SolidFire Reviews

What I like about SolidFire is the ease of administration. It's a slight deviation from what we are used to before the ONTAP interface. SolidFire comes with its own interface and APIs, and that makes it much more intuitive and a little simpler to use when we're creating volumes, and managing it.

It's very automated. One of the presentations we saw this morning here at NetApp Insight explained that if a workload is more demanding, it accommodates increasing workload, without us, as admins, having to go in and do the manual administration. So it seems to be intuitive as to what's taking place within the system and the workloads.

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.

Less complaints from the database administrators as to why an application is so slow; we always get blamed, everything goes back onto storage. SolidFire takes that away from the equation. Now we have a fast system, so the admins have to go back and see where the bottleneck is.

I'd like to see a fiber channel being implemented in it. We have a large fiber channel infrastructure, and that's one area that we haven't seen implemented in SolidFire, its more iSCSI.

It's not a deal breaker, its just something that we would like to see. And I believe they mentioned it will be implemented soon, so we're just waiting for that part to be added into it.

We are still doing testing, but so far from what we've seen, it seems to be a very rock solid system. But like I said, we still doing testing as to how good and how fast it is.

We haven't done much scalability testing yet. We've only had it for a couple months, so we are still preparing our tests, a range of tests, to see how scalable and how suitable it is for our environment.

So far I like what I see. I like how it's able to self-heal for advanced workloads, the ease of management, and all SSD. It's a great trend we're heading towards.

I have not used technical support. We looked at the documentation. We had minimal input from our accountant team. We're a very experienced NetApp shop. So we more or less know how to manage storage systems. And again, SolidFire, it's very intuitive as to how you go about using it.

We had a large implementation of spinning disks, hard drives, and they would fail often. We went to all-flash for our ONTAP systems and SolidFire began all SSDs which ensured that we would have fewer broken disks. We'll have longer up-time, running.

I was involved in the hands-on setup of it. We racked it, we provisioned the IP addresses and we did the administration part of it.

It's a little bit different from the ONTAP systems. This is more of a Linux-type setup. But it was intuitive, it wasn't that difficult.

I cannot speak for the cost. The cost is actually on a higher level than I am at. I'm actually the administrator, so I look at what and how the product works. The cost is for my manager. He takes care of the costs.

We looked at EMC, we looked at Pure Storage, and we also looked at DDN. And for what we needed to do, none of those vendors fit the bIll. None of those had been there to give us what we needed.

We also considered hybrid storage. But SolidFire is a specialized product. For hybrid we can use a fast product line. But SolidFire, it's designed, as far as we see, for a specific use case and that's why we are targeting it for our workload.

For SolidFire, we're looking into better IOPS for database workloads and for other VM use cases. We purchased it for customer-facing applications, mostly for database administration-type work.

We are an enterprise level company, but we are federal. SolidFire is uniquely valuable for a company our size because our company scales, we're supporting thousands of users. And with SolidFire, we can handle the workload.

For us the most important criteria when selecting a vendor are reputation, reliability, support. All these things we have gotten from NetApp.

NetApp has been out for a long time, they know the storage business. And they've been very responsive to our needs when there are issues. Our contact team, they're right there to support us and make anything that we need right.

Look at the reputation of a company, the innovation, how they are able to support their customer needs. And seeing that many of the companies are doing pretty much the same thing, which one stands out in the reviews. That's very important.

Simplicity is definitely up there. It's not my number one. Number one is scalability. Simple to scale, scale up, scale down. When you look at something like a VMAX, there's a ton of pre-planning that has to happen to buy them. And then, if you didn't plan well, you're going to have a messed up implementation. With the SolidFires, I don't have to think about those things. We can just buy them, scale them as we need on demand, and we don't have to spend so many front end cycles on designing the architecture.

Also, green initiatives. Power, cooling, datacenter footprint. Ultimately, it's about cost, on that front. I think we can tie that one to some capex and opex. The front-end, I was just really talking about soft savings. We have a large company. We have an aging workforce and we can't just keep acquiring highly skilled employees as people retire.

