SolidFire Reviews

Just moving away from traditional spinning disc to solid state storage is a step forward, and user applications obviously are performing much faster. We have a much smaller footprint within our datacenter, so we've able to reduce overall operating expenses within our datacenter; shrinking costs for our business. It's been a fantastic improvement all round.

• The resiliency of the platform
• No down-time with the product itself
• Overall performance of the solution
• The dedupe

All of the feature set has been fantastic.

Really, everything our business needs, the solution currently has. Some of the other things that we are really looking forward to are some of the CloudConnect abilities. 

We only have one array today, so we want to add an additional arrays in a different datacenter so then we can actually do some of the Snapshot mirroring. That capability is already there, we just don't have an additional solution for it. Right now, for us, there is not much else that we really need. 

I do like their automation, some of the things that they've actually built in with their PowerShell. A lot of that stuff will help us automate our day to day operations. They've been on track with everything that we're looking for and it's just a great solution.

We've run it for a year and a half, we've done multiple code upgrades, there's been zero impact to the business when we do a code upgrade. During our testing we actually demoed unplugging an entire node from the solution just to see if there was any impact to the business, there was none. In a year and a half there has been zero down-time and it's been really a solid product.

Scaleout, the ability to just add additional nodes without needing storage vMotion, moving anything on the virtual side around, has been really great to see. We actually just recently went through and added an additional node, we did that seamlessly; no impact to the business, no impact to our users. Our application set just continued to run. All of the LUNS just expand once the new node is added, you really can't ask for anything better.

Honestly they have probably one of the best technical support staff we've worked with. One of the things that we did do during our PoC, is we actually made support calls at two in the afternoon, asked specific questions. We actually opened up support calls at 2am, just to see if we would actually get the same response which is exactly what we saw. It was good to see.

Simple, easy, adding an additional node is easy, just a couple of cables, there's no complexity at all with the solution.

We looked at Texas Memory, we looked at Violin Memory, we looked at XtremIO. All those solutions just didn't compare with what we could do with SolidFire in terms of performance, support, product stability. SolidFire definitely just blew the competition away.

I would definitely say have a look at SolidFire, just because of the scalability, the ability to add additional nodes, the resiliency of the product. There are definitely other solutions that may come in and say they can do everything that SolidFire does, but in our testing we were unable to find a solution that mirrored what SolidFire could do. I think it just makes a lot of sense to just continue down that path with Solid Fire.

The scalability and being able to implement it quickly.

Because we're a service provider, we have customers that need to grow and need their data increased quickly, so it helps us with that. We're also incorporating SolidFire into being our cloud-providing mechanism, so it allows customers to get in and out of our cloud, as well as move into the main cloud.

Because of the scalability and being able to add and decrease quickly, it allows us to service our customers at a quick rate, versus how they normally would have done it.

I would like to see more of the fiber channel connect, legacy-type, Linux-type front-ends to it. That would really help in our environment.

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.

So far we haven't had any problems with it. I think it's a very good product so far.

NetApp overall has been very good at helping us incorporate things quickly. The SolidFire was a quick, scalable solution. You can add nodes as quick as you need them. 

Where we were before that was bringing in and setting up whole arrays and then trying to get the pieces we need. The scalability with that is a lot tougher because you're not scaling the nodes, you're scaling strictly storage, unless you bring in another whole set of clustered environment, which takes time. 

We actually had a partner come in and set it all up for us and get us started with it. We didn't have to do it ourselves.

It was quick. It's not very complex. It went in very quickly. Basically added it to the network and it was ready to go.

We've got quite a few different vendors on our floor today. Just about any vendor, you name them, is on our floor. For the applications, and what we were trying to move towards, the SolidFire seemed to fit every niche we were looking at, for the part we brought it in for. It was a very good product.

I don't think we looked at much in the hybrid. SolidFire met all the criteria of what we were looking for, for that part of our infrastructure. 

We purchased SolidFire, in some aspects, for customer facing application. We have started to bring SolidFire into our house to use for our own applications, versus just using it for our customers.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor to work with are, I would say, performance, ease of of using, how to incorporate it in to our datacenter. And that's one of the things with ONTAP - that it's able to be used on SolidFire -  we know ONTAP. It made it a lot easier than to have to bring in a different application, learn something new. So that also helped in our decision, it was the ease of bringing it in.

