We performed a comparison between Dell PowerMax NVMe and SolidFire based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two All-Flash Storage solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."This solution has improved our organization in the way that we used to see latency but now with this solution we don't. It also has good performance. Latencies have come down for our performance in the SQL databases. We can put a lot more in a lot less in terms of space savings. We also save data center space have good deduplication."
"The console is simple to use. It has good performance. It is easy to install, understand, and manage, with a good ratio of deduplication and compression. It is doing its job."
"Performance, dedupe, and that it works well with database workloads are its most valuable features."
"Its array houses our entire production environment."
"The most valuable feature is its data reduction."
"The management features are well organized and they have a very good dashboard."
"The scalability options are very nice because you can scale it much better and faster. The scalability was there in the previous environment also, but this is far better than what we had before. It basically helps the user in case they are looking for more storage. We can scale it much faster."
"The most valuable feature is replication."
"We are most interested in cloud utilization."
"The smaller footprint of the device has been really nice. We have gone from eight bays to one bay. Having one floor tile in our data center has been pretty awesome. A lot less power and HVAC cooling is being consumed."
"The response time, compared to XtremIO, is far better."
"I have been highly satisfied with the resiliency and scalability of the solution."
"It is a scalable solution. Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"It allows us to protect our data using different data centers and replicate bi-directionally between our two main data centers."
"We are happy with the monitoring that Dell EMC is doing for us. They have helped us to identify many issues during the routine checks, issues which we were not aware of."
"The SRDF site-to-site replication for the volumes is the most important feature for us. That enables us to do site recovery and replication for our VMware infrastructure."
"It is very easy to scale up SolidFire."
"Overall performance of the solution."
"The system efficiency is excellent overall."
"We can add a node, we add compute, we add storage, and we've had really good luck with that."
"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."
"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."
"Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"If you buy the solution for its specific purpose it will work well."
"It is way in excess of what we need. If anything, we could see a bit more speed. I'm just comparing it with what some of my colleagues who are implementing their own systems do."
"A minor issue that comes to mind is that, every once in a while, a hard drive will go bad."
"The price of this solution could be improved."
"There are many features which need to be added, particularly on the replication side."
"I would love for them to have a hyper-converged solution."
"It would be nice to have a better view of the allocated capacity on their Platform as a Service solution because we have to do some manual calculations to understand how much we are going to pay every month to use the storage that is allocated."
"The number of Filesystems is limited, which it is not on the EMC VNX."
"In some cases, we get into very in-depth conversations around movement of specific data and, what's more, chunk sizes. The documentation lacked any description or information on that."
"I would like it to support NVMe over Fabrics, because that is the next item for consideration on the NVMe roadmap. PowerMax supports NVMe on the back-end, but when it starts supporting NVMe over Fibre Channel, suddenly various hosts can directly communicate with PowerMax, and with NVMe-oF, as well. Suddenly, Gen 6 and Gen 7 switchers will be able to help facilitate that particular communication channel."
"There are definitely some improvements that can be made to the CloudIQ."
"The initial setup process is difficult."
"There are some stability issues that we just recently experienced. We hope the next release will solve these problems."
"I would like them to continue improving the management tools and continue moving towards a RESTful API versus CLI."
"The tool needs to improve its performance. Today's applications are demanding a response rate of one millisecond or below. The product should also look into AI integration."
"I would like NVMe to be end-to-end in the next release. Right now, it is not end-to-end."
"We brought up this question to the implementation engineer. We were comparing use cases where a customer is using RecoverPoint, then goes to PowerMax. In our previous setup with XtremIO, we were using RecpverPoint and keeping snapshots for 30 days, every few seconds. With PowerMax, I requested this for every 15 minutes, keeping it for a week. The engineer's answer was, "There will be too many snapshots. It might slow down the system." This is specifically for the use cases where there is RecoverPoint. While PowerMax works with RecoverPoint, and you can use it, there should be some way where you can have even more snapshots and not to worry about performance and system cache."
"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."
"The tool should improve its initial cost which is expensive compared to other products."
"A little better segregation of the multi-tenancy. Right now, it's just VLAN-specific, that's all you can do."
"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."
"The upgrade process could be better."
"There is room for improvement with a focus on creating a centralized storage system, functioning similar to AWS."
"It's a very good Windows-type solution. But we do a lot of legacy systems and the like. So it's getting that incorporated into it that would help us."
"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."
Dell PowerMax NVMe is ranked 8th in All-Flash Storage with 66 reviews while SolidFire is ranked 19th in All-Flash Storage with 33 reviews. Dell PowerMax NVMe is rated 8.8, while SolidFire is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Dell PowerMax NVMe writes "Simplified storage provisioning for us, enabling us to assign any volumes in two to three minutes". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SolidFire writes "A versatile storage solution suitable for various workloads in cloud environments providing scalable architecture, granular Quality of Service and consistent performance". Dell PowerMax NVMe is most compared with Dell PowerStore, IBM FlashSystem, Dell Unity XT, Huawei OceanStor Dorado and Dell XtremIO, whereas SolidFire is most compared with NetApp AFF, Dell PowerStore and VMware vSAN. See our Dell PowerMax NVMe vs. SolidFire report.
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