SolidFire Reviews

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.

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.

I'd recommend the solution. Implementing it is a breeze, support is good and scaling is easy. If you do not have a lot of technical capability on-premise, that would certainly be a leading reason to look at this solution.

On-premises

We are a solution provider and SolidFire is one of the products that we implement for our customers. It is used for virtualization.

The most valuable feature is the performance, as well as how you manage performance on the system.

The technical support is really bad and has to be improved.

We have been working with SolidFire since it was acquired by NetApp in 2016.

In terms of stability, I have not had any issues.

Scalability has not been a problem.

The technical support from NetApp is really bad.

We deal with and promote similar solutions from NetApp and Kaminario.

The initial setup is straightforward and quick.

Rating this solution is difficult because I would rate SolidFire very high and NetApp very low.

I have no trouble with features but we need the proper support. Whether I would recommend this solution depends on the requirements, although without knowing more, I would recommend something else.

Overall, I would rate this solution a five out of ten.

On-premises

I work as a technical consultant and our company are resellers. We sell hyper-converged solutions to our customers. We use mainly NetApp HCI and SolidFire. We use a variety of versions depending on the customer's requirements. Our main use of the product is for ESX environments and Hyper-V environments. 

The most valuable feature of the product is its resiliency. 

The product does what it's meant to do and I don't think there's any need for improvement at the moment. The same applies to additional features, which would make the product quite expensive and I don't think it requires that. If you add features, you might lose the things that the product is best at. It makes the most sense to let it be what it is. If you buy the solution for its specific purpose it will work well. Once you add additional features like Essex, you diminish the system and that would be a shame. 

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've been using NetApp SolidFire ( /products/solidfire-reviews ) for about a year.

The product is stable and performs very well without any bugs. 

I believe the scalability of the product is very good. 

I've had a very good experience with technical support. 

The initial setup is very simple, anyone can do it. 

I can't comment on the price of the product because I only deal with it on a technical level. 

I would rate it a nine out of ten.

On-premises

The most valuable feature of this solution is its scalability. That is the biggest benefit of using this solution. 

The entry-level for this solution is so high that we had to use other solutions for some of our smaller office locations that are in different parts of the world. As a consequence, because we could not use it across our entire organization, we have changed to something else. I would like to see the entry-level changed so that you can do really small systems with SolidFire.

This solution would be improved if it were made to be more compatible with other products.

We have been using this solution for two years.

This is a stable solution.

Scalability is the biggest benefit of using this solution.

The technical support for this solution can be good and bad. If you have a really big issue then it's bad because it takes quite a long time for the issue to be solved.

There are different levels of service. You can have a technician who is able to do the troubleshooting and is allowed to set up the commands.

If you just have questions with no due date, or you just have to fix a small package, the support is good. You always get the answers you need. However, in critical situations, we have had problems. For example, in the last three years, we spend three or four hours on the phone with support where nobody could escalate our tickets. 

We have had to stop using this solution because the price was too high for global implementation. We are now using NetApp MetroCluster. We were happy with the functionality and switched only because of the price.

The initial setup of this solution is straightforward.

I would say that you can deploy this solution in an hour if you know how to do it.

The price of this solution is more expensive than others.

The suitability of this solution depends on the use case, so anybody who is researching this solution should take care to consider their use cases first.

I cannot think of any additional features this solution needs, but there is a long list of improvements.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

With this solution, you can actually do more with less. You can have more tenants and more application with less space and less dollar per gigabyte. By increasing the utilization up to four or five times someone can get more with less.

In Asia, a lot of people are still using the Fibre Channel and Fibre Channel is actually the best part of NetApp SolidFire. By providing the journey, we enable the customer to actually experience the new technology but without the need to make a lasting investment. We have to transition to the next generation because whatever SolidFire is offering it's not common hyperconverged work. It is actually for the centrifugal outlook but, it is not about the Fibre Channel. It's no longer required, The transition to next-generation infrastructure is where the Fibre Channel switch is required.

The quality of service for minimum iOS to maximum iOS in a multi-terminal environment is very powerful. The SQL service feature is the best part of SolidFire.

They took away the centrifugal outlook and it is not included anymore which is unfortunate. Additionally, I think there is room for improvement needed with its storage capability. A bigger node is needed.

Three to five years.

The quality of service is unique. There's no one who does it like NetApp. Additionally, we can allow customers to do more with less while using this solution.

Primarily this is used as the backend iscsi SAN for our oracle 12c RAC implementation.... 2 x 2-node clusters, plus 3 add'l servers (dev/qa/stg).  We also use now for some limited-use VMs (vmware), and have implemented the VVOL configuration that SF makes available.  We debated using this for non-prod data for Oracle or not, but two things swayed our opinion.  1) We would not incur a huge disk-space penalty for having dev/qa/stg there as the de-dupe functions would come into play, and 2) we can guarantee IOPS so we know that regardless of what we do in dev/qa, it won't incur a perfornance penalty for production volumes.

