SolidFire Reviews

Because I'm also a PC guy for my company and in Pakistan there is not a third-person specific guy for a client or specific job, we are also doing the very tough job as the IT specialists. So I have to look after the solution, the technical stuff, and also the deployment. I am personally working in all three departments. I have to, because it's my job as the head of IT in my company. We are a resellers, so we are actually giving solutions to our customers. Regarding SolidFire, it's a very good storage solution when you are looking for a software defined data center.

SolidFire provides seamless performance across your storage system when you need to scale up. Other solutions(software defined data center) do not provide that much of scalability.

If customer doesn't want to learn a lot of software stuff and only wants to learn one piece of software, and does not want to learn the storage system; that's where SolidFire comes in, because its software defined and it is really good for software defined data centers(SDC) and virtualization.

What I mean is, if a customer doesn't need a centralized storage system but does need a data center solution which is capable of being an agile software defined storage system, then they should choose SolidFire; but if they need a big centralized storage SAN, they shouldn't choose SolidFire.

For a customer who purchased SolidFire, they don't had reported any issue regarding it's performance or scalability.The end result is better productivity due to seamless performance of any application.

In terms of SolidFire's most valuable features, simplicity is the key component and key feature of SolidFire. It meant that the administrator or the user do not need to learn about storage RAID Groups or something like that, but they only need to provision the storage space that they need for the host. SolidFire's is being used in NetApp HCI(Hyper-converge Infrastructure)solutions that comes with a Deployment Engine to make the solution more simpler faster and easier to deploy.When you need a software defined storage system SolidFire's is really, really good.

When a customer need complete "Software defined Data-center Solution" with compute and storage; then NetApp HCI is far better choice than any other HCI Solutions.

SolidFire's really simple to deploy. you don't need to learn a lot. When you compare the NetApp storage system with SolidFire, both are very simple to deploy, but comparing to the other products from NetApp, SolidFire is even more simpler to deploy.

SolidFire should start from two nodes instead of the four nodes. That's the only thing. In a lot of solutions, we have to use four nodes, that's the better thing. But as a starting point, two is better. That's why their starting point is expensive. 

There is another thing - they should have a mixed/Hybrid disk option too; like other solutions have. If you get around the two things, then you can also compete with the cost. The others have mixed/Hybrid disk options. That's why they are cheaper.

Collectively; stability is good.

Scalability is really, really good with reference to other storage systems. Other software defined data centers do not have that much storage scalability. SolidFire is very scalable and that's really good.

The starting point of SolidFire is really a little bit on the expensive side, but from a scalability perspective, as a total cost of ownership, if you go for it then it's not so expensive.If you want a scalable solution, of course, the starting point will be expensive.

The product is really amazing, so I will not even think about the technical support because it's so easy to manage. There is no problem when you apply the solution according to the requirements and the documentation. You don't need support. In comparison other storage systems like Oracle, and others, have lots of problems and you need support. But with NetApp I only need the support to replace the component and that's easy to do. Also, the fault frequency of NetApp is really low compared to other storage systems.

I didn't experience any kind of problem which took a long time with NetApp support, but I did find a lot of problems which held me with support for other storage solutions like Oracle and EMC. This is very important because the backend engine is very strong. This is really a very smooth experience through the warranty period and of course after the warranty period. I got very good support from NetApp.

Initial setup is very simple as SolidFire build for SDC.

One thing I would advise people is regarding the price. This is a very important point here. When you go for being a gold partner, not as a customer, then you should get a better discount. And if you get a better discount from NetApp, then we can compete with any other solution. But here, it is really important to tell the customer what the total cost of ownership is, not just the starting point, because at the starting point, it's still a little bit expensive. But when you have a back-end gold partnership, then you can tell NetApp, "Okay, NetApp I am competing for the cheaper solution." Then you can get extra discounts to sell the product.

But then in parallel, you must inform the customer. If you want a Ferrari, you have to pay for that.You have to tell the customer, "Technically, it is very good." You have to convince your customer that if they want technical ability, agility, simplicity and real ease of management plus a lot of other things, then you have to pay for that. There's no free lunch at all. Somebody has to pay.