I didn't give it a 10 out of 10 because, like I said, the things that we need it for, that we're still missing - some of the Linux and the Unix-type connections - that would really help it. 

Given the ease, for the value of the product, it's a great thing to bring in and start going to the cloud with.

• Ease of use
• Performance guarantees that you can set
• Individual settings you can put on each individual volume, if you want to do that
• Ability to scale up, scale down whenever you want
• Scale-out ability, and the ease of adding a cluster - When you get a new node, if you farm out the datacenter tasks like we do, there is no technical ability required for them to plug it in and connect it and we can just add it.
• Open RESTful APIs are great

It's provided us the ability to not be concerned with setting SLOs for whatever application we're using. Everything is pretty much tier-one.

Our primary use case is virtualization, right now. We initially purchased it to be incorporated into our own internal cloud, OpenStack-based, KVM-based, so we use it for that. And, we've also branched into standard VMware as well. So we have both.

Based on those use cases we get really good efficiencies. We do a lot of encryption. We initially didn't have any because we were using it for anything, any LUNS, Oracle, whatever, and we didn't get the efficiency. So we positioned the use case over to virtualization and we're getting good efficiencies that way; to make it more cost effective. That's one of disadvantages, the actual cost. We haven't gotten there yet, but...

A little better segregation of the multi-tenancy. Right now, it's just VLAN-specific, that's all you can do. There's no authentication domain separations, things like that. For example, the NetApp product has storage virtual machines, which has a lot better segregation, and a lot better multi-tenancy, a lot better role-based access. That's probably the biggest thing that I would say, so we could actually use it for different tenants.

We've had some issues with hardware failures, and for them to resolve that it's actually meant replacing nodes. Otherwise, the stability is pretty good, all we've had is hardware failures. And they're built for a smaller scale, so before they were purchased by NetApp it was just, "replace the node, it's easier to replace." Any other field-replaceable unit, anything that breaks is, "replace the node," except the power supply or the disk.

We're impressed with its scalability.

For the most part, it's been pretty good. We've had to use it a lot for what I explained earlier, the hardware failures. This was mostly before it was integrated into NetApp support. We haven't really used them recently, so I don't know how the assimilation into NetApp support has taken effect.

We purchased SolidFire for customer facing applications, they're all internal, house-developed applications that we sell to customers, to financial services.

When selecting a vendor to work with what's important to me are

• support
• viability - are they going to be around?

Support is the big one. Is it just reactionary support, or proactive support? You need both of those.

I gave it a seven out of 10 based on what I've already explained. In the past, they seemed like more like a small company - and they were. But what I explained before, the hardware replacement, just replace a node. That's a small company.

Make sure that you have the performance requirement for it, because its price per gigabyte is a lot more than other solutions out there, if you don't need the performance requirements. You can get by on all-flash unless you have the need to guarantee performance on specific volumes.

For us it's the horizontal scalability. We traditionally run our private clouds for our R&D engineering on AFF, which worked quite well. But we ran into IOP-driven scalability. So instead of adding more clusters and more HA pairs with all-flash disks in an AFF scenario, we were able to just scale with SolidFire. That is so much better because we can add a node, we add compute, we add storage, and we've had really good luck with that.

Our use case is all private cloud right now, running OpenStack. All internal, for our internal R&D and engineering.

For us, moving into a private cloud area was a big step for R&D. So while we are just in our infancy right now, it has made a big difference in storage efficiency. Traditional workloads that we ran on AFF, we saw better deduplication ratios, and efficiency ratios on SolidFire than AFF for our workloads. It's a very IOP-driven environment, very IOP intensive, and the SolidFire handles that quite well using the QoS for IOP.

We're really in our infancy right now for what we use it for. We haven't really gotten into a lot of the advanced features and functionality of SolidFire because we get so many things out of the OpenStack overlay. For now it's doing what we wanted it to do.

Anything we've had, were covered by Hotfix. We had some false positives, power supplies failing, and that's really been about it. We had a couple of glitches during some upgrade processes but nothing that was really concerning to us.

