfect package for us.

After NetApp acquired SolidFire, we were a little afraid that it wouldn't work out, because we all have seen acquisitions that went totally wrong. As soon as we got the word that they were acquired, we immediately started looking at other vendors. But, at the moment, we're still really happy with them and it seems that the combination really works out. What happens with NetApp is, now that we're looking at the rest of the NetApp portfolio, because the integration of SolidFire seems to work quite good, the other products get more interesting for us as well.

We previously had another storage vendor, and we would recompose desktops of 350 VDI desktops or virtual desktops, and it would take us 10 to 12 hours. We then implemented the SolidFire on that same subset of users, the 350 desktops, and we could do it in an hour and a half. It's almost a ten-times savings as far as time for recomposing in our environment or infrastructure.

• The simplicity of it
• Ease of use
• The flash array
• Performance
• Reporting

We are looking for, potentially, on the Active IQ reporting side, to do reporting based on the datastore. Right now, I can report on the whole SolidFire, or I can report on just a certain datastore or a volume. I'd like to take all of my VDI infrastructure, which as an example would be multiple datastores, which I would select, and then do reporting on that for dedup, compression, IOPS - all the different metrics that we currently measure in the SolidFire. It'd be nice to be able to selectively pick what you want to monitor, as far as reporting.

Very good. With the exception of a couple drives that reported bad, we've had zero issues from that thing in two and a half years.

Scalability's easy. In the automotive industry, we don't know how fast we're going to go and when. It's really unpredictable. So, the scalability was a big feature for us when we were looking for a new storage vendor. We've already added to our cluster two separate times by adding nodes. We've already done that process twice in two and a half years.

Hit and miss, to be honest. I've had some bad experiences, I've had some good experiences. All-in-all it's been good, above average, but I have had some unfortunate experiences.

On the negative side of it, I'm working on support, and I would get not enough detail or the support tech would say, "Check the manual." They'd send me the manual, and its a 680-page manual. We're all busy. I have a job too. I don't have time to read through 680 pages. Send me the three, four, five pages that I need that's effective to my problem.

And ultimately just follow-up in another situation where we're working through a case. They tell me I'm fine. Then, a month later, they tell me I've got a problem on my SolidFire array, and all of a sudden. That was not told to me for the past 30 days, and it kind of caught me off guard from a communication standpoint. To me, the customer, I felt it could have definitely been improved.

Number one was reliability. We had a competitor of SolidFire that was never up, we had multiple downed outages where our whole business was down, and we have 20 dealerships or rooftops. Being down is not acceptable. Obviously, reliability was a big thing, and then, obviously, the scale out and getting to a flash array for VDI was very important for us.

In terms of solving those challenges, it's simple, it's straightforward, it literally just runs itself, and the scalability. When we need more space or storage array, we can just add to our cluster, which is huge, because we can't predict growth in our industry for automotive.

Very straightforward, very easy. We put in a four-node cluster in under two hours, three hours. It was very simple.

We were down between SolidFire before it was acquired by NetApp, so this would be even pre-merger, and our other one was Pure Storage. We chose this solution because of the flexibility to scale out compared to the competitors, such as Pure; along with cost, at almost about a three-to-one cost difference.

Operational costs, flexibility. The more nodes you add the more cost it is, but it's definitely significantly cheaper compared to other competitors that are on the market.

We did not want to consider hybrid storage because we previously had hybrid storage, and we had problems with our VDI, our virtual infrastructure, to where we wanted to get flash array. All flash was a big deal for us to get to.

Primary use case purchase for us was VDI or virtual desktop infrastructure, with the intention of VDI and our whole assortment of load, for the server infrastructure.

Important criteria when selecting a vendor would be reputation, accountability. Support was big for us as well, knowing that support will be there, ten-year, long term. And just durability, and knowing it'll be there.

Regarding advice for a colleague researching this type of solution, do your research, obviously. Check it out, give SolidFire a fair chance if that means you're demoing, bring it on for a bake off, definitely do so. It's worth your time and effort to look into SolidFire and what it has to offer.

