NetApp FAS Storage Arrays vs. SolidFire (discontinued)

NetApp FAS is a great platform to solve a large variety of different problems. It is ideal for large organizations that have a variety of different business scenarios and locations. This ability allows global support organizations to have standard tools and methods even in a variety of use cases and site sizes. On the flip side, this flexibility is also sometimes the weakness of the platform. In very specialized use cases/areas such as low latency with flash this can be a detriment. We still seem to use specialty arrays to solve these point requirements.

Incentivized

Well suited for companies who use NetApp Storage. This is one of the more performant offerings from NetApp and is highly customizable.

Incentivized

• Support. Support. Support. It's been a welcomed surprise to have a hard drive land on my desk, and a better surprise to have a NetApp tech arrive soon after to install the drive. I didn't even know the drive failed-- now that's support.
• AS stated, the ability of these devices to host multiple virtual servers, entire infrastructures, and work well and fast, is a definite strength.
• The ability to stack these devices and have failover.
• The upgrade program is great.

Incentivized

• All-flash performance is very good, particularly on read-intensive workloads
• Performance scales linearly by adding new nodes
• Guaranteed QOS policies offer both a minimum IOPS and maximum IOPS with burst capabability, so its not just capping the upper limit of a workload
• Encryption at rest is integrated into the array platform
• Grid architecture ensures that ability to perform rolling upgrades online without severely impairing performance
• VVOL capabilities with the array allow granular control and visibility of the workloads

Incentivized

• Deduplication job runs at certain times and creates a large CPU overhead for the system
• Management of a volumes, disk groups, LUNs, etc. is a burden to manage and is not efficient with storage capacity
• Upgrades are complicated and not "non-disruptive"

Incentivized

• There seems to be an overarching view (with drill downs) of the entire infrastructure.
• You need a solid partner to implement this product initially.
• As this product is still integrating with Net Apps mature support systems, I still think that there is room for a better end to end experience.

Incentivized

It just works! We've used NetApp FAS Storage Arrays systems since 2011 and have had fantastic results, in particular since 2016 as performance has drastically improved. Tools are great/user friendly, command line capabilities are very strong ... it is simply very effective at what it does!

Incentivized

It does have a really nice and easy to use web interface to do pretty much anything you need with it. It was very simple to configure our volumes and luns and connect them to our VMWare environment using the interface. It has options to rename, shrink, grow, and other things with our luns and volumes. It was nice and easy to read graphs to see where you stand on your storage usage at a glance.

Incentivized

NetApp support in Brazil is managed by its partners. We know in other countries, such as the US and NO, they have support directly from Netapp. We have a very good NetApp partner working with us since the beginning, on both the implementation and daily support. Very few cases needed to be escalated to NetApp support, most of the cases are handled and satisfyingly closed by the partner.

Incentivized

I have not had to use support. However, others on my team have and have been impressed.

Incentivized

Our initial deployment was handled by pro services. Most later deployments were handled in-house. All went very smoothly. Documentation made it relatively easy to set up new systems which allowed us to do it in-house. When using pro services they were professional and comprehensive.

Incentivized

NetApp FAS is very agile compared to other similar products. It especially caters to NFS and does it expertly. Compellent, Clariion, and EqualLogic all boast similar overall functionality but lag behind in innovation such as a full HTML5 web UI without the installation of additional components. Full PowerShell integration is also very helpful for automation.

Incentivized

All in all, Net App Solid Fire is a strong competitor to Nutanix AOS or HPE SimpliVity. It is conceded that there are plusses and minuses for the competitive landscape, however, Net App Solid Fire is a worthwhile competitor at a very competitive price point.

Incentivized

• The speed of file recovery is the biggest positive impact. Recovering from a ransomware attack in minutes is something you can certainly brag about.
• Integration with products like Exchange and SQL can certainly speed up normal day to day processes. Not just in backup recovery situations either.
• Redundant paths make migrations and updates very easy with no downtime.

Incentivized

• Effectiveness
• Ease of use
• Cost savings by tiering

Incentivized