It's the overall simplicity of the platform in that you can learn to operate one of these in half a day. You can stand them up in half a day. Whatever you need to purchase, it has a simple bill of materials. It's great.

Also, agility, absolutely. It takes a typical IT company months, and especially large companies like ours, months and months and months, to acquire gear. We spend a long time to plan, design, and then eventually get our quotes, review these bills of materials, make sure we get everything that we need correct, and it's just a complicated process. It takes time.

When you set up the nodes, we have to serial into each one of these nodes to configure the IP ranges. It's still very easy, but it's time consuming. If I have a 40-node cluster, it just irritates me. I really wish that they would use IPv6 Autoconfiguration to discover the other nodes and let me just do it by configuring one node.

I don't have a good answer. When we try to make these changes from VMAX, SolidFire, people say, "Well what's the risk-reward?" The risk is you either stay on a legacy architecture that's not going to be growing or developing. Like our VMAXs. Or you make a change. You go with the future. Go with something that you know is going to continue to develop and evolve. I think that's the key.

I do wish we could get a little more scalability on it. I feel confident we could scale one to the size of a fully blown out VMAX. But it'd be great if I could scale out to the size of two or three blown out VMAXs, like we would have in our enterprise datacenters.

I called technical support once, early on. So I don't know how that's changed with NetApp acquisition.

We're replacing VMAX. All-purpose, general compute, block storage for the enterprise.

The biggest challenge is for block storage. What we're talking about here is, really, support. They're spinning magnetic drive disks. Sometimes we deal with some performance issues and if we didn't do a lot - if we did not have all the right information to get requirements from our customers so that we can architect the appropriate size solution - then it'd blow up on our face.

With a SolidFire I think that problem goes away. I just ask, "How much capacity do you need?" And I'm good.

Cake. Easy. Too easy.

We expect that it'll take some time but we expect that it would reduce our operational cost, absolutely.

EMC.

We considered hybrid storage but they were eliminated because they're a legacy architecture, for most of them; with bolt-ons. And the other ones were dual control or architectures; we are not about scale up anymore. We want scale out.

When it comes to selecting a vendor, first, we don't deal with small vendors typically. We don't generally want to buy something that's VC-backed. We probably would not have considered SolidFire pre NetApp acquisition. But after it was acquired by NetApp, then we said, "Okay look, this company's not going go away overnight." So that's one criterion, that's a big one.

And the second is, am I going to get a commitment in the level of support that I get. When I buy this, are we going to be working together like we're partners, that we're in the same boat together?

We're an enterprise level company and I think SolidFire is uniquely valuable to a company our size. Because the price to get in there, that initial footprint, it's somewhat high. I think for the small business, I think Pure is killing it over there. I talked to them, I think Pure has got a great product, an all-flash product. But its dual controller and they're not going to play in a space where we're going to have hundreds and hundreds of connected hosts, and I need all those front-end ports. It's just not going to work. That's why, while Pure was interesting, they washed out for us pretty early. They would work great, I think, for our small robos, our small sites.

If a colleague at another company was researching a similar product I'd say make sure whatever you're looking at, you're not buying a legacy architecture with bolt-on flash drive. That's what we're trying to get away from, the pitfalls, because they're always tied to poor architecture decisions; things like cache-slot ratios to disk. We end up seeing that they have other problems. We definitely look at something that's designed ground up with flash in mind. And secondly, a company that's definitely going to be around.

We previously had another storage vendor, and we would recompose desktops of 350 VDI desktops or virtual desktops, and it would take us 10 to 12 hours. We then implemented the SolidFire on that same subset of users, the 350 desktops, and we could do it in an hour and a half. It's almost a ten-times savings as far as time for recomposing in our environment or infrastructure.

• The simplicity of it
• Ease of use
• The flash array
• Performance
• Reporting

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, which I would select, and then do reporting on that for dedup, compression, IOPS - all the different metrics that we currently measure in the SolidFire. It'd be nice to be able to selectively pick what you want to monitor, as far as reporting.