The compression and de-dupe have been great in terms of space-savings, especially for our prod/stg/qa/dev DB instances (where you gain add'l savings for the de-duped data);  the QOS for IOPS helps us to ensure that no non-prod action can be deleterious to our production-stack data

• Expandability (incrementally and non-disruptive
• Compression/Deduplication/thin provisioning
• Recovery from failure/data-protection
• Guaranteed IOPS per volume
• Simple browser web-admin (with extensive out API interface)

The level of monitoring could be better. They give you access to stats and it is very informative. But you really need to do your own internal availability monitoring. Perhaps they just assume you are. And part of the thing, perhaps an adjustment on my part is needed, is that because something like a drive failure is handled internally and data-blocks are re-duplicated automatically, a failure somehow becomes less urgent. That is not second nature to me.

Having said that, 1) support reaches out if there is an issue, and 2) the on-line reporting is pretty good and only getting better. 

One to three years.

There were no issues with stability.  We've had 1 failed drive so far, and gone through 2 firmware upgrades - including reboots of invidual nodes, one at a time - and everything continues to "just work".  

There were no issues with scalability.  Far from it - see previous comments

Customer Service:

Customer service was good. I haven't needed much so far. We prefer to be our own source of knowledge and reach out to clarify or confirm something.

Technical Support:

Technical support is good and helpful. While you can schedule the node S/W upgrades and have them take care of, I had them walk me through it, as we were in pre-production at the time. Knowing/understanding more about the process gave me a better feeling.

I don't like black boxes, so anything I can understand or wrap my head around things provides comfort. The nodes are ubuntu and they leverage ubuntu/debian update mechanisms. These methods are well-known and understood, so no re-inventing the wheel was necessary here.

We have some older EMC boxes that were not sufficient to the task. We wanted an AF (all-flash array).

The setup was quite simple. Even though we had help, it would not have been required.  To date, we've added 2 add'l nodes with no outside assistance. 

We implemented in-house, although SF sent a technical staff members out to us. He allowed us to pick their brain and ask questions, which was very helpful.

I believe the initial buy-in/purchase is more expensive, because you are starting out with 4 (minimum) nodes. It then becomes cheaper and easier to expand and grow.

For example, compared to the more traditional dual-controllers+shelf, expanding to a new shelf was a pretty big investment and you needed to fully populate it with drives).

That uses the same controllers, so you have added capacity but not performance. Whereas, adding another node is a relatively simple operation. You don't even have to add all the drives right away. Licensing is via your support contract.

We did an extensive evaluation of several products and vendors, looking at SF, Kaminario, Nimble, Pure Storage, EMC, and HPE.

Price was a factor, but it was not the only factor. We are not a huge shop, but are growing, so we wanted something that had a solid architecture for now and for later.

We wanted it to be as bulletproof as possible, and yet be able to change/grow with us. The more standard, dual-controller-with-1-shelf can survive with a controller failure, or 1+ drive failures, but what about a shelf failure? While this is unlikely, it is still a possibility.

With SF, a few minutes after a drive failure, the data (blocks) that were located on that drive are re-duplicated elsewhere. In a very short time (a few minutes), you are fully-protected again. And as long as you have sufficient spare capacity - you can lose an entire node with no data-loss and reportedly only a small performance hit (even software upgrades are non-disruptive, as they are done 1 node at a time).

That entire node's data is re-duplicated elsewhere on the remaining nodes. If you don't have a node's worth of spare capacity, that becomes more problematic, of course.

What this also means is, as you add nodes, for increases in both capacity and performance, a.k.a. the scale-out model, you also get faster recovery times in case an entire node fails.

Adding nodes is a simple as:

1. Adding a node to the cluster
2. Adding the drives.

Data is re-balanced across the new nodes automatically. Removing/Decommissioning a node is just as easy:

1. Remove the drives from the cluster
2. Allow data to be re-located
3. Remove the node from the cluster

There is another unique option. Let's say I grow to 10 nodes, but the LOB application changes, and the role is no longer the same. I can break that into 2 x 5-node arrays and redeploy in different roles.

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update: since doing the initial review, we have added two additional nodes.  Very easy to do, the data re-balancing (distribution) is done automatically.

I'm not sure why SF isn't more popular in the SMB space. To my mind, it offers a unique combination that isn't easily matched in the marketplace. Kaminario seems to be the closest. I haven't had it long enough to truly "know" the product, but will happily revisit this in 6-12 months.

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Since the intial rollout, we have implemented VVOLs on SF with our VMware 6 setup.  Once setup - the initial configuration and communication, plus the SPBM policies - it is quite easy to use, and allows the vmware admin to do it all without having to touch the SF webadmin URL - even setting IOPS per volumes is done there.  Very nice. 

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Lastly... scaling up, either for perf. or capacity (more likely), is so much of a non-issue that it is hard to over-state:

- predictable cost: you are adding a node, you know how much they cost.  No "threshold" where you have to add add'l controllers, or a new shelf, nothing like that

- no (minimal) impact to add to a running system.  They _say_ that when data is re-balanced (across the new node(s)), you have a percentage perf. hit, but we have not noticed this (and we've added 2 add'l nodes so far).  

- in fact, adding OR removing nodes requires no downtime, literally a 'non-event'