We performed a comparison between SolidFire and VMware vSAN based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, NetApp, Pure Storage and others in All-Flash Storage."The solution has probably reduced my power use substantially."
"It is fast and reliable. It works."
"We like the data reduction rates. That has been really helpful. You get 4U of Pure storage replacing something like two racks of spinning disks. One of the things that has contributed to that are the data reduction rates."
"Their support system has insight into errors on our SAN fabric that we can't see. They've brought attention to and raised awareness for us about things that we couldn't see, when we were experiencing problems."
"Performance, deduplication, compression, and fast response time for requests from servers and applications."
"I never have to worry about its performance or if it is the root cause of an issue."
"Pure Storage technology allowed us to automate tasks, reducing something which started as a 12-hour turnaround down to about 15 minutes."
"The performance of the storage is just unbelievable."
"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."
"I would say in terms of architecture and in terms of functionality, the product is quite good."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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's got full API functionality and the performance is pretty steady."
"The most valuable feature is the performance, as well as how you manage performance on the system."
"When we do to do more scaled load testing, we can run more dense workloads and still have the same results across all specific nodes"
"It is very well known in the industry, and there are a lot of technical resources around it. This is a big thing for me because, at the end of the day, when you implement it, you need to support it."
"One of the valuable features of vSAN is it has a universal type of technology that allows you to deploy it on any server or hardware. Competitors, such as Nutanix, provides the AOS and can be deployed only on certified hardware. For vSAN, it does not require any kind of certified hardware."
"Its ease of use is most valuable. It is easy to configure, and there is a unified interface, which makes things slightly easier."
"VMware vSAN is easy to configure, with basic functionality and the customer can maintain the solution."
"it's easy to scale, it's easy to predict IOP needs, and you can design for low latency using all-flash... Also, for setting up new clusters for VDI quickly, it's nice. You don't have to wait on an order for a storage vendor to ship you a system and help you configure it, you do it all yourself. And the sizing guides are pretty straightforward."
"To me, VMware is a leader of the visualizations. I think everyone just follow VMware."
"vSAN is very integrated."
"I would like to see data tiering to AWS."
"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."
"It's not so scalable. It's got moderate scaling capabilities right now. The clustering technology needs a bit of work, they need to improve that."
"We would like more extended historical data to help with some of the capacity planning. This is something that we are asking for all the time. E.g., what was the historical performance of this particular volume? So, we would like more historicals."
"I would like some performance analytics which go deeper than today. It should be specific to some hosts and applications. This would be good."
"It was a little costly. The price was ultimately higher than both of the other solutions that we evaluated. I'd say that's the only downside."
"The initial setup of the product is complex."
"There was some complexity in the initial setup."
"They could make the mNode more user-friendly. Now you need to configure and add nodes by CLI and it’s not really easy to manage. If they created a web interface to do the management of the mNode, that would be great!."
"I would like to see integration with the cloud, number one. Being able to spin SolidFire in the cloud."
"There is room for improvement with a focus on creating a centralized storage system, functioning similar to AWS."
"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."
"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."
"SolidFire could improve in terms of hardware robustness."
"The inclusion of more protocols and interfaces would make it easier to integrate with other products."
"I think there is room for improvement needed with its storage capability. A bigger node is needed."
"This solution is not great for large file shares/object/rich media repository."
"It needs to be vanilla. There shouldn't be any custom drivers, any custom anything. It should just be, "Hey, you know what? These drivers are going to work for this version, the next version, and the following version after that." That's the difficulty in this. It takes too much upkeep... The main issue is drivers. Every time we move to a new vSAN version, we're having problems finding the correct drivers for the vendor."
"I would like to be able to limit IOPS."
"I would like compression and deduplication to be offered for offloading hardware, instead of doing it with software. That would be nice."
"What I would like to see, for the really small customers, is the ability to have two nodes."
"vSAN itself is a great storage platform, but one of the issues with it is that you have to be fully locked into the VMware package to use it. We're going to be deploying 72 Kubernetes nodes, and we're not going to buy VMware licenses for 72 of them, just so they can access vSAN. That's what we're using the Pure for. Opening it up so you could have vSAN as a data store, use it as a data lake, hit it with an NFS, S3 from outside the VMware ecosystem, would be great."
"I would like for the next release to be a bit cheaper."
"The ability to access SAN environments with fiber channels (or even NVMe) would be a good addition."
SolidFire is ranked 19th in All-Flash Storage with 33 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 3rd in HCI with 226 reviews. SolidFire is rated 8.2, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.4. 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". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSAN writes "Very stable, easy to set up, and easy to use". SolidFire is most compared with NetApp AFF and Dell PowerStore, whereas VMware vSAN is most compared with VxRail, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, HPE SimpliVity, Red Hat Ceph Storage and NetApp AFF.
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