SolidFire Reviews

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.

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.