TrustRadius Insights for SolidFire (discontinued) are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.
Business Problems Solved
NetApp SolidFire is a software solution that offers seamless deployment and easy accessibility of virtual infrastructures, leading to increased productivity and business performance. According to users, it solves infrastructure problems by providing straightforward deployment and significantly less time-consuming benefits of virtualization that make the most efficient use of physical hardware storage. This solution also allows users to focus on their skills and manage storage efficiently, reducing costs and workload while minimizing manpower usage.
Another significant problem solved by NetApp SolidFire is the ability to easily create and delete VM servers. Users note that this results in cost savings and better use of data center space. Additionally, it enables development and testing, scalability, flexibility, security, load balancing, backup, and recovery. Users appreciate the central management of virtual infrastructures which ensures security, access control, and variable management.
However, users have noted some downsides such as fuzziness on network and segment load which can affect security and access control. Furthermore, when loaded with many VMs, there can be a slowdown in performance. Nevertheless, users view NetApp SolidFire as an effective solution that provides a single software solution to manage virtual infrastructure centrally while improving hardware management by eliminating the need to manage it physically. Overall it helps businesses run more efficiently without sacrificing performance or security.
Net App Solid Fire is currently in full use at my organization. I made the decision to purchase and implement this infrastructure. Once set up, the devices seem to run almost flawlessly. The set up took quite a bit of time to initially configure and there, for those who like to know ALL of the details, seems to be a good amount of nooks and crannies to find little settings.
Pros
Speed is incredible.
Ongoing maintenance is great.
Price point was quite good.
Cons
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.
Likelihood to Recommend
Excellent all-in-one solution. We chose to purchase a disk and compute nodes across two disparate sites. The failover capabilities are quite good, particularly when paired with a backup solution (we happen to use Veeam). Not the cheapest solution out there. It still needs some maturation. Could stand to have a better end to end administrative experience.
VU
Verified User
Director in Information Technology (51-200 employees)
SolidFire is used to manage the storage that is connected to our virtualized server environment. It’s used by multiple teams but most often by the compute engineering team to self serve the storage capacity needs. This product addresses a need for fast reliable storage with good management GUI provided.
Pros
Manages all flash storage
Easy to understand GUI
Cons
API documentation could use some help
GUI can be slow
Likelihood to Recommend
Well suited for companies who use NetApp Storage. This is one of the more performant offerings from NetApp and is highly customizable.
We use their all-flash storage in our internal data center, which is the HQ for 6 office locations nationwide. We use solid fire storage for production, databases, and anything that needs rapid access capabilities from multiple locations. We find them to be very cost effective, and very good at what they do.
Pros
Flash
Storage
On-perm
Cloud integration
Cons
Pricing
Support
Interoperability
Likelihood to Recommend
Solid fire is a great fit for data center management staff that need highly available and readily accessible data storage for the entire enterprise. We have multiple site locations across the country who have access to the solid fire data based at our HQ location and never have any issues with connections.
VU
Verified User
Technician in Information Technology (51-200 employees)
SolidFire is the primary, tier 2 storage for the organization, used behind vSphere. The company is leveraging VVOLs and Storage Policy Based Management in vSphere on Solidfire to address complexity and management points within the array. It was used to replace aging EMC VNX arrays and consolidate from 6 down to a single array, reducing the management points and independent pools of storage into a single unified pool of all-flash storage. The efficiencies of the array were attractive in making the all-flash costs more affordable in a cost per GB comparison with other arrays. The shift to Solidfire also allowed for the shift from expensive fiber channel infrastructure towards iSCSI and faster Ethernet infrastructure, further eliminating management points.
Pros
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
Cons
Block-only storage platform
Latency is higher than expected on write-intensive workloads (making it less effective for log applications and video)
UI and marketing inconsistencies make it hard to know how close you are to your maximum performance - all IOPS in UI are reported in actual IOPS whereas the ratings and marketing all use 4K IOPS - users must manually equate actual Average IO size and IOPS to the 4K representation
Solidfire's excellent support is being merged with NetApp's support and seems to be harder to navigate and receive the traditional high-quality support
ActiveIQ portal is good for longer term views of the array, but it is sub-par compared to competitors like HPE's Infosight
VVOL visibility in the UI is constrained - you can dig into details on a single volume but you are unable to compare performance of multiple volumes
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.
