DDN IntelliFlash vs SolidFire comparison

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between DDN IntelliFlash and SolidFire based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, NetApp, Pure Storage and others in All-Flash Storage.
To learn more, read our detailed All-Flash Storage Report (Updated: March 2024).
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"The GUI is very easy to use and intuitive.""It does efficient work of storing data while still delivering the performance that you would normally expect from a higher priced solution.""The scalability is good.""The management features are well organized and they have a very good dashboard.""The solution helps to simplify storage.""The most valuable feature of this solution is the support.""It comes with a large number of features out-of-the-box, which makes it easy for us to see problems and manage capacity.""They are quite responsive and our local team was pretty good."

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"It has reduced our electricity usage by reducing the amount of disks needed for the virtual environment.""EasyTier/hotcaching: Valuable because it allows greater performance than standard SAS disks""It performed great originally, and when it performed great, it was awesome.""The initial setup is straightforward.""Data Compression: Up to 80% space reduction in the database""It provides a combination of all the protocols that you need, without losing deduplication and compression.""High performance and ease-of-management are the most valuable features.""It's very fast. We were seeing read latencies of less than one millisecond. It is robust."

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"It's got full API functionality and the performance is pretty steady.""Feature-wise, it is a good solution allowing users to monitor and simplify their networks. The solution also provides its users with flexibility by enabling them to utilize its extensions.""SolidFire provides seamless performance across your storage system when you need to scale up. Other storage systems do not do that.""SolidFire is one of the products that does have great APIs right out-of-the-box. It works great. The tools and the other stuff seem to work a little better right out-of-the-box than the ONTAP stuff does, C-Mode.""It's a very compact device. For a medium-sized business, it's very helpful because the device is efficient and very fast.""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.""We can just buy them, scale them as we need on demand, and we don't have to spend so many front end cycles on designing the architecture."

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Cons
"The backend of this solution utilizes an Active/Passive architecture, rather than an Active/Active architecture, which is a disadvantage, when compared to some of its competitors. Its storage capacity should be expanded in the next release.""I would love for them to have a hyper-converged solution.""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.""Pure Storage FlashArray could improve by being more secure.""They could improve the price.""Having something native in the Pure Storage ecosystem would make it integrated and in one single company, and we wouldn't have to work with multiple organizations.""The scalability of the solution is not as good as it probably could be.""The price of this solution could be improved."

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"Technical support is bad. It'd grade them at 30% or 40%. The response time is terrible.""Performance is horrible now. Our original intent was to buy new storage in about two years. But since it became a critical urgency for us, we decided to purchase a new one in two or three months.""We had just one small stability problem with power flapping and it did not start up again automatically. We had to access service ports and manually restart the storage processors.""In the proxy section you can’t choose a user account and password, so it is not allowed at the moment to go out, if customer has such constellation.""It's somewhat scalable, but maybe not so much as some of the competition.""Snapshots are not as easy to access as on a NetApp device.""It only keeps one hour of real-time data without the ability to do deep analysis of each element.""They need to offer better integration for a virtual platform to enable you to create hyper-converged solution."

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"I think there is room for improvement needed with its storage capability. A bigger node is needed.""So feature-wise, I would say more reporting tools that could be merged into it.""SolidFire could improve in terms of hardware robustness.""We have a large fiber channel infrastructure, and that's one area that we haven't seen implemented in SolidFire, its more iSCSI.""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.""The technical support is really bad and has to be improved.""They could make the mNode more user-friendly. Now you need to configure and add nodes by CLI and it’s not really easy to manage. If they created a web interface to do the management of the mNode, that would be great!.""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."

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Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "We feel that the pricing is fair and the licensing process was easy for both."
  • "There is always room for negotiation."
  • "The price was slightly higher than others, but competitive, if you consider all the other features that you get from it."
  • "It is a more expensive solution, but it is worth it. You are getting what you paid for."
  • "For pricing, you have to take into account their performance on deduplication and compression in a $/GB comparison."
  • "We have seen a reduction in total cost of ownership (TCO)."
  • "It is a cheaper solution."
  • "Pure Storage is all-flash, so this sometimes tends to make it a bit more expensive in the beginning."
  • More Pure Storage FlashArray Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "I recommend the full bundle software in order to have all the functionality. It is more expensive to purchase it one by one."
  • "I think we pay around 100 grand per year for three arrays or four arrays."
  • More DDN IntelliFlash Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "We would probably use SolidFire more, except we're getting more bang for our buck with our purchases of ONTAP right now, and the deal we made with NetApp, so it's more of just a cost decision"
  • "The price of this solution is more expensive than others."
  • "Based on what I heard from other people, its price was on the higher side."
  • "On a scale where one is a high price and ten is a low price, I rate the solution between three and four. It is an expensive solution."
  • "It might be considered expensive, but when evaluating performance, it represents good value online because you pay for what you get."
  • More SolidFire Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:Both are great platforms, but if you are considering all flash solutions, I would recommend you to consider Pure… more »
    Top Answer:We consume less physical storage because of the solution’s deduplication and compression.
    Top Answer:We have customers who use a three-year or five-year license. We also have customers who use Evergreen.
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    Top Answer:The provisioning process is efficient and doesn't demand higher latency, ensuring optimal data transfer performance… more »
    Top Answer:It might be considered expensive, but when evaluating performance, it represents good value online because you pay for… more »
    Top Answer:There is room for improvement with a focus on creating a centralized storage system, functioning similar to AWS. This… more »
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    Tegile, IntelliFlash N-Series, IntelliFlash T-Series, IntelliFlash HD-Series
    Learn More
    Overview

    Pure Storage FlashArray is the world’s first enterprise-class storage array that runs exclusively on the nonvolatile memory express (NVMe) protocol for memory access and storage. It represents a totally state-of-the-art type of storage technology. It offers users shared accelerated storage that delivers cutting-edge features in the realms of performance, simplicity, and consolidation. Pure Storage is fresh and modern today and will be for the next decade. Without forklift upgrades or planned downtime, Pure Storage takes the work out of storage ownership and delivers unprecedented customer satisfaction.

