CIARA MAGMA Storage Servers vs. Scality ARTESCA vs. SolidFire (discontinued)

The team in charge of implementing Scality has to be full stack in order to guarantee the correct functioning of the entire system. However, you have to think very carefully about the balance between servers and disks, perhaps adopting smaller fully populated servers instead of large semi-populated servers, which would mean that over time our disk updates will not have a fully useful life.

Incentivized

Solidfire is a good, multi-purpose array for iSCSI environments. Grid architecture allows incremental, linear expansion of the array both in capacity and performance. The all-flash is a very high performance, low latency platform for a lot of applications. The way the company has architected the platform allows for continual upgrades and removes the lift-and-load replacements if you stay with Solidfire in the future. The Solidfire fiber channel implementation is workable, but largely there is a checkbox. I cannot imagine any fiber channel shop is going to look at a Solidfire seriously, unless they are looking to move towards Ethernet based transport. Write intensive workloads struggle on the array. The double-helix data protection combined with the architecture can make writes more latent than expected - well into the teens and 20's of ms within the array.

Incentivized

• I love the redundancy of the software.

Incentivized

• Speed is incredible.
• Ongoing maintenance is great.
• Price point was quite good.

Incentivized

• The overall packaging is not very good. I think it could be more efficient for installation.
• There are many components in storage servers. This can generally be complex to understand, you have to be patient.

Incentivized

• API documentation could use some help
• GUI can be slow

Incentivized

As an organization, it took us a while to understand the shift from a traditional black box SAN to software-defined storage, but now we are much more certain of what this means. The time invested and the resources were not very high, thanks on the one hand to the technical support and on the other to the coherence and good development of the platform.

Incentivized

I have seen Scality in the office meeting with our VP and get the feeling that they are here to support us.

Incentivized

When we have had problems, the response on the Solidfire side has been strong, but not perfect. As they scale and integrate into NetApp, support from regions outside of the USA are having a more difficult time diagnosing and addressing issues for complex problems. The Boulder, CO, and Raleigh, NC, support teams are both extremely strong and provide top-notch support. ActiveIQ is a great support tool both for NetApp/Solidfire and for the customer. The proactive support tickets opened have been helpful. The node-based support has been excellent - meaning when we had a DIMM fail, they sent a replacement node - no time consuming troubleshooting of internal components to fix the issue. Upgrades are handled by SF technicians, so it feels white-glove

Incentivized

Due to the nature of our business we require extensive encryption and availability for sensitive customer data. The erasure encoding that Scality provides gives us the assurance that documents are rest are never in a state of being downloaded or available to a casual data thief. This is something that can be found with other vendors but at a fraction of the same cost. Having this kind of performance, availability and redundancy at the cost that Scality provides has made a large difference to our organization.

Incentivized

SolidFire was chosen over these other service providers because of relationships we have with the company, with our reps, and with the local Denver presence. We also are a partner, and we felt that the solution stacked up technologically very well against the competition and was more cost effective.

Incentivized

• Keeping sensitive customer data secure is a must for our organization and Scality has great features to make this happen.
• We replaced a single SAN with a Scality ring and found performance to improve as we store more and more customer data.
• Being able to lose various portions of our Scality ring and allow it to continue to service customers while maintaining high performance has been key to our business.

Incentivized

• The ROI was quick - under 1 year

Incentivized