Everything has been resolved.

It happens with any product. It wasn't anything that stood out for us, to be a red light.

It's been really good. We've had no issues, we've had non-disruptive upgrades, non-disruptive hotfixes, which is really great for the customer - the R&D customer. They don't like any disruption. Disruption is money to them. So we have been really satisfied.

Great. For us, budget wise, just being able to say we know this workload is coming down the pipes for new design, a new ASIC chip, anything like that. We can predict what the cost is going to be versus having to buy disk at another solution. It's great for us.

Any small, minor issues that we've had have been resolved by support really quickly and support has been extremely good with SolidFire.

We had initially purchased AFF for this solution and, while it met our needs, we thought that SolidFire might be a better fit based on how we wanted to configure OpenStack and what our workload was; and again, for the scalability in terms of IOPs and how we have to grow that for AFF versus SolidFire.

Purely the scalability, being able to add a node, add compute, add storage, and being able to restrict IOPs for specific applications and workflows is a really a huge benefit for us.

I was involved. We did a proof of concept, set it all up and then we ended up adding on to that. We turned our PoC into production and then we added more nodes, and more nodes. We've gone from a five-node initial proof of concept to, now, a 15-node cluster.

The initial setup was easy. Very simple. We were up and running in less than an hour I think, which was really easy; after it was racked and stacked, etc. Very, very easy to get going.

I can't really speak about SolidFire's impact on operational cost compared to other storage platforms because all our other storage platforms are NetApp. The scalability for us, it is a cost-savings, so if we hit a certain number of IOPs within an AFF system we have to add another pair of controllers and we have to add more disk. There are also bottlenecks for AFF, for how many SSD shelves you can run for those specific clusters, whereas with the SolidFire side we are just able to add nodes on and get what we need. They're both great solutions that fit the use case a lot better.

I'm not sure it's uniquely valuable to an enterprise-type company like us but I think it's unique in how it operates. That whole "add a node, add compute, add storage" has been done before but I think they really do it right with their all-flash technologies. Some of the other vendors don't do it with all-flash and run into bottlenecks for IOP and the like. I think SolidFire has really done a great job with that. They have done a really good job with storage efficiencies versus a lot of other vendors. A lot of the other vendors are add-ons for things like deduplication or compression/compaction. So I think SolidFire has done a great job with that.

It's all been NetApp products. There's been AFF FAS and then we just thought we would look at SolidFire because we've had such great luck with AFF and FAS for many, many years. We've been a long standing NetApp customer and it just looked like a good solution for us to try, do the proof of concept, and it worked out well for us.

We did not consider hybrid storage for this specific use case, but we do have hybrid storage from that NetApp in other parts of our infrastructure. We are also adding some other tiers of storage into this cloud solution, potentially storage grid and potentially some other FAS-type thing for protocol-based access.

The most important criterion when selecting a vendor to work with, for me personally, is partnership. I think it's also important that the vendor has vision. I think it's important that they are willing to collaborate with customers and not just throw solutions at them. I think they should really want to understand your workflows, how they can benefit you and how they can make your life easier in terms of automation or efficiencies or performance. I want to find that they actually really care about what you are doing, as opposed to just throwing a solution out there.

Do your due diligence. Do proofs of concept. Make sure that you try to break it with what you are trying to do, and make sure you engage the vendor. Tell them exactly and share exactly what you trying to do and let them help you build the correct solution. Especially with NetApp, they have such a huge portfolio. You might be thinking traditionally you have experience in AFF or FAS but SolidFire might be a good fit, or E-Series might be a good fit, or cloud ONTAP might be a good fit. So it's important to engage the vendor and find out what the best solution is for your use case.

Getting predictability in our analytics for space trending, performance analytics. We use to correlate data with other tools that we have. 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. It has proved really useful for that.

Part of the reason we went this route was we did that storage design workshop with NetApp. So we went for QoS-driven design for our new array. It really helped us not only in delivering the service levels to our users, but also automating that. So it makes it a lot easier for provisioning. It also makes it a lot easier to guarantee performance for our end users.