Very good. With the exception of a couple drives that reported bad, we've had zero issues from that thing in two and a half years.

Scalability's easy. In the automotive industry, we don't know how fast we're going to go and when. It's really unpredictable. So, the scalability was a big feature for us when we were looking for a new storage vendor. We've already added to our cluster two separate times by adding nodes. We've already done that process twice in two and a half years.

Hit and miss, to be honest. I've had some bad experiences, I've had some good experiences. All-in-all it's been good, above average, but I have had some unfortunate experiences.

On the negative side of it, I'm working on support, and I would get not enough detail or the support tech would say, "Check the manual." They'd send me the manual, and its a 680-page manual. We're all busy. I have a job too. I don't have time to read through 680 pages. Send me the three, four, five pages that I need that's effective to my problem.

And ultimately just follow-up in another situation where we're working through a case. They tell me I'm fine. Then, a month later, they tell me I've got a problem on my SolidFire array, and all of a sudden. That was not told to me for the past 30 days, and it kind of caught me off guard from a communication standpoint. To me, the customer, I felt it could have definitely been improved.

Number one was reliability. We had a competitor of SolidFire that was never up, we had multiple downed outages where our whole business was down, and we have 20 dealerships or rooftops. Being down is not acceptable. Obviously, reliability was a big thing, and then, obviously, the scale out and getting to a flash array for VDI was very important for us.

In terms of solving those challenges, it's simple, it's straightforward, it literally just runs itself, and the scalability. When we need more space or storage array, we can just add to our cluster, which is huge, because we can't predict growth in our industry for automotive.

Very straightforward, very easy. We put in a four-node cluster in under two hours, three hours. It was very simple.

We were down between SolidFire before it was acquired by NetApp, so this would be even pre-merger, and our other one was Pure Storage. We chose this solution because of the flexibility to scale out compared to the competitors, such as Pure; along with cost, at almost about a three-to-one cost difference.

Operational costs, flexibility. The more nodes you add the more cost it is, but it's definitely significantly cheaper compared to other competitors that are on the market.

We did not want to consider hybrid storage because we previously had hybrid storage, and we had problems with our VDI, our virtual infrastructure, to where we wanted to get flash array. All flash was a big deal for us to get to.

Primary use case purchase for us was VDI or virtual desktop infrastructure, with the intention of VDI and our whole assortment of load, for the server infrastructure.

Important criteria when selecting a vendor would be reputation, accountability. Support was big for us as well, knowing that support will be there, ten-year, long term. And just durability, and knowing it'll be there.

Regarding advice for a colleague researching this type of solution, do your research, obviously. Check it out, give SolidFire a fair chance if that means you're demoing, bring it on for a bake off, definitely do so. It's worth your time and effort to look into SolidFire and what it has to offer.

It comes down to reliability, and it just runs. It just literally runs itself, which is all I could ask for.

We went from huge NetApp arrays to essentially a half a rack with the same amount of space that was required as far as data drives. With the footprint being smaller, and performance being way up, we're able to increase IOPS, which will give us better capability to actually mimic the production network on a government network.

• Power
• HVAC
• Density of drives

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.

With our Solidfire, we're going to be doing things like DevOps for ease of use. We're going to be able to expand in a condensed environment with a lot of IOPS to create a very small footprint on an all-flash array using a web interface, which makes it easier for some of the lower technicians to use it.

I'm seeing what I want to see. They're expanding and doubling the I/O per every 2U on their new 19210, or something like that. I'm looking forward to getting in there and testing it out as well. I'm really liking the performance of the network.

However, it would be good to provide administrative access at the root level to be able to do things with the system, if need be.

It seems pretty stable. At the beginning, they bring their engineer out. They actually set it up for you. That was a really good thing.

However, when we wanted to change how we want to do it and basically start it over, do some hands on training with some of the architects who would be working on it, one of the issues was there wasn't an admin password at the BIOS level to restart it over. We actually had to contact NetApp to come back out, or we had to contact them and get a one-time password. This was painful.

