SolidFire Reviews

We use SolidFire for a number of iSCSI connections across different environments where we need an SSD disk with a Tier 0 type of allocation. Across our legacy setup and hardware refresh, we have a mix of SolidFire and VNX, but wherever we need good IOPS for a particular server, we allocate volumes from SolidFire.

In our environment, most of the volumes are configured on the Tier 0 level, which is an all-flash array. We have a cheat sheet for each person's IOPS configuration, and we configure the minimum and maximum logs manually. Sometimes, we face issues with IOPS even in SolidFire.

I can't really say that I've seen a lot of benefits since we installed SolidFire as our legacy backup storage. I haven't noticed any significant increases in productivity or functionality.

From my point of view, the best feature is the auto-support I've received over the last two years. The auto support is triggered automatically if there is any node issue, node failure, disk failure, or even a small glitch in the particular port. It directly creates a support case, and those people follow up with me. They ask for the logs and work on the issue. Support-wise, I feel SolidFire has very good support, and by using it, I feel very satisfied.

Another thing that makes me happy with SolidFire is its support. It makes me feel extremely satisfied.

SolidFire could improve in terms of hardware robustness. We often experience many hardware failures across the environment compared to EMC, with many discs and other known failures. In comparison, Fujitsu is the best, as we don't experience any hardware failures.

SolidFire would rank third in hardware robustness, with EMC coming in second. Overall, I feel that the hardware structure of SolidFire is more fragile than that of EMC.

I have been using SolidFire for three years now. Across our global environments, we are using a three-node setup. Initially, we used version 11.8.0.23, which was the latest version available at the time. However, we have since upgraded to version 11.8 Airpack, which is the current version we use.

Regarding the nodes, we have a mix of SF1920 and SF9605 models with 9TB and 19TB nodes. Unfortunately, due to the end of support from NetApp management, we can no longer procure node replacements for the 9TB nodes. Therefore, we only use the 9TB nodes as reserves whenever we have dismantled a SolidFire array. We are now only able to get 9TB nodes from the vendor.

I have seen some performance issues, but we weren't sure if the bottleneck was caused by SolidFire or something else, like backups of a particular application or the application condition itself.

However, even when we moved the volume from SolidFire to another system like VNXR or Unity, the performance issue wasn't completely resolved. I tried to increase the IOPS of that particular volume and used ActiveIQ to identify when the issue occurred. ActiveIQ is a helpful tool for analyzing and troubleshooting issues. However, I can't directly attribute the performance issue to SolidFire, which may have been caused by something else.

It is very easy to scale up SolidFire. If the cluster has six or seven nodes, you can easily add one more node if it exists. So, it's very easy to scale up to your environment.

The support team is very good.

Positive

I don't think they have any hidden costs. As far as I know, they are very transparent with their pricing.

I would rate the initial setup a ten out of ten. Compared to other solutions, SolidFire is very easy to implement, including node upgrades, and it's also easy to manage and administer. We perform various activities across the environment every six months or a year as part of release management, and SolidFire is very straightforward to work with. Even someone who is not well-versed in storage technology can easily manage it. Overall, I am very satisfied with the ease of implementation and administration.

The whole setup was done by a vendor. I managed everything and have done node upgrades and movements from one place to another through node replacements.

I advise that if the environment is confined, if there is a need for solid-state devices and flash devices, and if there is a need for better logs, then SolidFire is a good choice because it has good support and is easy to manage. The upgrades and data sync is easy to manage on the UI console. I would rate SolidFire a seven out of ten; it is a good choice but still has room for improvement.

If I go ahead and put it up with the OpenStack, the OpenStack stuff goes so smoothly with SolidFire, increasing the capabilities of the VMs to bring them up. I think it's just fantastic.

Also, the scalability, as well as the performance, and then the way it goes with the API part of it. That is the amazing part. The API, it's not that complicated. You can choose an item, you can go ahead with PowerShell, anything; it's not that complicated to go ahead. 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.

It will save a lot of implementation time, complexities; and then you don't have to go ahead with networking the OS separately. It's all one in the same place.

I think there are some reporting tools like Grafana.

Kubernetes is already there, and VMware is already sorted out. I just came out of that particular session right here at NetApp Insight 2017 and that was amazing.

So feature-wise, I would say more reporting tools that could be merged into it. I'm not sure if you've heard something called Data Protection Adviser, it's a reporting tool. The way you are monitoring your environment, I think it's important.

I don't see any disk failures or support cases being logged. I would say, to be precise on the percentage, it's 15% better than what other people provide.

Scalability, I've done a couple of times during the year and it's amazing. Petabytes, whatever you're bringing up, it's all good.

I haven't used it directly, but I know how many cases have been raised, and it's quite on the low side.

It was 85% straightforward. The other 15%, you need to understand certain aspects, you need to understand your environment. It's alright that you're bringing up NetApp, and then SolidFire, but then how exactly are you going to configure it in your setup? That's going to take a little bit of time. Otherwise, once it is there, it's all good.