Nothing I can think of that they don't know about right now. They're looking at making some of the custom widgets and reports a lot easier to deal with. They're heading down that direction already, so I don't think that's a big deal.

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.

About seven months now.

It's great. At first there's a little bit of a learning curve, but once we got past that everything is rock solid.

So far it's been great. We've have not had any issues. We've added some more data into it, it hasn't choked on it.

We've used them twice. They were great.

It was really easy. We had Professional Services delivery with it. We worked with the NetApp CI team to implement. That's about as straightforward as you can get.

It is fast. By default, its APIs expose pretty much all of its configuration items. On the ONTAP systems, we use WFA to expose the APIs, where with SolidFire, everything is pretty much out-of-the-box, so the customers like it. The main uses are virtual machine environment. This is internal, on a private cloud. In India on most of their workstations are on virtual machines, and those all are hosted on SolidFire.

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.

It's doing SAN, so that would be the major difference. We use NFS file storage much more than we use block storage. SolidFire is our only block storage offering right now. Honestly, we're kind of phasing block storage out, but it's filling that gap for applications that claim they need block storage and can't use file-based. That's kind of its role.

It is just filling the gap of the block client, because maybe 10% of our clients have to use block storage and have a good technical reason. The other 90% we've gotten on a NAS.

They could do a file-based NAS: SolidFire NAS-based. It's probably not its niche, but that is our direction, not to use block, and it's block. Solid state block is what it is.

If it was the same price as C-Mode and did file-based storage, because this is what our company is heading towards.

It is pretty low-maintenance for upgrades and support issues. We haven't messed with it much. We have set it up, and we have the capacity so we haven't added a lot to it either. I have not had any issues with it.

Setting up new clusters is pretty straightforward. ONTAP is great, and it is really easy to use and setup.

It is very stable. I forget we have it sometimes, because once we have it configured, it just up and runs. Plug and play, the GUI works and the APIs, customers can use them. Everything is kind of there, therefore, it is very low-maintenance.

We have not scaled it a lot, because there are some niche environments running including the virtual workstations. So, I don't know how well it scales.

It is fine.

That is a problem we have. When we call tech support, we have to open a tunnel to the SolidFire device, then tech support can get in and look at it. The tunnel keeps closing on them. So we'll open the tunnel, 10 minutes later I'll get a phone call. "Hey, the tunnel closed. Can you open it?"

The only way to keep the tunnel, and I think it might be an issue with our proxy on our end, but something is closing the support tunnel. I don't know if it is a NetApp issue. We haven't been able to fix it on our end, so I don't know if they can give me any feedback on it, but it is a chronic issue. We have to babysit that tunnel, and I don't know why.

We would probably use SolidFire more, except we're getting more bang for our buck with our purchases of ONTAP right now, and the deal we made with NetApp, so it's more of just a cost decision. Because we're going NAS, it doesn't really fit the pattern of where we're going, because everything is being presented via NFS, so it's just block storage. That would be the reason the footprint is not growing.

However, as long as the price is right, it is a no-brainer on block.

If they are using block storage, then it is very user-friendly. It's easy to use out-of-the-box. I was not a storage admin when I came to this team. I was a server guy, so it was all new to me, and SolidFire was the easiest thing for me to pick up. We had old 7-Mode systems. We had C-Mode. We had Isilon systems on EMC, and SolidFire was in a day, you knew how to do everything. It is just a real easy setup.

We don't have a reason to not use solid states. I don't know why we'd use anything else at this point other than solid state.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

For a storage vendor, it is price and stability are probably the main thing. We like vendor support, but we have a huge internal IT shop with a lot of engineers, so we don't need that much support and hand-holding. It's really the following:

• Management
• A cost decision, who gives us the best deal.
• Stability.

If there's stability, and we haven't had stability issues with NetApp, they are a better deal than EMC, so that's why we've been using them. We were an EMC shop until three or four years ago.

• Being able to provide multi-tenant applications
• Being able to provide quality of service as promised
• Being able to accommodate extreme needs, like burst IOPS
• Finally, being able to solve the "noisy neighbor" problem

We were able to migrate some applications from spinning media to SolidFire, and we were having "noisy neighbor" problems before.

