SolidFire Reviews

Just moving away from traditional spinning disc to solid state storage is a step forward, and user applications obviously are performing much faster. We have a much smaller footprint within our datacenter, so we've able to reduce overall operating expenses within our datacenter; shrinking costs for our business. It's been a fantastic improvement all round.

• The resiliency of the platform
• No down-time with the product itself
• Overall performance of the solution
• The dedupe

All of the feature set has been fantastic.

Really, everything our business needs, the solution currently has. Some of the other things that we are really looking forward to are some of the CloudConnect abilities. 

We only have one array today, so we want to add an additional arrays in a different datacenter so then we can actually do some of the Snapshot mirroring. That capability is already there, we just don't have an additional solution for it. Right now, for us, there is not much else that we really need. 

I do like their automation, some of the things that they've actually built in with their PowerShell. A lot of that stuff will help us automate our day to day operations. They've been on track with everything that we're looking for and it's just a great solution.

We've run it for a year and a half, we've done multiple code upgrades, there's been zero impact to the business when we do a code upgrade. During our testing we actually demoed unplugging an entire node from the solution just to see if there was any impact to the business, there was none. In a year and a half there has been zero down-time and it's been really a solid product.

Scaleout, the ability to just add additional nodes without needing storage vMotion, moving anything on the virtual side around, has been really great to see. We actually just recently went through and added an additional node, we did that seamlessly; no impact to the business, no impact to our users. Our application set just continued to run. All of the LUNS just expand once the new node is added, you really can't ask for anything better.

Honestly they have probably one of the best technical support staff we've worked with. One of the things that we did do during our PoC, is we actually made support calls at two in the afternoon, asked specific questions. We actually opened up support calls at 2am, just to see if we would actually get the same response which is exactly what we saw. It was good to see.

Simple, easy, adding an additional node is easy, just a couple of cables, there's no complexity at all with the solution.

We looked at Texas Memory, we looked at Violin Memory, we looked at XtremIO. All those solutions just didn't compare with what we could do with SolidFire in terms of performance, support, product stability. SolidFire definitely just blew the competition away.

I would definitely say have a look at SolidFire, just because of the scalability, the ability to add additional nodes, the resiliency of the product. There are definitely other solutions that may come in and say they can do everything that SolidFire does, but in our testing we were unable to find a solution that mirrored what SolidFire could do. I think it just makes a lot of sense to just continue down that path with Solid Fire.

I like SolidFire's technology and the way that it is implemented, from a node perspective instead of having a controller shelf architecture. One node can control everything, but if the node goes down, obviously the other nodes can bring everything back up. Going into the next generation data center, that's very compelling, as well as being able to use QoS settings and maintain a standard of performance for the VMs and things that are underlying it.

The SolidFire's technology and architecture allow for a more fluid and dynamic data center. It moves away from the controller and shelf design philosophy to a node design. This means that each node has the ability to control the entire cluster. In essence, you have the same number of controllers as the shelves.

If a node goes down, the other nodes easily take the load. This is accomplished both by the node technology as well as the Double Helix technology. If needed, you can easily remove one node and ship it to another location or attach it to a different cluster, with very little effort. The implementation of the structure is fairly easy, as well. Our first 5-node cluster from the box to serving data (for testing), took about five hours.

The biggest advantage is going to be the QoS settings, being able to maintain a level performance for our customers on whatever application that they're running at that particular time. For us, a business advantage is implementation time; our first cluster, four hours from un-boxing, racked, stacked and having it up and running.

We've had issues with the stability of our platform. We're a hosting provider and we've pushed it to its limits. We've found some of the bugs. The nice thing is that SolidFire has worked with us to correct those issues, bring new OS versions online to help correct whatever problems we've run into.

Scalability is excellent; it scales very easily. I can scale from a sizing perspective as well as an IOP perspective very easily. I can add a new node to the cluster. Within about an hour or an hour and a half, it's up and running. I have more space right then and there. Power and cooling is minimal as well.

The technical support is great. I've never had an issue with the technical support. When we open up a ticket – whether it's email, phone, whatever it happens to be – we usually get something back fairly quickly; they'll jump on the problem. We can give them access to the arrays or the clusters fairly easily so that they can figure out what the issues are. Getting new nodes or hard drives or whatever, in-house, usually happens fairly quickly. I have had a couple of issues with that in the past. Nothing major, but that's probably where they lost some of their points.

I was responsible for the initial setup in our Chicago data center; it was extremely easy. We had one of the SolidFire NetApp engineers with us when we did it and, as I’ve mentioned, it was four hours from opening the boxes to having it up and running.

