SolidFire Reviews

As a service provider, our role involves serving as consultants for our clients. We are responsible for managing and improving infrastructure services. This includes making recommendations for solutions, strategizing capacity additions, and overseeing the retention of various databases. It serves as our primary storage solution for third-tier storage, catering to both warm and cold data. Additionally, we leverage its features to enhance various aspects of our cloud environment.

The most significant benefit lies in its exceptional performance, driven by its Flash-based architecture. This enhances routing speed and, consequently, database performance. The provisioning process is efficient and doesn't demand higher latency, ensuring optimal data transfer performance which is particularly valuable for tasks like data mining, where quick results are essential.

There is room for improvement with a focus on creating a centralized storage system, functioning similar to AWS. This involves diverse storage tiers that can be designated for various customers.

I have been using it for more than ten years.

Stability has been consistently excellent, with no issues over the past years. It provides a high level of availability, reaching up to 99.99% I would rate it ten out of ten.

It provides impeccable scalability. I haven't come across another solution that can currently scale up to that level. I would rate it ten out of ten. Approximately ten thousand users utilize it on a daily basis.

I would rate its customer service and support nine out of ten.

Positive

We transitioned from VIOLIN storage to SolidFire primarily due to the need for IOPS optimization in our environment. Our customers had varied requirements, with some demanding higher IOPS and others not needing as much.

The initial setup was straightforward.

The deployment time varies according to complexity, such as ours, which involves numerous storage tiers annually. Since we're part of the project team, our team consists of only ten members. Maintenance is integrated into our monitoring tool. As a precautionary measure, we have service engineers from our vendor partner.

Currently, the return on investment is being recognized, whereas initially, it wasn't apparent at that level due to the higher one-time cost. However, once the storage is introduced to the market and sold to customers, the sales uptake increases, leading to the realization of ROI typically within a timeframe ranging from three to five years.

It might be considered expensive, but when evaluating performance, it represents good value online because you pay for what you get.

We were evaluating it head-to-head with NetApp. At that time, it was not yet acquired by NetApp, and we already had NetApp storage in use.

Overall, I would rate it nine out of ten.

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.

Feature-wise, it is a good solution allowing users to monitor and simplify their networks. The solution also provides its users with flexibility by enabling them to utilize its extensions.

The security provided by the solution is one area that can be improved.

I have been using SolidFire for four to five years. Also, I am using the solution's licensed version.

Though it is a stable solution, its users may face some security issues at times. Since I am using the solution currently, I can say that there is no problem with its stability. However, there are tools that offer better stability than SolidFire. But, I will consider SolidFire to be good since our company's management has no problem with it.

It is a scalable solution. There are two or three people using the solution in my company. Also, I don't know if my company has plans to increase the usage of the solution.

I have previously contacted the technical support team of the solutions provider, and I had no issues with them as they provided good service.

The initial setup requires the involvement of at least one engineer or technical expert, which indicates that it falls somewhere between being straightforward and complex. One should follow the commands provided for the installation process. In that case, it is not a very hard process since the person doing the initial setup needs to be qualified enough to do it. In our company's deployment process, we utilized the demo servers within our network. In adherence to our policy management, we were also responsible for managing these demo servers.

The number of staff required for the deployment and maintenance of the solution depends on the network in which the solution is being used. So, one can have a person or two to manage the solution.

I would recommend the solution to those planning to use it. I rate the overall solution an eight out of ten.

SolidFire is used as a storage for our public cloud.

SolidFire integrates with a platform, OpenStack, that we use in our company.

The company providing the solution had faced some difficulties with their product line, which they must resolve. One of the challenges we faced while using SolidFire was that the product line that we were using in our company was discontinued.

I have been using SolidFire for four years. Also, I am using the solution's latest version. My organization is a solution provider of public cloud, and we are engaged in reselling as well.

Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten. So, we sell the product to our customers. The solution is suitable for medium to large-sized companies.

I do have experience with the solution's technical support. They try to provide resolutions to our issues. I rate the technical support a nine out of ten.