This thing uses a model like Lego blocks to be able to not only mix and match different models, but to be able to expand or scale out based on what the demand is currently. It gives me the opportunity to go from two to three nodes up to as many nodes as I need without having to put out an upfront cost that's way high. Especially when you're talking about development networks, this gives me the opportunity to provide the customer with a solution upfront which is high-performing. Then as the years go by, I can scale it out way further, especially if demand increases.

Tech support was fine. The fact that I had to contact tech support just to get administrative at the BIOS level was kind of painful. But other than that, yeah, lovely.

Density is the key here. Getting high-performance drives in a small package was what we were looking for. We still continue using NetApp, just a newer system, and when we want old flash arrays.

Definitely give it an opportunity; put in on a network, then put the different loads on the system and show how they do QoS across those loads to make sure you've got the guaranteed bandwidth.

We're currently working on the Element X operating system with SolidFire, because we're trying to break the combination of hardware and software. We're going for the Element X implementation, where you can use any hardware you like. That's also something where SolidFire's very supportive. Maybe we end up buying the SolidFire hardware anyway, but it's a nice option. You have no vendor-lock; you can purchase the software from SolidFire and use some appliance from other vendors.

I have been using it for about two years now. We launched our new product at the beginning of 2015 in Europe and deployed it in the US in the middle of 2015.

It's absolutely a consistently stable solution. We have, currently, up-times of 100% and no data loss at all, not even the slightest. That's one of the major points why we went for flash array storage and not local SSD storage, which is, of course, faster, when you look at the IOPS, but the redundancy is just missing. SolidFire was delivering not only stability, but also a lot of efficiency with the data storage.

Scalability is a very interesting point for us, especially with the new licensing model SolidFire now offers. We can just add new appliances without purchasing new software. That will be very relevant for us in the future, especially since we added new data centers all the time over the last year. We started with one data center in Europe, we added another one and another one, and now we're provisioning it in four data centers all around the globe.

Technical support is very good. We had some minor issues when we started the US data center, because we did not reach the performance level that we were promised and that we had in the European data centers. We figured out, it cannot be a hardware problem; it must be somewhere within our implementation. The SolidFire guys were very, very supportive and now, with over-provisioning, we reach levels that are far beyond the guaranteed levels.

The product we have been building was brand new, so we didn't have any legacy we had to deal with.

For us, it was very easy to do the initial setup because we built part of the building blocks just around the storage appliance. That made it very easy for us to grow with SolidFire in, basically, the storage.

We were really looking for the highest performance combined with very specific requirements regarding the platform. Of course, we looked at the NetApp portfolio, but they couldn't offer anything that matched our requirements in both ways. All of a sudden, our upper management came up with, "Look at these guys. they're doing great job.", and that's how we ended up with SolidFire.

Of course, we evaluated some other vendors, as well, but the package that SolidFire delivered was simply the best. It was not only the performance or price. In fact, the price is quite high compared to other vendors, but what we really loved about SolidFire was the agility of the team. If you deal with really large vendors, like EMC, NetApp, or HPE, you do not have much leverage when it comes to, “We want that, we need that and please change the product this way.”

SolidFire was very open, their support was great, and they fixed a lot of problems on our side with their solution.

When my company selects a vendor, the reputation is not a key factor for us. That's why we looked at SolidFire in the first place. For us, it was very interesting to work with a small provider. We always try to get some leverage there; that we can influence the development. That's why we focus, in the evaluation also, on small vendors. Of course, we looked at different providers, like Pure Storage, Nimble and so on, but in the end, SolidFire delivered the perfect package for us.

After NetApp acquired SolidFire, we were a little afraid that it wouldn't work out, because we all have seen acquisitions that went totally wrong. As soon as we got the word that they were acquired, we immediately started looking at other vendors. But, at the moment, we're still really happy with them and it seems that the combination really works out. What happens with NetApp is, now that we're looking at the rest of the NetApp portfolio, because the integration of SolidFire seems to work quite good, the other products get more interesting for us as well.