We've evaluated three or four different all-flash type solutions. We actually went with one of the other solutions first. We ran into a very large bug about a year or year and a half ago, with an all-flash solution, and that particular provider was having issues correcting it. They still really haven't corrected it, so we can't push it as hard as we want to. When we were starting to look at a different solution, SolidFire came back with a good pricing model for us, as well as being able to meet the demands of what we're trying to deal with, and provide a rip and replace solution on our storage area that worked awhile back.

Evaluate everything. But if you're looking for an easy-to-implement solution from an all-flash perspective, really take a look at SolidFire. Try to get a PoC in house and run from a proof-of-concept perspective. The API's implementation is all very easy. You can look at it from your power and cooling aspects as well. That's the advice I have: Do a good proof of concept on the flash storage.

I work as a technical consultant and our company are resellers. We sell hyper-converged solutions to our customers. We use mainly NetApp HCI and SolidFire. We use a variety of versions depending on the customer's requirements. Our main use of the product is for ESX environments and Hyper-V environments. 

The most valuable feature of the product is its resiliency. 

The product does what it's meant to do and I don't think there's any need for improvement at the moment. The same applies to additional features, which would make the product quite expensive and I don't think it requires that. If you add features, you might lose the things that the product is best at. It makes the most sense to let it be what it is. If you buy the solution for its specific purpose it will work well. Once you add additional features like Essex, you diminish the system and that would be a shame. 

They could make the mNode more user-friendly. Now you need to configure and add nodes by CLI and it’s not really easy to manage. If they created a web interface to do the management of the mNode, that would be great!.

The product is stable and performs very well without any bugs. 

I believe the scalability of the product is very good. 

I've had a very good experience with technical support. 

The initial setup is very simple, anyone can do it. 

I can't comment on the price of the product because I only deal with it on a technical level. 

I would rate it a nine out of ten.

• Ease of use
• Performance guarantees that you can set
• Individual settings you can put on each individual volume, if you want to do that
• Ability to scale up, scale down whenever you want
• Scale-out ability, and the ease of adding a cluster - When you get a new node, if you farm out the datacenter tasks like we do, there is no technical ability required for them to plug it in and connect it and we can just add it.
• Open RESTful APIs are great

It's provided us the ability to not be concerned with setting SLOs for whatever application we're using. Everything is pretty much tier-one.

Our primary use case is virtualization, right now. We initially purchased it to be incorporated into our own internal cloud, OpenStack-based, KVM-based, so we use it for that. And, we've also branched into standard VMware as well. So we have both.

Based on those use cases we get really good efficiencies. We do a lot of encryption. We initially didn't have any because we were using it for anything, any LUNS, Oracle, whatever, and we didn't get the efficiency. So we positioned the use case over to virtualization and we're getting good efficiencies that way; to make it more cost effective. That's one of disadvantages, the actual cost. We haven't gotten there yet, but...

A little better segregation of the multi-tenancy. Right now, it's just VLAN-specific, that's all you can do. There's no authentication domain separations, things like that. For example, the NetApp product has storage virtual machines, which has a lot better segregation, and a lot better multi-tenancy, a lot better role-based access. That's probably the biggest thing that I would say, so we could actually use it for different tenants.

We've had some issues with hardware failures, and for them to resolve that it's actually meant replacing nodes. Otherwise, the stability is pretty good, all we've had is hardware failures. And they're built for a smaller scale, so before they were purchased by NetApp it was just, "replace the node, it's easier to replace." Any other field-replaceable unit, anything that breaks is, "replace the node," except the power supply or the disk.

We're impressed with its scalability.

For the most part, it's been pretty good. We've had to use it a lot for what I explained earlier, the hardware failures. This was mostly before it was integrated into NetApp support. We haven't really used them recently, so I don't know how the assimilation into NetApp support has taken effect.

We purchased SolidFire for customer facing applications, they're all internal, house-developed applications that we sell to customers, to financial services.

When selecting a vendor to work with what's important to me are

• support
• viability - are they going to be around?

Support is the big one. Is it just reactionary support, or proactive support? You need both of those.

I gave it a seven out of 10 based on what I've already explained. In the past, they seemed like more like a small company - and they were. But what I explained before, the hardware replacement, just replace a node. That's a small company.

Make sure that you have the performance requirement for it, because its price per gigabyte is a lot more than other solutions out there, if you don't need the performance requirements. You can get by on all-flash unless you have the need to guarantee performance on specific volumes.

The quality of service features are valuable. They are able to allocate a certain number of IOPS in your throughput to your LUNs. That's something that's a little bit more difficult using traditional methods.