It comes down to reliability, and it just runs. It just literally runs itself, which is all I could ask for.

The solution is our upper-tier all-flash shared storage for our customers. We have shared virtual private cloud environments that we serve storage to. This solution is our high-tier flash storage offering.

The product is easy to manage and deploy. It's got full API functionality and the performance is pretty steady. 

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. 

We have had some issues with it scaling as high as the marketing says it can. We've got some very large clusters of up to over 20 nodes and when you get to that size your upgrades tend to take a long time or just waste. We tend to have issues beyond 20 plus nodes.

The upgrade process could be better. Lately, we've had lots of hardware having general issues with lots of failures. It seems like every month at least we're replacing an entire node, as opposed to just dry failures which you would normally expect, or small components. It seems like we have to replace an entire node pretty often. The hardware reliability isn't quite there.

I've used the solution since 2014. I've had it for the last seven years.

The product is pretty stable. As far as the software side of it, how it works, it's got the double helix protection. It's very redundant. However, due to hardware issues, we've had some performance problems as a node fails and it takes all those drives out of commission. That's partly an issue with capacity management, however, just as a result, we've had a plan for much lower usage. 

We need to have a much bigger buffer there to deal with node failures to ensure it doesn't impact performance. If you're running at 70% and you suddenly lose a node now you're hitting cluster full alarms and that can impact performance as well as the ability to continue creating volumes and things like that for customers. 

Other than that, it works as expected as far as maintaining redundancy. We've never had a problem with losing data or anything like that, even with those hard work failures.

Scalability may be a function of the distributed nature. When you do an upgrade on a 20 plus node cluster, it's going to go through and upgrade each node one at a time. As a result, for example, it can take sometimes upwards of 48 to 50 hours to complete as you're going through this one step at a time. It can be stretched out due to the fact that you can only do one node at a time and hold off during the day if needed. 

One thing that we run into during the upgrades is we have had cases where very large volumes become disconnected. Some of that might just be that we need to limit the size of the volumes that we support. However, for our customers, we have had issues with nodes rebooting and a volume might be disconnected from the ESXi for longer than the period that the ESXi can tolerate and then you get all paths down.

Right now, we have hundreds of end-users on this solution. We are a service provider and likely have thousands of users if you take into account our customer's user base.

We're not planning on expanding SolidFire. We're looking at different options just for our work for a private counter environment. We're going towards more of an HCI architecture. SolidFire may stick around as a dedicated platform or just an all-flash option, however, it's not going to be our primary shared storage.

I've never really dealt with technical support. There was another engineer that mostly dealt with them. The times that I dealt with support, they were pretty knowledgeable. That was definitely before NetApp purchased SolidFire. Their support was top-notch. Since then, if we can get past the first layer of support, it seems to be better than what I would expect, however, there have been issues with calling in and not getting the right support. It just takes time to get past the level that isn't as knowledgeable as the next level up.

I'm also familiar with Pure, NetApp, and VNX.

Pure's are more traditional to controller architecture as opposed to the distributed architecture of SolidFire. It's also all-flash, just like SolidFire. It's even simpler than SolidFire in terms of deployment and management. They've got an active controller configuration so that upgrades are essentially transparent as you upgrade a node or scale. It's just the way that the architecture's designed on the back end.

We have found the initial setup to be fairly easy. The implementation process is pretty smooth. It's self-explanatory.

We've got two people dedicated to the SolidFire array. We have several in our data centers and we have a whole support task force that deals with tickets. However, in general, there are two people that are the platform owners that ensure everything's up to date and any things are being resolved as needed.

While I don't know specifics about the licensing costs or procedures, my understanding it's comparable to other products. We did a comparison with Pure recently and the per-gigabyte charge was within a range of five to 10 cents difference.

We are currently a customer and an end-user.

