SolidFire Reviews

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.

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.

• 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.

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.

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.

Simplicity is definitely up there. It's not my number one. Number one is scalability. Simple to scale, scale up, scale down. When you look at something like a VMAX, there's a ton of pre-planning that has to happen to buy them. And then, if you didn't plan well, you're going to have a messed up implementation. With the SolidFires, I don't have to think about those things. We can just buy them, scale them as we need on demand, and we don't have to spend so many front end cycles on designing the architecture.

Also, green initiatives. Power, cooling, datacenter footprint. Ultimately, it's about cost, on that front. I think we can tie that one to some capex and opex. The front-end, I was just really talking about soft savings. We have a large company. We have an aging workforce and we can't just keep acquiring highly skilled employees as people retire.

It's the overall simplicity of the platform in that you can learn to operate one of these in half a day. You can stand them up in half a day. Whatever you need to purchase, it has a simple bill of materials. It's great.

Also, agility, absolutely. It takes a typical IT company months, and especially large companies like ours, months and months and months, to acquire gear. We spend a long time to plan, design, and then eventually get our quotes, review these bills of materials, make sure we get everything that we need correct, and it's just a complicated process. It takes time.

When you set up the nodes, we have to serial into each one of these nodes to configure the IP ranges. It's still very easy, but it's time consuming. If I have a 40-node cluster, it just irritates me. I really wish that they would use IPv6 Autoconfiguration to discover the other nodes and let me just do it by configuring one node.

I don't have a good answer. When we try to make these changes from VMAX, SolidFire, people say, "Well what's the risk-reward?" The risk is you either stay on a legacy architecture that's not going to be growing or developing. Like our VMAXs. Or you make a change. You go with the future. Go with something that you know is going to continue to develop and evolve. I think that's the key.

I do wish we could get a little more scalability on it. I feel confident we could scale one to the size of a fully blown out VMAX. But it'd be great if I could scale out to the size of two or three blown out VMAXs, like we would have in our enterprise datacenters.

I called technical support once, early on. So I don't know how that's changed with NetApp acquisition.

We're replacing VMAX. All-purpose, general compute, block storage for the enterprise.

The biggest challenge is for block storage. What we're talking about here is, really, support. They're spinning magnetic drive disks. Sometimes we deal with some performance issues and if we didn't do a lot - if we did not have all the right information to get requirements from our customers so that we can architect the appropriate size solution - then it'd blow up on our face.

With a SolidFire I think that problem goes away. I just ask, "How much capacity do you need?" And I'm good.

Cake. Easy. Too easy.

We expect that it'll take some time but we expect that it would reduce our operational cost, absolutely.

EMC.

We considered hybrid storage but they were eliminated because they're a legacy architecture, for most of them; with bolt-ons. And the other ones were dual control or architectures; we are not about scale up anymore. We want scale out.

When it comes to selecting a vendor, first, we don't deal with small vendors typically. We don't generally want to buy something that's VC-backed. We probably would not have considered SolidFire pre NetApp acquisition. But after it was acquired by NetApp, then we said, "Okay look, this company's not going go away overnight." So that's one criterion, that's a big one.

And the second is, am I going to get a commitment in the level of support that I get. When I buy this, are we going to be working together like we're partners, that we're in the same boat together?

We're an enterprise level company and I think SolidFire is uniquely valuable to a company our size. Because the price to get in there, that initial footprint, it's somewhat high. I think for the small business, I think Pure is killing it over there. I talked to them, I think Pure has got a great product, an all-flash product. But its dual controller and they're not going to play in a space where we're going to have hundreds and hundreds of connected hosts, and I need all those front-end ports. It's just not going to work. That's why, while Pure was interesting, they washed out for us pretty early. They would work great, I think, for our small robos, our small sites.

If a colleague at another company was researching a similar product I'd say make sure whatever you're looking at, you're not buying a legacy architecture with bolt-on flash drive. That's what we're trying to get away from, the pitfalls, because they're always tied to poor architecture decisions; things like cache-slot ratios to disk. We end up seeing that they have other problems. We definitely look at something that's designed ground up with flash in mind. And secondly, a company that's definitely going to be around.

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.

We went from huge NetApp arrays to essentially a half a rack with the same amount of space that was required as far as data drives. With the footprint being smaller, and performance being way up, we're able to increase IOPS, which will give us better capability to actually mimic the production network on a government network.

• Power
• HVAC
• Density of drives

The square footage for doing development is at a premium when dealing with government networks. To be able to put a lot of IOPS in a lot of high-speed performing drives in a very small location which requires very little HVAC with very little power, it is very valuable to us.

With our Solidfire, we're going to be doing things like DevOps for ease of use. We're going to be able to expand in a condensed environment with a lot of IOPS to create a very small footprint on an all-flash array using a web interface, which makes it easier for some of the lower technicians to use it.

I'm seeing what I want to see. They're expanding and doubling the I/O per every 2U on their new 19210, or something like that. I'm looking forward to getting in there and testing it out as well. I'm really liking the performance of the network.

However, it would be good to provide administrative access at the root level to be able to do things with the system, if need be.

It seems pretty stable. At the beginning, they bring their engineer out. They actually set it up for you. That was a really good thing.

However, when we wanted to change how we want to do it and basically start it over, do some hands on training with some of the architects who would be working on it, one of the issues was there wasn't an admin password at the BIOS level to restart it over. We actually had to contact NetApp to come back out, or we had to contact them and get a one-time password. This was painful.

This thing uses a model like Lego blocks to be able to not only mix and match different models, but to be able to expand or scale out based on what the demand is currently. It gives me the opportunity to go from two to three nodes up to as many nodes as I need without having to put out an upfront cost that's way high. Especially when you're talking about development networks, this gives me the opportunity to provide the customer with a solution upfront which is high-performing. Then as the years go by, I can scale it out way further, especially if demand increases.

Tech support was fine. The fact that I had to contact tech support just to get administrative at the BIOS level was kind of painful. But other than that, yeah, lovely.

Density is the key here. Getting high-performance drives in a small package was what we were looking for. We still continue using NetApp, just a newer system, and when we want old flash arrays.

Definitely give it an opportunity; put in on a network, then put the different loads on the system and show how they do QoS across those loads to make sure you've got the guaranteed bandwidth.

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.

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.