I would like to see integration with the cloud, number one. Being able to spin SolidFire in the cloud. The hybrid cloud vision means that you should be able to run your application anywhere, on-prem or off-prem, so any product should meet that.

It's quite stable. We had some issues. Luckily, we had a "phone home" thing. But it's pretty stable. I think it was a disk failure early on, and it was catching the disk failure a little late. But then they had this upgrade and they fixed it. It was a one-time thing.

The product is horizontally scalable, which is very good, which is what you need these days.

They're very knowledgeable. They provided us good documentation.

Our biggest challenge was QoS - not getting guaranteed IOPS at the volume level.

It was straightforward, because we were given a VM, and that was doing the installation, so it was straightforward.

Our use case is to provide quality of service and guaranteed IOPS.

Replication is okay, meaning they do two copies, they are routing two copies. We're not going more than that, because of the cost. I'm satisfied.

The first and foremost criteria when selecting a vendor is that the vendor should have a unique niche. Number two, they should know what they're doing, meaning technical support. Whether it comes to technical support or e-sales. If they're not able to answer my questions on time, then it's a problem. The third is being able to integrate with my existing environment.

To a colleague researching a similar solution, I would say look for a stable company and look for a company that has good backing. Look for a good price versus performance ratio.

If I go ahead and put it up with the OpenStack, the OpenStack stuff goes so smoothly with SolidFire, increasing the capabilities of the VMs to bring them up. I think it's just fantastic.

Also, the scalability, as well as the performance, and then the way it goes with the API part of it. That is the amazing part. The API, it's not that complicated. You can choose an item, you can go ahead with PowerShell, anything; it's not that complicated to go ahead. 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 will save a lot of implementation time, complexities; and then you don't have to go ahead with networking the OS separately. It's all one in the same place.

I think there are some reporting tools like Grafana.

Kubernetes is already there, and VMware is already sorted out. I just came out of that particular session right here at NetApp Insight 2017 and that was amazing.

So feature-wise, I would say more reporting tools that could be merged into it. I'm not sure if you've heard something called Data Protection Adviser, it's a reporting tool. The way you are monitoring your environment, I think it's important.

I don't see any disk failures or support cases being logged. I would say, to be precise on the percentage, it's 15% better than what other people provide.

Scalability, I've done a couple of times during the year and it's amazing. Petabytes, whatever you're bringing up, it's all good.

I haven't used it directly, but I know how many cases have been raised, and it's quite on the low side.

It was 85% straightforward. The other 15%, you need to understand certain aspects, you need to understand your environment. It's alright that you're bringing up NetApp, and then SolidFire, but then how exactly are you going to configure it in your setup? That's going to take a little bit of time. Otherwise, once it is there, it's all good.

I think one of the reasons we chose SolidFire is because it is definitely giving us good results on the costing part of it. It definitely has an impact on it. To be straightforward, it works for that.

There were a couple of them: Hitachi, EMC. But I'm pretty much into NetApp's side of it.

If you're bring up cloud in-house and you're still not aware of OpenStack Kubernetes, that's the way ahead. If you are putting up NetApp in the background, I think you're all sorted out. Your cloud is all prepared, so all done.

The way I see it, there's the scalability and the complexity part of it. And then errors are huge, and when I say huge I mean they are costly. So the way I compare it with other products, maybe the other vendors, the cost is a major factor.

And with that, there is complexity, work in silos, so right now it is coming to OpenStack and then beneath you have NetApp SolidFire, it's all simple. No more complexities.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Implementation, it should be quite simple to understand.
• It should be customizable; it should not be that the vendor is saying, "No, this is something that we are providing, it cannot be customized for your environment." That doesn't work for me. It should be as customizable as possible
• Costing of course
• The support that comes with that

We are an enterprise level company. SolidFire is definitely uniquely valuable to a company of our size, because the way the market is going ahead, on the cloud. Large companies have got their old stuff kept in old datacenters wherein you have huge, costly storage boxes of course, and you want to bring that up. So SolidFire is something that is giving you a migration platform. I mean, it's a steady platform for you, the way you prefer it.

I would say go ahead with this and then if they are good with the API part of it, configuration specifically with Python or OpenStack, just go for it.