I did not use the latest version of the solution. We were a couple of years behind. We were most recently at version 11. I've been out of the operations group now for the last, probably eight months or so, however, it's my understanding that they recently updated it, however, the last one I worked with was version 11.

I'd rate the solution at a solid eight out of ten simply due to the hardware issues which are pretty impactful lately and the issues with the upgrades that we've seen lately.

We are a distributor and this is one of the products that we resell. I work with the entire NetApp portfolio.

It is used by our clients as a block storage solution.

The most valuable feature is the QoS and its ease of use. The dashboard is such that you don't need to be a storage expert to administer it.

The replication works well.

They now have a 100GB network interface, which is nice because I was disappointed with the original iSCSI protocol. That was all that it supported and I found it to be a limitation.

For people using FC SAN, SolidFire is not an option because of the interface.

The inclusion of more protocols and interfaces would make it easier to integrate with other products.

Adding NFS or another file service would be a good feature, on top of the block storage. There are, however, already other solutions for this in the NetApp portfolio.

I began working with SolidFire two years ago.

I have a SolidFire grid set up and I find that it is a stable solution. I did have to replace a disk on one occasion, which is something that the technical support contacted me about. While I have not used SolidFire in production, I have not heard complaints about stability from any of our customers.

There are some rules that have an impact on scalability. If the existing nodes have a small capacity then a much bigger node cannot simply be added. The reason for this is that there needs to be sufficient capacity to provide redundancy in case one of the nodes is lost. This means that during the design of the system, there are a few things that have to be considered. If the rules are respected then scalability is not a problem.

Each time I have been in contact with technical support, it has been proactive. They always call me before I realize that there is a problem. They will call or send an email, at which point they will explain whether there are updates that you should consider installing.

We are connected to NetApp using Active IQ, and the support contacted me to say that there was a disk that was not behaving as expected, according to their metrics and analytics.  They sent me a new disk and we changed it, which was a very easy process. 

In a previous experience, I had a SolidFire platform in the lab, and I remember that we changed a motherboard on one of the nodes. It was not a problem and it was done without disruption. The data on the system was still available from the other nodes.

Overall, I have no complaints about the NetApp support around SolidFire.

I have experience with Pure Storage and NetApp is the better option. The software is similar and the Pure Storage has better performance but with NetApp, it is easier to scale up and scale-out.

Most of the time when we sell SolidFire, it is integrated with NetApp HCI. Together, they make up part of a whole package that includes servers, compute, storage, and network. SolidFire can be fun in standalone mode but most of the time, if we have a need for flash storage then we will use the EF-Series. We also have the AFF storage with ONTAP as an option.

My advice to anybody who is implementing this solution is to make sure that it is properly designed. There are always things that you need to be aware of when designing an efficient system.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

For us it's the horizontal scalability. We traditionally run our private clouds for our R&D engineering on AFF, which worked quite well. But we ran into IOP-driven scalability. So instead of adding more clusters and more HA pairs with all-flash disks in an AFF scenario, we were able to just scale with SolidFire. That is so much better because we can add a node, we add compute, we add storage, and we've had really good luck with that.

Our use case is all private cloud right now, running OpenStack. All internal, for our internal R&D and engineering.

For us, moving into a private cloud area was a big step for R&D. So while we are just in our infancy right now, it has made a big difference in storage efficiency. Traditional workloads that we ran on AFF, we saw better deduplication ratios, and efficiency ratios on SolidFire than AFF for our workloads. It's a very IOP-driven environment, very IOP intensive, and the SolidFire handles that quite well using the QoS for IOP.

We're really in our infancy right now for what we use it for. We haven't really gotten into a lot of the advanced features and functionality of SolidFire because we get so many things out of the OpenStack overlay. For now it's doing what we wanted it to do.

Anything we've had, were covered by Hotfix. We had some false positives, power supplies failing, and that's really been about it. We had a couple of glitches during some upgrade processes but nothing that was really concerning to us.

Everything has been resolved.