Positive

The solution's initial setup process was simple. SolidFire was deployed on the cloud. The customers of the solution can deploy it themselves.

On a scale where one is a high price and ten is a low price, I rate the solution between three and four. It is an expensive solution.

I can't compare the solution with any other product in the market since I haven't used any other tool.

Only because of the solution's pricing, I won't be able to give a ten out of ten. I rate the overall solution a nine out of ten.

In my previous company, we had SolidFire and HCI nodes. I was in the Element OS upgrade team, and we also used to look into normal break/fix. We mostly used SolidFire for cloud operations.

At the time I was using it, it was better than other products. It was fast and easy to understand. It didn't have complex connectivity. Connectivity was very easy. Even the management, in terms of how we access the device, was easier as compared to other devices. I have not done the configuration. It was something that their support used to do for us. They used to send an engineer. 

In our environment, we had both HCI and SolidFire. It worked well. It was a good device. All the operating systems in NetApp are customized units. It's very user-friendly and easy to understand. It was previously owned by a different company, which was acquired by NetApp in 2016.

It's a very compact device. For a medium-sized business, it's very helpful because the device is efficient and very fast. 

The scalability of HCI or SolidFire as such isn't a concern, but when you compare it to PowerMax or NetApp AFF series devices, scalability is a concern because it's only the drives that are connected to the nodes. We don't have any shelf connectivity. I don't know if they have updated it recently because, for the past year, I've been working on other products.

I'd rate it a nine out of ten in terms of stability and performance.

For a medium-sized business, it's very good because the performance is good. For a large enterprise, I'm not sure. I have no idea about connecting it with others. SolidFire single devices are meant for medium businesses. They have thought it through and made SolidFire single nodes for medium businesses. If someone wants to migrate to the cloud, they can use HCI which gives hybrid storage. It will also give better performance. I'd rate it a seven out of ten in terms of scalability.

We contacted them. They were responsive, and they were able to resolve our issues.

In storage, we have the concept of RAID, but SolidFire doesn't have that. The technology used in SolidFire is Double Helix, which is entirely a different concept. If someone wants to implement it in their environment, they should study the basics of it. They should know its architecture because the block-level concept that is there in other NetApp solutions isn't applicable to SolidFire. RAID, which is the main component for storage, is not there. They should learn about Double Helix and how it works. Once you do that, it's easy.

We had the on-prem as well as cloud deployment.

In India, we didn't use it much. It was being used for our sites in the US for banking operations, etc. Based on what I heard from other people, its price was on the higher side.

I'd advise learning about the device before implementing it. Take some time and get an idea of how it works. It's a very interesting new technology. It's a good concept.

Overall, it was a good experience working with this solution. I'd rate it an eight out of ten.

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.

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.

The solution is primarily for a hyper-converged solution, and the hyper-converged solution with NetApp HCI is to address the most common workloads, generic workloads, also workloads around VDI. It's primarily for everything around performance, around software like the CAD suite, and around scientific completion.

The performance with the QoS is its most valuable aspect.

The integration with VMware is excellent. There are different plugins to manage the SolidFire storage from the vCenter level. That I really appreciate. 

SolidFire even as a standalone storage platform is excellent. 

I would say in terms of architecture and in terms of functionality, the product is quite good. 

It's block access storage, however, for block access storage we have the guarantee of performance. 

We have the duplication and we have the encryption with this solution. We have almost all the standards needed for storage with SolidFire. In terms of protection, with the level of protection we can set between the SolidFire nodes, it's very good.

The only thing I would see as a drawback of SolidFire, is that it's a storage that we can address only with the iSCSI protocol and no other protocol such as FC, or things like that, unfortunately. It's probably the only point that I can see that is not positive compared to other storage solutions. 

It would be ideal if the solution could be more open with access protocols. 

Sometimes we have to be careful when we need to add some storage. I'd say some tips and some best practices with respect to that would help. 

You don't have business continuity with SolidFire. I think it could be a nice feature to have in the future.