VDI is a perfect use case. If you have ones that need more performance than others, it's easier to allocate it on a prolonged basis for a VDI environment for your specific virtual desktop users.

Right now, we're still in the testing phase but I think it definitely helps in the sense where, with traditional SAN architectures, you have to architect what kind of disk you need and how many of those disks you need in your storage pool and things like that. With the SolidFire, it's really just a number and it’s really just a matter of typing in that number for that certain LUN or whatever it is that you want to allocate for your users.

I now know their best practices associated with allocating IOPS to your LUNs. I wish that was more apparent to me when actually configuring the system. That's really the only feedback so far.

Also, in a competitor's solution, they have this ability to tell you what platform you should buy next to expand your environment based on your current needs and your predicted needs for the future. It tells you what models to buy. Maybe SolidFire could do the same thing.

It's stable. We haven't had any stability issues at all. It works really well.

We have not had any scalability issues at all. I think it scales out really well. We've tested it with cloning multiple VMs at the same time. The numbers it generates are pretty impressive.

I did have an issue where, when I was deleting stuff, it did not detect that I had deleted something. I just reached out to the SE and he gave me the script to unmap the blocks that I had originally used. That was the only time I had an issue. They were great, excellent, and responsive.

Management of traditional SANs was becoming cumbersome. We wanted to look for a more efficient solution. That's why we started looking at SolidFire.

Initial setup was very straightforward, easy. I've used all the hyper-conversion platforms before and I think we got it up and running within an hour or so. It was very simple.

We also looked at hyper-converged infrastructure competitors.

We actually have both in our environment. We're really assessing both at the same time and trying to see which might be better for certain use cases. One is more storage focused and the other one's computing and storage. There's that problem, too, where you just want to compute. Expanding on storage is more difficult with the hyper-converged stuff but with SolidFire, you can just expand on the storage without worrying about compute.

Start small, then expand. That's what I would do.

I think the solution was very simple and easy to set up, which I really appreciated.

To give it a higher rating, I'll have to thoroughly test it and have a better understanding of the whole architecture and the solution and also the capabilities I’ve mentioned.

When I look for a vendor such as NetApp, some of the important criteria are the market space, their customer support, and how responsive they are from the account manager to the SEs, not just tech support but also the other guys involved in the organization, too.

• Being able to provide multi-tenant applications
• Being able to provide quality of service as promised
• Being able to accommodate extreme needs, like burst IOPS
• Finally, being able to solve the "noisy neighbor" problem

We were able to migrate some applications from spinning media to SolidFire, and we were having "noisy neighbor" problems before.

I would like to see integration with the cloud, number one. Being able to spin SolidFire in the cloud. The hybrid cloud vision means that you should be able to run your application anywhere, on-prem or off-prem, so any product should meet that.

It's quite stable. We had some issues. Luckily, we had a "phone home" thing. But it's pretty stable. I think it was a disk failure early on, and it was catching the disk failure a little late. But then they had this upgrade and they fixed it. It was a one-time thing.

The product is horizontally scalable, which is very good, which is what you need these days.

They're very knowledgeable. They provided us good documentation.

Our biggest challenge was QoS - not getting guaranteed IOPS at the volume level.

It was straightforward, because we were given a VM, and that was doing the installation, so it was straightforward.

Our use case is to provide quality of service and guaranteed IOPS.

Replication is okay, meaning they do two copies, they are routing two copies. We're not going more than that, because of the cost. I'm satisfied.

The first and foremost criteria when selecting a vendor is that the vendor should have a unique niche. Number two, they should know what they're doing, meaning technical support. Whether it comes to technical support or e-sales. If they're not able to answer my questions on time, then it's a problem. The third is being able to integrate with my existing environment.

To a colleague researching a similar solution, I would say look for a stable company and look for a company that has good backing. Look for a good price versus performance ratio.

We are a solution provider and SolidFire is one of the products that we implement for our customers. It is used for virtualization.

The most valuable feature is the performance, as well as how you manage performance on the system.

The technical support is really bad and has to be improved.

We have been working with SolidFire since it was acquired by NetApp in 2016.

In terms of stability, I have not had any issues.

Scalability has not been a problem.

The technical support from NetApp is really bad.

We deal with and promote similar solutions from NetApp and Kaminario.

The initial setup is straightforward and quick.

Rating this solution is difficult because I would rate SolidFire very high and NetApp very low.

I have no trouble with features but we need the proper support. Whether I would recommend this solution depends on the requirements, although without knowing more, I would recommend something else.

Overall, I would rate this solution a five out of ten.