It happens with any product. It wasn't anything that stood out for us, to be a red light.

It's been really good. We've had no issues, we've had non-disruptive upgrades, non-disruptive hotfixes, which is really great for the customer - the R&D customer. They don't like any disruption. Disruption is money to them. So we have been really satisfied.

Great. For us, budget wise, just being able to say we know this workload is coming down the pipes for new design, a new ASIC chip, anything like that. We can predict what the cost is going to be versus having to buy disk at another solution. It's great for us.

Any small, minor issues that we've had have been resolved by support really quickly and support has been extremely good with SolidFire.

We had initially purchased AFF for this solution and, while it met our needs, we thought that SolidFire might be a better fit based on how we wanted to configure OpenStack and what our workload was; and again, for the scalability in terms of IOPs and how we have to grow that for AFF versus SolidFire.

Purely the scalability, being able to add a node, add compute, add storage, and being able to restrict IOPs for specific applications and workflows is a really a huge benefit for us.

I was involved. We did a proof of concept, set it all up and then we ended up adding on to that. We turned our PoC into production and then we added more nodes, and more nodes. We've gone from a five-node initial proof of concept to, now, a 15-node cluster.

The initial setup was easy. Very simple. We were up and running in less than an hour I think, which was really easy; after it was racked and stacked, etc. Very, very easy to get going.

I can't really speak about SolidFire's impact on operational cost compared to other storage platforms because all our other storage platforms are NetApp. The scalability for us, it is a cost-savings, so if we hit a certain number of IOPs within an AFF system we have to add another pair of controllers and we have to add more disk. There are also bottlenecks for AFF, for how many SSD shelves you can run for those specific clusters, whereas with the SolidFire side we are just able to add nodes on and get what we need. They're both great solutions that fit the use case a lot better.

I'm not sure it's uniquely valuable to an enterprise-type company like us but I think it's unique in how it operates. That whole "add a node, add compute, add storage" has been done before but I think they really do it right with their all-flash technologies. Some of the other vendors don't do it with all-flash and run into bottlenecks for IOP and the like. I think SolidFire has really done a great job with that. They have done a really good job with storage efficiencies versus a lot of other vendors. A lot of the other vendors are add-ons for things like deduplication or compression/compaction. So I think SolidFire has done a great job with that.

It's all been NetApp products. There's been AFF FAS and then we just thought we would look at SolidFire because we've had such great luck with AFF and FAS for many, many years. We've been a long standing NetApp customer and it just looked like a good solution for us to try, do the proof of concept, and it worked out well for us.

We did not consider hybrid storage for this specific use case, but we do have hybrid storage from that NetApp in other parts of our infrastructure. We are also adding some other tiers of storage into this cloud solution, potentially storage grid and potentially some other FAS-type thing for protocol-based access.

The most important criterion when selecting a vendor to work with, for me personally, is partnership. I think it's also important that the vendor has vision. I think it's important that they are willing to collaborate with customers and not just throw solutions at them. I think they should really want to understand your workflows, how they can benefit you and how they can make your life easier in terms of automation or efficiencies or performance. I want to find that they actually really care about what you are doing, as opposed to just throwing a solution out there.

Do your due diligence. Do proofs of concept. Make sure that you try to break it with what you are trying to do, and make sure you engage the vendor. Tell them exactly and share exactly what you trying to do and let them help you build the correct solution. Especially with NetApp, they have such a huge portfolio. You might be thinking traditionally you have experience in AFF or FAS but SolidFire might be a good fit, or E-Series might be a good fit, or cloud ONTAP might be a good fit. So it's important to engage the vendor and find out what the best solution is for your use case.

It is fast. By default, its APIs expose pretty much all of its configuration items. On the ONTAP systems, we use WFA to expose the APIs, where with SolidFire, everything is pretty much out-of-the-box, so the customers like it. The main uses are virtual machine environment. This is internal, on a private cloud. In India on most of their workstations are on virtual machines, and those all are hosted on SolidFire.