I've been working with this solution at my current company for one year, however, in my previous position I worked with SolidFire solution for two years. I'd say I have around three years of experience with the product.

I've never had any issues with SolidFire's stability, except once. We had a problem with a node, a problem with a motherboard. In fact, with the protection level, we changed the motherboard without any disruption in production and in storage services. If we can change like that from one motherboard of another, and change an entire SolidFire node without disruption, it's okay and I'd consider that quite a stable product. It was even done without performance issues as I recall. From this point of view, it's really a really nice, reliable solution.

The scalability is quite good. I don't have a number in mind, however, I know that when SolidFire is part of the HCI product from NetApp, we can scale up to at least 40 SolidFire nodes. That is quite good for a full SSD solution. On that side, it's really enough to address the most common storage needs.

The only time I had an issue was with a motherboard. In fact, with the SolidFire technology, NetApp was able to acquire Active IQ. Active IQ is the software layer that is pushing all information on the health of the SolidFire platform. 

Therefore, the support is really quite proactive, in fact. Each time there was something to do, a component to change, or an upgrade to do on the platform, it was followed by emails from the NetApp support, who would remind me of necessary changes. Even with Active IQ, we've had advice on what we could do on the system to get better performance or better organization about the data that resides on the SolidFire platform. 

It's got really great proactive support, and we're quite satisfied with them.

The initial setup is not complex. It's pretty straightforward. There was some information we needed to get before installation, such as IP addresses, due to the fact that we were with an iSCSI storage and we needed some IP addresses for each node that composing the SolidFire storage solution. That said, when we have all that in an array, when we have all the information ready to go, the installation process is really easy, quite fast, and well-integrated when we want to provide this kind of storage to VMware.

Within HCI, the whole solution is considered to be quite extensive. As just a storage solution, however, SolidFire is at the same level of pricing as a full SSD solution like ASF. It really depends on what the customer's needs are. That said, it's quite well positioned in terms of price.

We're a distributor.

SolidFire is on its own standard storage platform, and, as it's embedded with HCI from NetApp, adds to the storage for the hyper-converged solution.

There are a lot of use cases for SolidFire within HCI. It can address most of the workloads we have on the customer side. It's really something. We can build solutions that really fit the customer and we can size the compute as needed. 

For the VMware server, we use ESX, and we can also add into the compute nodes some CPU cards for all that is graphic or scientific calculations. On the storage side, we can build the storage we need with the SolidFire nodes. We can really address on one side, the computer needs, and on the other side, the storage needs. In fact, that's the value of HCI by NetApp. What is nice with SolidFire is that the QoS is embedded, and for each volume you create, you put the QoS on it. And you're sure to grantee the service level agreement for the customer, depending on the workloads he needs.

Overall, I would rate the solution at an eight out of ten. It doesn't quite have the same amount of options and features as Pure Storage. Yet, it's pretty impressive.

The only recommendation I have to others is on the network side. You need to really get all the information required before you try to deploy this solution. That's all. It's a little work to do beforehand, however, it's really important to address everything before implementing SolidFire.

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.

The solution is primarily used as an on-premises VMWare based application provisioning platform.

One of the most valuable thing aspect of the solution is the fact that it's all in one and all in a very small physical footprint. It has all of your major components, including your storage area network, servers, and networking footprint.

The delivery of the product is very fast and the solution itself deploys quickly, it is up and running within hours.

The product is competitively priced and technical support is good.

You can easily and effectively scale this solution. It's one of the main selling points and one of the features that makes it far superior to competitors.

We've been dealing with the solution for about three years now.

The stability of the solution is amazing. There aren't bugs or glitches. There isn't freezing or crashing. I find the solution reliable.

The solution is unbelievably scalable. It's one of the solution's main characteristics that differentiate it from other similar products. If a company is looking for something that can scale easily, this is that solution.

The technical support of the solution is quite good. They are responsive and knowledgeable.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward, deployment is lightning fast and very easy.

In House

The pricing of the solution is fair and definitely competes in the marketplace. We have no monthly cost. We bought the product outright with all licensing included and have support with them for three years.