We are in a crisis situation for everyone, for customers, for partners, for principals, manufacturers. We need a specific solution to move on to the new normal. So from the available solutions, HCI (Hyper Converged Infrastructure) would be the future of IT. HCI is the future, it is easy faster to deploy collectively. You don't need to buy frequently - just buy once and scale out when you need more resources.

So, I think for the customers want their IT to have a continuous support and response for business needs, then they should choose HCI solutions.

I will advise to choose HCI from NetApp, others can choose HCI from other hardware manufacturers, but the future I believe is HCI.I believe and recommend that the best HCI is the NetApp HCI(The back-end Storage used for NetApp HCI is SolidFire)

The difference between SolidFire and other storage is that it is a stand alone storage. No one has that good storage software or that scalability and performance. On a scale of one to ten, I would rate SolidFire an eight.

The only thing is the initial cost because we have to convince the customer that he has to pay more. That's the only thing in this case. It's not an overall technical, scalability, or simplicity issue. Only the price factor brings it down to eight. Otherwise, if any NetApp partner is a gold partner and they get the good discount then I can easily give SolidFire a 10.

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.

The most valuable feature of this solution is its scalability. That is the biggest benefit of using this solution. 

The entry-level for this solution is so high that we had to use other solutions for some of our smaller office locations that are in different parts of the world. As a consequence, because we could not use it across our entire organization, we have changed to something else. I would like to see the entry-level changed so that you can do really small systems with SolidFire.

This solution would be improved if it were made to be more compatible with other products.

This is a stable solution.

Scalability is the biggest benefit of using this solution.

The technical support for this solution can be good and bad. If you have a really big issue then it's bad because it takes quite a long time for the issue to be solved.

There are different levels of service. You can have a technician who is able to do the troubleshooting and is allowed to set up the commands.

If you just have questions with no due date, or you just have to fix a small package, the support is good. You always get the answers you need. However, in critical situations, we have had problems. For example, in the last three years, we spend three or four hours on the phone with support where nobody could escalate our tickets. 

We have had to stop using this solution because the price was too high for global implementation. We are now using NetApp MetroCluster. We were happy with the functionality and switched only because of the price.

The initial setup of this solution is straightforward.

I would say that you can deploy this solution in an hour if you know how to do it.

The price of this solution is more expensive than others.

The suitability of this solution depends on the use case, so anybody who is researching this solution should take care to consider their use cases first.

I cannot think of any additional features this solution needs, but there is a long list of improvements.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

Getting predictability in our analytics for space trending, performance analytics. We use to correlate data with other tools that we have. If we get complaints about any kind of performance metric issues, whether it's storage related or something on the virtual side, we use it to pinpoint what the actual issue is. It has proved really useful for that.

Part of the reason we went this route was we did that storage design workshop with NetApp. So we went for QoS-driven design for our new array. It really helped us not only in delivering the service levels to our users, but also automating that. So it makes it a lot easier for provisioning. It also makes it a lot easier to guarantee performance for our end users.

Nothing I can think of that they don't know about right now. They're looking at making some of the custom widgets and reports a lot easier to deal with. They're heading down that direction already, so I don't think that's a big deal.

For example, the ease of use with the reporting. Right now it's not impossible, but you have to know Sequel. It's a little time consuming to get those customized reports in there.

About seven months now.

It's great. At first there's a little bit of a learning curve, but once we got past that everything is rock solid.

So far it's been great. We've have not had any issues. We've added some more data into it, it hasn't choked on it.

We've used them twice. They were great.

It was really easy. We had Professional Services delivery with it. We worked with the NetApp CI team to implement. That's about as straightforward as you can get.

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.

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.

• 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.

We use the tool as a storage system.

SolidFire has seamless performance for the nodes and extensions. I also like the tool’s scalability. The product’s performance does not get affected when we scale either up or down. This is not the case with other products.

The tool should improve its initial cost which is expensive compared to other products.

I have been working with the solution for ten years.

SolidFire is a high-performing stable solution.

The solution is flexible and scalable. You can add compute and storage nodes as needed.

The tool’s technical support is very good. We encounter very few issues with the tool. Therefore, the requirement for support is low compared to other products.

The solution is very easy to setup. You can deploy the solution within 30-40 minutes.

I would rate the tool an eight out of ten. You need to analyze your requirement before selecting the tool. SolidFire may not fit the requirements of every customer.