SolidFire is one of the products that does have great APIs right out-of-the-box. It works great. The tools and the other stuff seem to work a little better right out-of-the-box than the ONTAP stuff does, C-Mode.

It's doing SAN, so that would be the major difference. We use NFS file storage much more than we use block storage. SolidFire is our only block storage offering right now. Honestly, we're kind of phasing block storage out, but it's filling that gap for applications that claim they need block storage and can't use file-based. That's kind of its role.

It is just filling the gap of the block client, because maybe 10% of our clients have to use block storage and have a good technical reason. The other 90% we've gotten on a NAS.

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.

If it was the same price as C-Mode and did file-based storage, because this is what our company is heading towards.

It is pretty low-maintenance for upgrades and support issues. We haven't messed with it much. We have set it up, and we have the capacity so we haven't added a lot to it either. I have not had any issues with it.

Setting up new clusters is pretty straightforward. ONTAP is great, and it is really easy to use and setup.

It is very stable. I forget we have it sometimes, because once we have it configured, it just up and runs. Plug and play, the GUI works and the APIs, customers can use them. Everything is kind of there, therefore, it is very low-maintenance.

We have not scaled it a lot, because there are some niche environments running including the virtual workstations. So, I don't know how well it scales.

It is fine.

That is a problem we have. When we call tech support, we have to open a tunnel to the SolidFire device, then tech support can get in and look at it. The tunnel keeps closing on them. So we'll open the tunnel, 10 minutes later I'll get a phone call. "Hey, the tunnel closed. Can you open it?"

The only way to keep the tunnel, and I think it might be an issue with our proxy on our end, but something is closing the support tunnel. I don't know if it is a NetApp issue. We haven't been able to fix it on our end, so I don't know if they can give me any feedback on it, but it is a chronic issue. We have to babysit that tunnel, and I don't know why.

We would probably use SolidFire more, except we're getting more bang for our buck with our purchases of ONTAP right now, and the deal we made with NetApp, so it's more of just a cost decision. Because we're going NAS, it doesn't really fit the pattern of where we're going, because everything is being presented via NFS, so it's just block storage. That would be the reason the footprint is not growing.

However, as long as the price is right, it is a no-brainer on block.

If they are using block storage, then it is very user-friendly. It's easy to use out-of-the-box. I was not a storage admin when I came to this team. I was a server guy, so it was all new to me, and SolidFire was the easiest thing for me to pick up. We had old 7-Mode systems. We had C-Mode. We had Isilon systems on EMC, and SolidFire was in a day, you knew how to do everything. It is just a real easy setup.

We don't have a reason to not use solid states. I don't know why we'd use anything else at this point other than solid state.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

For a storage vendor, it is price and stability are probably the main thing. We like vendor support, but we have a huge internal IT shop with a lot of engineers, so we don't need that much support and hand-holding. It's really the following:

• Management
• A cost decision, who gives us the best deal.
• Stability.

If there's stability, and we haven't had stability issues with NetApp, they are a better deal than EMC, so that's why we've been using them. We were an EMC shop until three or four years ago.

The scalability and being able to implement it quickly.

Because we're a service provider, we have customers that need to grow and need their data increased quickly, so it helps us with that. We're also incorporating SolidFire into being our cloud-providing mechanism, so it allows customers to get in and out of our cloud, as well as move into the main cloud.

Because of the scalability and being able to add and decrease quickly, it allows us to service our customers at a quick rate, versus how they normally would have done it.

I would like to see more of the fiber channel connect, legacy-type, Linux-type front-ends to it. That would really help in our environment.

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.

So far we haven't had any problems with it. I think it's a very good product so far.

NetApp overall has been very good at helping us incorporate things quickly. The SolidFire was a quick, scalable solution. You can add nodes as quick as you need them. 

