NetApp SolidFire SF19210 Storage Node
Mfg # SF19210-01
CDW # 4081454
| UNSPSC 43201835
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NetApp SolidFire SF19210 Storage Node is rated4.00 out of5 by3.
Rated 5 out of 5 byPrincipl4cf9 from Enables us to accommodate extreme needs, like burst IOPS, and to solve the "noisy neighbor" problemWhat is most valuable?* 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" problemHow has it helped my organization?We were able to migrate some applications from spinning media to SolidFire, and we were having "noisy neighbor" problems before.What needs improvement?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.What do I think about the stability of the solution?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.What do I think about the scalability of the solution?The product is horizontally scalable, which is very good, which is what you need these days.How is customer service and technical support?They're very knowledgeable. They provided us good documentation.Which solutions did we use previously?Our biggest challenge was QoS - not getting guaranteed IOPS at the volume level.How was the initial setup?It was straightforward, because we were given a VM, and that was doing the installation, so it was straightforward.What other advice do I have?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.Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Date published: 2017-10-22T00:00:00-04:00
Rated 5 out of 5 byLeadEngia5ea from Has great APIs right out-of-the-box, but it is not fitting our pattern to go to NASWhat is most valuable?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.How has it helped my organization?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.What needs improvement?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.What was my experience with deployment of the solution?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.What do I think about the stability of the solution?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.What do I think about the scalability of the solution?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.How is customer service and technical support?Customer Service: It is fine.Technical Support: 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.What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?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.What other advice do I have?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.Disclaimer: IT Central Station contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
Date published: 2017-10-24T00:00:00-04:00
Rated 5 out of 5 byAlan Sheehan from Helps us deliver service levels to our users through automation, makes provisioning much easierWhat is most valuable?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.How has it helped my organization?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.What needs improvement?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.For how long have I used the solution?About seven months now.What do I think about the stability of the solution?It's great. At first there's a little bit of a learning curve, but once we got past that everything is rock solid.What do I think about the scalability of the solution?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.How is customer service and technical support?We've used them twice. They were great.How was the initial setup?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.Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Date published: 2017-11-01T00:00:00-04:00
Rated 5 out of 5 byassociat541638 from Some of the valuable features are compression, deduplication, and thin provisioning.What is our primary use case?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.How has it helped my organization?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 dataWhat is most valuable?* 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)What needs improvement?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.For how long have I used the solution?One to three years.What do I think about the stability of the solution?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".What do I think about the scalability of the solution?There were no issues with scalability. Far from it - see previous commentsHow is customer service and technical support?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 ( https://www.itcentralstation.com/products/ubuntu-linux ) and they leverage ubuntu/debian update mechanisms. These methods are well-known and understood, so no re-inventing the wheel was necessary here.Which solutions did we use previously?We have some older EMC ( https://www.itcentralstation.com/vendors/dell-emc ) boxes that were not sufficient to the task. We wanted an AF ( https://www.itcentralstation.com/categories/all-flash-arrays ) (all-flash array).How was the initial setup?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.What about the implementation team?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.What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?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.Which other solutions did I evaluate?We did an extensive evaluation of several products and vendors, looking at SF, Kaminario ( https://www.itcentralstation.com/products/kaminario-k2 ), Nimble ( https://www.itcentralstation.com/products/nimble ), Pure Storage ( https://www.itcentralstation.com/products/pure-storage ), EMC ( https://www.itcentralstation.com/vendors/dell-emc ), and HPE ( https://www.itcentralstation.com/vendors/hewlett-packard-enterprise ).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:* Adding a node to the cluster* Adding the drives.Data is re-balanced across the new nodes automatically. Removing/Decommissioning a node is just as easy:* Remove the drives from the cluster* Allow data to be re-located* Remove the node from the clusterThere 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._______update: since doing the initial review, we have added two additional nodes. Very easy to do, the data re-balancing (distribution) is done automatically.What other advice do I have?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.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.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'Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Date published: 2017-07-09T00:00:00-04:00
Rated 5 out of 5 byit_user527361 from We have a much smaller footprint in our datacenter, reduced overall operating expensesHow has it helped my organization?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.What is most valuable?* The resiliency of the platform* No down-time with the product itself* Overall performance of the solution* The dedupeAll of the feature set has been fantastic.What needs improvement?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.What do I think about the stability of the 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.What do I think about the scalability of the solution?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.How is customer service and technical support?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.How was the initial setup?Simple, easy, adding an additional node is easy, just a couple of cables, there's no complexity at all with the solution.Which other solutions did I evaluate?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.What other advice do I have?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.Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Date published: 2017-11-22T00:00:00-05:00
Rated 5 out of 5 byit_user527121 from It delivers stable and efficient data storage.How has it helped my organization?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.For how long have I used the solution?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.What do I think about the stability of the solution?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.What do I think about the scalability of the solution?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.How is customer service and technical support?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.Which solutions did we use previously?The product we have been building was brand new, so we didn't have any legacy we had to deal with.How was the initial setup?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.Which other solutions did I evaluate?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.Disclaimer: IT Central Station contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
Date published: 2016-12-28T00:00:00-05:00
Rated 5 out of 5 byit_user527100 from It can allocate a certain number of IOPS in your throughput to your LUNs.What is most valuable?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 ( https://www.itcentralstation.com/categories/virtual-desktop ) 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.How has it helped my organization?Right now, we're still in the testing phase but I think it definitely helps in the sense where, with traditional SAN ( https://www.itcentralstation.com/categories/enterprise-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.What needs improvement?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.What do I think about the stability of the solution?It's stable. We haven't had any stability issues at all. It works really well.What do I think about the scalability of the solution?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.How is customer service and technical support?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.Which solutions did we use previously?Management of traditional SANs was becoming cumbersome. We wanted to look for a more efficient solution. That's why we started looking at SolidFire.How was the initial setup?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.Which other solutions did I evaluate?We also looked at hyper-converged infrastructure ( https://www.itcentralstation.com/categories/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.What other advice do I have?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.Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Date published: 2016-11-09T00:00:00-05:00
Rated 5 out of 5 bySteve Kulinski from Scalability, being able to increase and decrease quickly, enables us to serve our customers fasterWhat is most valuable?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.How has it helped my organization?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.What needs improvement?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.What do I think about the stability of the solution?So far we haven't had any problems with it. I think it's a very good product so far.Which solutions did we use previously?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.How was the initial setup?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.Which other solutions did I evaluate?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.What other advice do I have?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.Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Date published: 2017-11-05T00:00:00-04:00
Rated 5 out of 5 byit_user527382 from The most valuable features are their QoS, the scalability and the serviceability of the environment.Improvements to My OrganizationWe 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.Valuable FeaturesThe 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.Room for ImprovementThe 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.Stability IssuesIt's been rock-solid. We have not had a single incident. We've not had any latency issues.Scalability IssuesIt 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.Customer Service and Technical SupportI 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.Previous SolutionsWe 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.Initial SetupThe 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.Other AdviceLook at SolidFire. It sounds cliché but it's true. For us, it worked really well.Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Date published: 2016-10-20T00:00:00-04:00
Rated 5 out of 5 byEnterpri6a79 from With the footprint being smaller, and performance being way up, we're able to increase IOPSHow has it helped my organization?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.What is most valuable?* Power* HVAC* Density of drivesThe 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.What needs improvement?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.What do I think about the stability of the solution?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.What do I think about the scalability of the solution?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.How is customer service and technical support?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.Which solutions did we use previously?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.What other advice do I have?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.Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Date published: 2017-10-04T00:00:00-04:00