DDN IntelliFlash Reviews

We use IntelliFlash for our virtualization environment. We use VMware, and it's used to show the virtual machines.

The initial setup is straightforward. 

I wouldn't say I like anything about this solution. We are looking for a replacement with Dell EMC and Pure Storage. Tegile's performance, support, and features are horrible. It's going down.

Multiple companies have bought it. It looked okay at one point in time, like four years ago. Even though it wasn't one of the best, it still looked okay. Since the management has changed several times, it looks like it's going down the drain. 

Performance is horrible now. Our original intent was to buy new storage in about two years. But since it became a critical urgency for us, we decided to purchase a new one in two or three months.

It would be better if they improved the codebase. We have issues very often with their code, and I think that is the main pain point. The hardware is also horrible because we have either a controller failure or a SATADOM failure very often. Now and then, we also have a disc failure. 

They have to get their act together. They have to make sure their hardware is robust, they have to make sure their code is good, and then we can think about new features and functionality. 

First, make the unit run properly, and then we can think about additions. Obviously, their support has to be knowledgeable. Because when I told them, "we have latency issues, come troubleshoot it for us," nobody came. But if we tell them that "we need to do a firmware upgrade," then they are like, "okay. Let's do a firmware upgrade." They will come to do the firmware upgrade, and then they will go. But with the firmware upgrades, you might never know when it works properly and when it doesn't work properly.

If there is a disc that needs to be replaced, and we ask them to replace it, they'll say, "okay, just share the remote station with us, and we'll run some commands, and we'll validate which disc is faulty. If it's really faulty, we will send the disc. We do that, and then they find the faulty disc and send a replacement.

They will do these minor things. But that's not what we are looking for. We are looking for more features and more functionality. Like if there is latency, try to help us out and help the customer find where the latency is. It doesn't necessarily have to be only with SAN storage. It might be a configuration issue, or it might be something else. So, you should help the customer find where the issue is. Unfortunately, that is not what we are getting from them. So they have to improve that a lot.

I have been using IntelliFlash for the past four years.

IntelliFlash isn't stable at all. Its performance is horrible.

I don't think there's any scalability. From the outside, it looks awesome. But performance-wise, it's not good. You just have to buy new arrays if you want to scale. It's not like a traditional SAN where you just add in a bunch of this or that and start increasing your capacity. It's not like that. We have 4,000 virtual machines and about 1,000 people using them.

Technical support is horrible. Their support is not able to handle the volume of issues. It's indirectly affecting the support system. Even though you create a ticket, it looks like they know what the issue is, and they don't have a fix for it. So, they don't really respond to you. 

Even though they release a fix and apply it, you get some other issue in two or three days. They have to go back to engineering again and get that resolved. We have been spending a lot of time with that array, which, ideally, we should not be doing. But unfortunately, that's the situation where we are in.

They are seriously bad. For example, we had virtual machines which were having high latencies. What do you do when you have virtual machines with high latency? You look at the application, you look at the virtual environment, and you look at the SAN switches, and you also look at the SAN storage. When I created a ticket, VMware hopped on very quickly. Then they looked at the thing, and they said, "oh, yeah, everything is good." I know everything is good, but still, I had to create a ticket as per our policy. Then I did the same with SAN storage. They responded after a day, saying, "okay, do one thing and just create a ticket. Set up a call with VMware so that we can work with them."

If that is what they want, then I'm going to set up a call with VMware and rope them in. I set up a call and roped them in. They didn't really attend to the call until now. It's been four months, and we haven't heard from them. I had to work with VMware. We had to make some changes, but still, there is a latency issue. That's why our management is like, "okay, we had enough of this company, let's go ahead and get a new one."

On a scale from one to ten, I would give their technical support a one.

The initial setup was straightforward. There weren't really many features or functionality for this product. It was very simple. You didn't need a storage administrator to manage it, and it was straightforward initially. It was good and took about a day to deploy this solution.

Initially, we used the help of a consultant to implement this solution. Our experience with them was okay. It wasn't bad.

Maintenance over the last year has become horrible. We had to dedicate one person or an administrator to do maintenance on these units. It's every day for maybe four hours on average.

I think we pay around 100 grand per year for three arrays or four arrays.