Where we were before that was bringing in and setting up whole arrays and then trying to get the pieces we need. The scalability with that is a lot tougher because you're not scaling the nodes, you're scaling strictly storage, unless you bring in another whole set of clustered environment, which takes time. 

We actually had a partner come in and set it all up for us and get us started with it. We didn't have to do it ourselves.

It was quick. It's not very complex. It went in very quickly. Basically added it to the network and it was ready to go.

We've got quite a few different vendors on our floor today. Just about any vendor, you name them, is on our floor. For the applications, and what we were trying to move towards, the SolidFire seemed to fit every niche we were looking at, for the part we brought it in for. It was a very good product.

I don't think we looked at much in the hybrid. SolidFire met all the criteria of what we were looking for, for that part of our infrastructure. 

We purchased SolidFire, in some aspects, for customer facing application. We have started to bring SolidFire into our house to use for our own applications, versus just using it for our customers.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor to work with are, I would say, performance, ease of of using, how to incorporate it in to our datacenter. And that's one of the things with ONTAP - that it's able to be used on SolidFire -  we know ONTAP. It made it a lot easier than to have to bring in a different application, learn something new. So that also helped in our decision, it was the ease of bringing it in.

I didn't give it a 10 out of 10 because, like I said, the things that we need it for, that we're still missing - some of the Linux and the Unix-type connections - that would really help it. 

Given the ease, for the value of the product, it's a great thing to bring in and start going to the cloud with.

We have approximately 8,000 VMs that we had been running on our traditional storage system and it simply was not able to keep up with the workload, so we've migrated all that to the SolidFire product. Provisioning times have gone down and a lot of the random errors from different things that we've seen across time kind of all went away. It's made everything much more efficient. It has saved us time.

We do a lot of tear-downs and rebuilds in non-production environments, so those processes have been reduced to minutes. It's been tremendously beneficial for our development.

The most valuable features for us are their QoS, the scalability and the serviceability of the environment. Our ability to add nodes or take nodes out for service and the QoS policies we're able to wrap around volumes are all very helpful.

The upcoming release is supposed to have much richer VMware virtual volume (VVOL) support, which is something we're very interested in. For our particular environment, we also use the VMware Integrated OpenStack, and so our VVOL adoption is waiting on VMware because they have to update their VIO product, but that's definitely a direction we want to move.

It's been rock-solid. We have not had a single incident. We've not had any latency issues.

It is very easy to scale. We started with our non-production cluster. I think we started off with six nodes. It's now a 14-node cluster. That's a seamless process. It just worked. No down time, no service disruption, nothing.

I have dealt with technical support many times. They’ve been very good. What they tout is they only have level-three engineers; there aren’t the normal layers of trying to get to somebody who can actually answer your question, because the first engineer you get ahold of usually knows the answer. If they can't, they basically have direct access to the engineers and developers. It's amazing; it works very well.

We had some NetApp 8040s and 6220s, which we still use for certain workloads because the SolidFires only do block; they don't service our NFS workload. The NetApps we had were flash pools, basically spinning disks fronted by SSD. Even with that configuration, they weren't really able to keep up with our workloads, so we needed something that had a lot higher throughput, so we started looking at all-flash technologies.

At the time, we didn't feel the NetApp offering was as mature as it needed to be, though we didn't technically evaluate that. We looked at ExtremeIO, we looked at Kaminario and finally the SolidFires. The ExtremeIO was really expensive. The Kaminario seemed slightly better but we liked the scalability story around the SolidFires. We then talked to some other customers who had them and confirmed that they really did live up to what the marketing hype said, and that sold us. For our highly dynamic VM workload, it's what the platform was built for, and it was a really good fit for us.

The initial setup was very smooth and straightforward. Basically, you put an initial configuration on each of the nodes and then they form a cluster, and then as you add additional nodes, you make it a member of the cluster. Originally, we had done that using their GUI. The last couple of clusters I built, I used their APIs to do it; very quick and painless process.

Look at SolidFire. It sounds cliché but it's true. For us, it worked really well.