Dell PowerMax NVMe vs. SolidFire (discontinued)

PowerMax is suited for a mid-tier to enterprise company. It can easily take on and manage what it may take with various storage arrays. This can work in any vertical, healthcare, manufacturing, financial, insurance, etc. It can easily manage massive workloads and deliver very high-end performance. Is not feasible for small companies, this can and would be very expensive to maintain and operate, and it truly doesn't make sense when a much smaller array can be used.

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

• Fastest storage array in the world.
• this system provide the performance density up to 7.5 million IOPS5 per rack
• Its support maximum system

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• Can be complex if someone is not versed on the product.
• Expensive.
• High cost of maintenance.

Incentivized

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

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

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

• Cost
• Opex vs Capex
• Maintenance Costs.
• Learning curve on software to maintain the array.

Incentivized

• The ROI was quick - under 1 year

Incentivized