I would tell potential users not to implement Tegile. We are leaning towards Pure Storage. We found it more stable when we did our research, and many people seem to be happy with it. It looks like the management will make the final decision, and we should be going towards Pure.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give IntelliFlash a one.

We used the solution basically for all operations. We got our ERP, Citrix, email (there was about a two wall to 18 terabytes with email), et cetera, that we had on the hybrid and we had our ERP system, which demands performance. We had that on the solution's all-flash.

It improved a lot of our processes and especially our ERP. Our reports were taking from six to eight hours to do. Once we got this solution in there, we were able to get the reporting down from eight hours to under 20 minutes. Ultimately, we were able to deploy to get the reports in under five minutes, which was a huge accomplishment.

There were some good features. It did provide the call home, which was a great feature when it worked. 

It performed great originally, and when it performed great, it was awesome. 

The initial setup was fine.

Once you started pushing it, it would start to not respond properly and then we would have to reach out to support, to try to figure out where these issues came from. They couldn't tell us where the problems were. Their advice was simply to take some load off and then it would work fine. 

Sometimes there was imprecise information. If there's an issue with the system, to kind of pinpoint where the issue was coming from, for example, if it was network latency or a load link to a VM or load link to some kind of switch, it would have been helpful to know. 

I know they can't look at all the networks, however, as the solution is connected to VMware and the SAN and the switch, there should be more information on the system. I can't pinpoint anything, which is a problem. Their reporting needs to be much better.

I've used the solution for five years.

The solution as it is right now is not very stable. The stability seems to have eroded. It's gotten to the point we are concerned about crashes.

The scaling is okay. We can scale it up, however, the problem with our scaling is how do you scale up something that, when it was sold to us, was already on the way out at an end of life. Therefore, while we can scale up, we're going to scale up an unsupported product. 

Their approach is "Hey, listen, let's just buy a new product. And then you scale of the new product even better." 

With the scalability of the product when I purchased it, I was able to add four flash arrays, and we could add four hybrid storage drives.

We have 300 to 400 people on the solution currently.

When we first got the product, support was amazing, however, that is no longer the case. 

Technical support is bad. It'd grade them at 30% or 40%. The response time is terrible. I had a major issue with things that were not working. I'd asked them for an ETA and they would make it more about them than us. It would be more than six hours before anybody would get back to me. That was unacceptable, especially when it's slow when it doesn't take it all the way down, yet slows everything down to the point where it's not working. While we're down they're treating the situation as not important enough to do a response time within an hour. I just find that unacceptable.

We're using HP. We moved over due to the fact that the product was declining, and we could get much better support and reporting elsewhere. 

The setup was pretty straightforward, however, when we received this version, we had a lot of problems. They had to replace the controller at least twice within the first three months. The guys did a great job, however, we might have gotten a bad batch of controllers, as we seemed to have many problems within the first six months.

The deployment was fast and on the first day, it was up and running, ready for our support.

We have two people that handle maintenance. It's pretty easy to take care of and they've found it easy to learn. They are network systems admins. They are just junior admins and they are able to handle everything with no problem.

We did the integration and installation in conjunction with an Intelliflash support engineer. They're good. They're above average. Originally, when Intelliflash was Tegile, the support engineers were knowledgeable of whatever they ran, and they had the patience to assist and were very helpful.

I'm not sure of the exact pricing. Over three years, the support might have been in the ballpark of $15,000. We bought the solution itself outright.

Before we purchased this product, we were actually going to go with the HP brand called Nimble. We're familiar with the all-flash array technology. This solution was a good fit when it first came out. However, some of the politics and the management of the system that can support it are no longer there.

We are a customer and an end-user.

The solution is now out of support, however, we were using the most recent version of the product.

I tell my guys when they're looking for a solution, is focus on the technology, of course, and focus on the SLA and the response time. The difference between what I have now and the current solution is the response time. If I made a call now, in less than 10 minutes we get a level three engineer. That's important. As much as I have great IT sys admins and they can resolve anything, sometimes it's just about being able to call at any time and have somebody there that knows what he's talking about and is able to help us from a level three perspective.

I'd rate the solution at a seven. It's a good product, however, their technical support is very bad.