The quality of service features are valuable. They are able to allocate a certain number of IOPS in your throughput to your LUNs. That's something that's a little bit more difficult using traditional methods.

VDI is a perfect use case. If you have ones that need more performance than others, it's easier to allocate it on a prolonged basis for a VDI environment for your specific virtual desktop users.

Right now, we're still in the testing phase but I think it definitely helps in the sense where, with traditional SAN architectures, you have to architect what kind of disk you need and how many of those disks you need in your storage pool and things like that. With the SolidFire, it's really just a number and it’s really just a matter of typing in that number for that certain LUN or whatever it is that you want to allocate for your users.

I now know their best practices associated with allocating IOPS to your LUNs. I wish that was more apparent to me when actually configuring the system. That's really the only feedback so far.

Also, in a competitor's solution, they have this ability to tell you what platform you should buy next to expand your environment based on your current needs and your predicted needs for the future. It tells you what models to buy. Maybe SolidFire could do the same thing.

It's stable. We haven't had any stability issues at all. It works really well.

We have not had any scalability issues at all. I think it scales out really well. We've tested it with cloning multiple VMs at the same time. The numbers it generates are pretty impressive.

I did have an issue where, when I was deleting stuff, it did not detect that I had deleted something. I just reached out to the SE and he gave me the script to unmap the blocks that I had originally used. That was the only time I had an issue. They were great, excellent, and responsive.

Management of traditional SANs was becoming cumbersome. We wanted to look for a more efficient solution. That's why we started looking at SolidFire.

Initial setup was very straightforward, easy. I've used all the hyper-conversion platforms before and I think we got it up and running within an hour or so. It was very simple.

We also looked at hyper-converged infrastructure competitors.

We actually have both in our environment. We're really assessing both at the same time and trying to see which might be better for certain use cases. One is more storage focused and the other one's computing and storage. There's that problem, too, where you just want to compute. Expanding on storage is more difficult with the hyper-converged stuff but with SolidFire, you can just expand on the storage without worrying about compute.

Start small, then expand. That's what I would do.

I think the solution was very simple and easy to set up, which I really appreciated.

To give it a higher rating, I'll have to thoroughly test it and have a better understanding of the whole architecture and the solution and also the capabilities I’ve mentioned.

When I look for a vendor such as NetApp, some of the important criteria are the market space, their customer support, and how responsive they are from the account manager to the SEs, not just tech support but also the other guys involved in the organization, too.

We have approximately 8,000 VMs that we had been running on our traditional storage system and it simply was not able to keep up with the workload, so we've migrated all that to the SolidFire product. Provisioning times have gone down and a lot of the random errors from different things that we've seen across time kind of all went away. It's made everything much more efficient. It has saved us time.

We do a lot of tear-downs and rebuilds in non-production environments, so those processes have been reduced to minutes. It's been tremendously beneficial for our development.

The most valuable features for us are their QoS, the scalability and the serviceability of the environment. Our ability to add nodes or take nodes out for service and the QoS policies we're able to wrap around volumes are all very helpful.

The upcoming release is supposed to have much richer VMware virtual volume (VVOL) support, which is something we're very interested in. For our particular environment, we also use the VMware Integrated OpenStack, and so our VVOL adoption is waiting on VMware because they have to update their VIO product, but that's definitely a direction we want to move.

It's been rock-solid. We have not had a single incident. We've not had any latency issues.

It is very easy to scale. We started with our non-production cluster. I think we started off with six nodes. It's now a 14-node cluster. That's a seamless process. It just worked. No down time, no service disruption, nothing.

I have dealt with technical support many times. They’ve been very good. What they tout is they only have level-three engineers; there aren’t the normal layers of trying to get to somebody who can actually answer your question, because the first engineer you get ahold of usually knows the answer. If they can't, they basically have direct access to the engineers and developers. It's amazing; it works very well.

