We performed a comparison between NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays and SolidFire based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two All-Flash Storage solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."All updates, upgrades, and hardware work are all performed on-line with no impact."
"It is all-flash. This makes it a lot faster than the rest of what we have, as it is able to drive high I/O loads, which is big for us."
"Running SAP on Pure Storage helps a lot without doing any further tuning to improve application performance. Our internal clients are happy."
"It's actually very stable"
"The most valuable feature is replication."
"Pure Storage is extremely reliable — it's never failed."
"All our junior partners can administer the storage arrays. It is simple and easy to use. We don't have to dedicate a whole team of full time people to work on it."
"The predictive performance analytics is a very good feature, as our system is performing better than before."
"Compared to Dell Unity XT, what I see as an advantage in NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays is the fact that it is more scalable...The performance of the product is good."
"It provides multi-protocol, which is what gives the edge when it comes to big lineage PC workloads."
"The solution allows us to segregate one storage unit from another."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the performance of the database access."
"Some of the valuable features include MetroCluster switchover, in terms of disaster recovery, it is easy to use, and flexible."
"We use it for our VDI environment, and have not had any complaints with it."
"Considering the cost, I find NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays to be the best storage available in the market."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to set a specific margin of performance to a specific workload."
"Greater IOPS, speed, it's all-flash. So seeing that everything is going to all-flash, all SSDs, SolidFire fits right in there with the emerging trend in IT."
"If you buy the solution for its specific purpose it will work well."
"Being able to provide quality of service as promised."
"The square footage for doing development is at a premium when dealing with government networks. To be able to put a lot of IOPS in a lot of high-speed performing drives in a very small location which requires very little HVAC with very little power, it is very valuable to us."
"SolidFire has seamless performance for the nodes and extensions. I also like the tool’s scalability. The product’s performance does not get affected when we scale either up or down. This is not the case with other products."
"The most valuable feature is the performance, as well as how you manage performance on the system."
"It is very easy to scale up SolidFire."
"It's got full API functionality and the performance is pretty steady."
"The technical support is okay, but could be improved."
"With scalability, I have run into a little problem with our last upgrade. There were some undocumented limitations to the number of drives that our controller could run on. So, instead of putting in a new data pack as we had anticipated, we had to keep adding and removing to get up to the capacity that we needed to be. What should have been a one day process (or a few hours) turned into a month and a half process."
"What it needs to do is work a little closer with solutions, like VMware, so it understands the particular workloads that are on it. Today, it does not understand the applications which are running against it."
"It's too early to tell if we've seen a reduction in total cost of ownership. The solution is expensive."
"We haven't seen ROI yet."
"As long as they always improve on IOPS speed, that's all we're really looking for. The faster the storage can be the more we can do speed of application and speed of use."
"I would like to see a Nagios monitoring plugin which watches the health and performance of the system. The only one available just checks volume capacity."
"The number of Filesystems is limited, which it is not on the EMC VNX."
"The initial setup phase of NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays is not straightforward and needs improvement."
"I would like to shrink it more, if we can. The smaller, the better."
"Better support technicians for CAPP."
"Better integration with other brands is important so we would like to see it easier to integrate."
"This solution has limited storage."
"Things like the FlexClones, SnapVault, SnapMirror, all of that. Some of it's available on the EF series, but we like what we have in the FAS system."
"They could improve overall scalability through performance. Denser capacity, which is doable, it is what the competition is doing."
"The dashboard could be simplified."
"We are looking for, potentially, on the Active IQ reporting side, to do reporting based on the datastore. Right now, I can report on the whole SolidFire, or I can report on just a certain datastore or a volume. I'd like to take all of my VDI infrastructure, which as an example would be multiple datastores."
"Though it is a stable solution, its users may face some security issues at times...The security provided by the solution is one area that can be improved."
"So feature-wise, I would say more reporting tools that could be merged into it."
"There is room for improvement with a focus on creating a centralized storage system, functioning similar to AWS."
"It would be good to provide administrative access at the root level to be able to do things with the system, if need be."
"We have a large fiber channel infrastructure, and that's one area that we haven't seen implemented in SolidFire, its more iSCSI."
"When you set up the nodes, we have to serial into each one of these nodes to configure the IP ranges. It's still very easy, but it's time consuming."
"The upgrade process could be better."
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NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays is ranked 23rd in All-Flash Storage with 38 reviews while SolidFire is ranked 19th in All-Flash Storage with 33 reviews. NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays is rated 8.6, while SolidFire is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays writes "A storage solution that offers great stability, resilience, and support". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SolidFire writes "A versatile storage solution suitable for various workloads in cloud environments providing scalable architecture, granular Quality of Service and consistent performance". NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays is most compared with Dell PowerStore, NetApp AFF, Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series, Huawei OceanStor Dorado and HPE Primera, whereas SolidFire is most compared with NetApp AFF, Dell PowerStore and VMware vSAN. See our NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays vs. SolidFire report.
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