Likelihood to Recommend 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.
Read full review The product is a must for enterprise & SMB segments as this gives a good value for money and the licensing policy is very well defined and cost effective for the feature set it provides. This is very well suited for organization which have multiple brand storage systems and would like to consolidate them all together, thus providing a huge storage capacity for the organizations data growth. The product becomes less appropriate in organization where they have single storage platform as the service provider would have the ability to consilidate all the storage systems. Hence this products may be under utilized.
Read full review Pros Speed is incredible. Ongoing maintenance is great. Price point was quite good. Read full review VMware runs VSAN certification programs to make sure the OEM sells validated nodes. It helps customers to select appropriate certified ready nodes like Lenovo ThinkAgile VX which comes factory configured and easy to set up. Hyperconverged solutions reduce real estate space and networking costs when compare with shared storage. The host overhead also less. Supports All-Flash (SATA and NVMe SSDs) and Hybrid vSAN with HDD and SSD. So customers can choose cost-effective solutions appropriate to their workloads. Supports different storage policies, RAID and duplication, and compression features and it makes a complete storage solution. Read full review Cons API documentation could use some help GUI can be slow Read full review We were a fairly early adopter of VMware vSAN and as such experienced several growing pains. We experienced a few bugs that took a few software versions upgrades to go mostly away. The biggest issue we had overall was with host drivers. Even with vSAN ready node compatible hosts, you have to be very careful that the drivers for NIC and RAID controllers are right. Read full review Usability Deploying and configuring VSAN is a relatively simple process for people that are already used to working in virtual environments, primarily for those that are familiar with
vSphere . The compatibility of those two products is amazing. You shouldn't really encounter any issues and if you do, you surely did something wrong.
Read full review Support Rating 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
Read full review Support is (as always forVMware) top notch and easy to work with. The majority of computer companies are outsourcing their tech staff, and it seems they do as well. But their guys know the product well and are quick to respond to your ticket (if the severity is right!).
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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.
Read full review Our VMware solution is built in-house for the organization's private application, we don't want to put our data on cloud premises. Also, vSAN is a cost-effective solution for our environment. We have done the POC with both products to understand the Flexibility, Management, and cost. After the successful POC, we have chosen the VMware vSAN.
Read full review Return on Investment The ROI was quick - under 1 year Read full review we have realized savings in the licensing compared to traditional storage (over $500,000 over the last 5 years) we have realized ROI through efficiencies in our staff of approx $1MM (over the last 5 years) also, positive impact on the time to value/speed of implementation allowed us to realize business objectives (Over $1MM of ROI) Read full review ScreenShots