I think one of the reasons we chose SolidFire is because it is definitely giving us good results on the costing part of it. It definitely has an impact on it. To be straightforward, it works for that.

There were a couple of them: Hitachi, EMC. But I'm pretty much into NetApp's side of it.

If you're bring up cloud in-house and you're still not aware of OpenStack Kubernetes, that's the way ahead. If you are putting up NetApp in the background, I think you're all sorted out. Your cloud is all prepared, so all done.

The way I see it, there's the scalability and the complexity part of it. And then errors are huge, and when I say huge I mean they are costly. So the way I compare it with other products, maybe the other vendors, the cost is a major factor.

And with that, there is complexity, work in silos, so right now it is coming to OpenStack and then beneath you have NetApp SolidFire, it's all simple. No more complexities.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Implementation, it should be quite simple to understand.
• It should be customizable; it should not be that the vendor is saying, "No, this is something that we are providing, it cannot be customized for your environment." That doesn't work for me. It should be as customizable as possible
• Costing of course
• The support that comes with that

We are an enterprise level company. SolidFire is definitely uniquely valuable to a company of our size, because the way the market is going ahead, on the cloud. Large companies have got their old stuff kept in old datacenters wherein you have huge, costly storage boxes of course, and you want to bring that up. So SolidFire is something that is giving you a migration platform. I mean, it's a steady platform for you, the way you prefer it.

I would say go ahead with this and then if they are good with the API part of it, configuration specifically with Python or OpenStack, just go for it.

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.

What I like about SolidFire is the ease of administration. It's a slight deviation from what we are used to before the ONTAP interface. SolidFire comes with its own interface and APIs, and that makes it much more intuitive and a little simpler to use when we're creating volumes, and managing it.

It's very automated. One of the presentations we saw this morning here at NetApp Insight explained that if a workload is more demanding, it accommodates increasing workload, without us, as admins, having to go in and do the manual administration. So it seems to be intuitive as to what's taking place within the system and the workloads.

Greater IOPS, speed, it's all-flash. So seeing that everything is going to all-flash, all SSDs, SolidFire fits right in there with the emerging trend in IT.

Less complaints from the database administrators as to why an application is so slow; we always get blamed, everything goes back onto storage. SolidFire takes that away from the equation. Now we have a fast system, so the admins have to go back and see where the bottleneck is.

I'd like to see a fiber channel being implemented in it. We have a large fiber channel infrastructure, and that's one area that we haven't seen implemented in SolidFire, its more iSCSI.

It's not a deal breaker, its just something that we would like to see. And I believe they mentioned it will be implemented soon, so we're just waiting for that part to be added into it.

We are still doing testing, but so far from what we've seen, it seems to be a very rock solid system. But like I said, we still doing testing as to how good and how fast it is.

We haven't done much scalability testing yet. We've only had it for a couple months, so we are still preparing our tests, a range of tests, to see how scalable and how suitable it is for our environment.

So far I like what I see. I like how it's able to self-heal for advanced workloads, the ease of management, and all SSD. It's a great trend we're heading towards.

I have not used technical support. We looked at the documentation. We had minimal input from our accountant team. We're a very experienced NetApp shop. So we more or less know how to manage storage systems. And again, SolidFire, it's very intuitive as to how you go about using it.

We had a large implementation of spinning disks, hard drives, and they would fail often. We went to all-flash for our ONTAP systems and SolidFire began all SSDs which ensured that we would have fewer broken disks. We'll have longer up-time, running.

I was involved in the hands-on setup of it. We racked it, we provisioned the IP addresses and we did the administration part of it.

It's a little bit different from the ONTAP systems. This is more of a Linux-type setup. But it was intuitive, it wasn't that difficult.

I cannot speak for the cost. The cost is actually on a higher level than I am at. I'm actually the administrator, so I look at what and how the product works. The cost is for my manager. He takes care of the costs.

We looked at EMC, we looked at Pure Storage, and we also looked at DDN. And for what we needed to do, none of those vendors fit the bIll. None of those had been there to give us what we needed.

We also considered hybrid storage. But SolidFire is a specialized product. For hybrid we can use a fast product line. But SolidFire, it's designed, as far as we see, for a specific use case and that's why we are targeting it for our workload.

For SolidFire, we're looking into better IOPS for database workloads and for other VM use cases. We purchased it for customer-facing applications, mostly for database administration-type work.

We are an enterprise level company, but we are federal. SolidFire is uniquely valuable for a company our size because our company scales, we're supporting thousands of users. And with SolidFire, we can handle the workload.

For us the most important criteria when selecting a vendor are reputation, reliability, support. All these things we have gotten from NetApp.

NetApp has been out for a long time, they know the storage business. And they've been very responsive to our needs when there are issues. Our contact team, they're right there to support us and make anything that we need right.

Look at the reputation of a company, the innovation, how they are able to support their customer needs. And seeing that many of the companies are doing pretty much the same thing, which one stands out in the reviews. That's very important.

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.