We had some NetApp 8040s and 6220s, which we still use for certain workloads because the SolidFires only do block; they don't service our NFS workload. The NetApps we had were flash pools, basically spinning disks fronted by SSD. Even with that configuration, they weren't really able to keep up with our workloads, so we needed something that had a lot higher throughput, so we started looking at all-flash technologies.

At the time, we didn't feel the NetApp offering was as mature as it needed to be, though we didn't technically evaluate that. We looked at ExtremeIO, we looked at Kaminario and finally the SolidFires. The ExtremeIO was really expensive. The Kaminario seemed slightly better but we liked the scalability story around the SolidFires. We then talked to some other customers who had them and confirmed that they really did live up to what the marketing hype said, and that sold us. For our highly dynamic VM workload, it's what the platform was built for, and it was a really good fit for us.

The initial setup was very smooth and straightforward. Basically, you put an initial configuration on each of the nodes and then they form a cluster, and then as you add additional nodes, you make it a member of the cluster. Originally, we had done that using their GUI. The last couple of clusters I built, I used their APIs to do it; very quick and painless process.

Look at SolidFire. It sounds cliché but it's true. For us, it worked really well.

I like SolidFire's technology and the way that it is implemented, from a node perspective instead of having a controller shelf architecture. One node can control everything, but if the node goes down, obviously the other nodes can bring everything back up. Going into the next generation data center, that's very compelling, as well as being able to use QoS settings and maintain a standard of performance for the VMs and things that are underlying it.

The SolidFire's technology and architecture allow for a more fluid and dynamic data center. It moves away from the controller and shelf design philosophy to a node design. This means that each node has the ability to control the entire cluster. In essence, you have the same number of controllers as the shelves.

If a node goes down, the other nodes easily take the load. This is accomplished both by the node technology as well as the Double Helix technology. If needed, you can easily remove one node and ship it to another location or attach it to a different cluster, with very little effort. The implementation of the structure is fairly easy, as well. Our first 5-node cluster from the box to serving data (for testing), took about five hours.

The biggest advantage is going to be the QoS settings, being able to maintain a level performance for our customers on whatever application that they're running at that particular time. For us, a business advantage is implementation time; our first cluster, four hours from un-boxing, racked, stacked and having it up and running.

We've had issues with the stability of our platform. We're a hosting provider and we've pushed it to its limits. We've found some of the bugs. The nice thing is that SolidFire has worked with us to correct those issues, bring new OS versions online to help correct whatever problems we've run into.

Scalability is excellent; it scales very easily. I can scale from a sizing perspective as well as an IOP perspective very easily. I can add a new node to the cluster. Within about an hour or an hour and a half, it's up and running. I have more space right then and there. Power and cooling is minimal as well.

The technical support is great. I've never had an issue with the technical support. When we open up a ticket – whether it's email, phone, whatever it happens to be – we usually get something back fairly quickly; they'll jump on the problem. We can give them access to the arrays or the clusters fairly easily so that they can figure out what the issues are. Getting new nodes or hard drives or whatever, in-house, usually happens fairly quickly. I have had a couple of issues with that in the past. Nothing major, but that's probably where they lost some of their points.

I was responsible for the initial setup in our Chicago data center; it was extremely easy. We had one of the SolidFire NetApp engineers with us when we did it and, as I’ve mentioned, it was four hours from opening the boxes to having it up and running.

We've evaluated three or four different all-flash type solutions. We actually went with one of the other solutions first. We ran into a very large bug about a year or year and a half ago, with an all-flash solution, and that particular provider was having issues correcting it. They still really haven't corrected it, so we can't push it as hard as we want to. When we were starting to look at a different solution, SolidFire came back with a good pricing model for us, as well as being able to meet the demands of what we're trying to deal with, and provide a rip and replace solution on our storage area that worked awhile back.

Evaluate everything. But if you're looking for an easy-to-implement solution from an all-flash perspective, really take a look at SolidFire. Try to get a PoC in house and run from a proof-of-concept perspective. The API's implementation is all very easy. You can look at it from your power and cooling aspects as well. That's the advice I have: Do a good proof of concept on the flash storage.