    Pure Storage FlashArray is built with simplicity and reliability in mind. The solution can be implemented and optimized in hours, as opposed to other similar solutions that can take days. It has no moving parts, which removes areas where it could potentially be vulnerable to suffering errors. It is highly stable and gives users the ability to manage system shutdowns in a way that  prevents data loss.

    Benefits of Pure Storage FlashArray

    Some of the benefits of using Pure Storage FlashArray include:

    • A much higher level of speed than similar pieces of technology. Pure Storage FlashArray maximizes the speed at which data can be transferred while at the same time minimizing system latencies that might slow the transfer down. Additionally, it offers users quick memory read and data access speeds.

    • A higher bang for your buck in terms of the storage capabilities you get for the money you pay. They are smaller in size than more standard storage technologies, but they offer flash memory, which enables users to store larger amounts of data than the current standard.

    Reviews from Real Users

    Pure Storage FlashArray is a highly effective piece of storage technology which stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Two major ones are its overall robustness and the value that it offers by way of its reliability and ease of use. It provides users with many valuable features that allow them to maximize what they can do with this solution. Pure Storage FlashArray’s reliability and ease of use make it a highly valuable solution. 

    PeerSpot user Prabakaran K., a technical consultant at Injazat Data Systems, notes the robustness of this solution when he writes, "FlashArray has many valuable features. It's very user-friendly and it has high availability, so there is comparatively less downtime. During maintenance, there is no shutdown procedure, so you can directly power off the Array and manage the shutdown process without any data loss, which is a unique feature. Managing replication and data migration is also very easy."

    PeerSpot user Jason D., a cloud solutions architect at a tech services company, notes three features that make this solution valuable when he writes, "We've had different types of storage, and three things of this solution are valuable. The first one is its outstanding performance. The second one is its stability. In the about three years that we've had it, we've had component failures, but we never had a service interruption or any data loss. The third one, which is really critical, is that it is super easy to use in terms of provisioning, storage, and managing the arrays. I'm able to maintain a multi-site environment with a couple of dozen arrays with a single mid-level storage admin."

    Western Digital through its IntelliFlash arrays delivers high-performance storage with a complete range of features and connectivity options, including inline compression and deduplication, application and VM consistent snapshots, replication, RAID, data encryption, VMware vCenter integration, and multi-protocol support for SAN (FC, iSCSI) and NAS (NFS, SMBv3). IntelliFlash arrays deliver high availability through dualredundant and hot-swappable components, active/active or active/passive controllers, non-disruptive software upgrades, eMLC flash, and proactive cloud-based monitoring, analytics, and intelligence. A RESTful API provides scripted or programmatic control.

    SolidFire delivers all five core elements needed to deliver newfound storage agility to your next generation data center and beyond. With SolidFire you can deploy new applications and capabilities faster, provide more agile and scalable infrastructure, increase application performance and predictability, enable automation and end-user self-service and raise operational efficiency and reduce cost.

    Sample Customers
    Nielsen, Lamar Advertising, LinkedIn, Betfair, UT-Dallas
    Bank of Stockton, Barnsley College, Boyes Turner, Brigham Young University
    California Public Utilities Commission, RFA, 1&1, Ultimate Software , Endicia, ezVerify, MercadoLibre, Sungard Availability Services, ServInt, Elastx, Hosted Network, Colt, Crucial, iWeb, Datapipe, Databarracks
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm19%
    Healthcare Company12%
    Manufacturing Company10%
    Computer Software Company8%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization32%
    Computer Software Company12%
    Manufacturing Company8%
    Financial Services Firm8%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company13%
    Manufacturing Company9%
    University9%
    Healthcare Company8%
    REVIEWERS
    Comms Service Provider27%
    Retailer20%
    Legal Firm7%
    Pharma/Biotech Company7%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Financial Services Firm21%
    Computer Software Company18%
    Manufacturing Company8%
    Real Estate/Law Firm6%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business27%
    Midsize Enterprise16%
    Large Enterprise57%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business17%
    Midsize Enterprise41%
    Large Enterprise42%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business67%
    Midsize Enterprise17%
    Large Enterprise17%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business24%
    Midsize Enterprise9%
    Large Enterprise68%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business27%
    Midsize Enterprise20%
    Large Enterprise53%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business23%
    Midsize Enterprise12%
    Large Enterprise65%
    Buyer's Guide
    All-Flash Storage
    March 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, NetApp, Pure Storage and others in All-Flash Storage. Updated: March 2024.
    765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    DDN IntelliFlash is ranked 28th in All-Flash Storage with 11 reviews while SolidFire is ranked 19th in All-Flash Storage with 33 reviews. DDN IntelliFlash is rated 7.4, while SolidFire is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of DDN IntelliFlash writes "Good features with an easy initial setup but technical support is slow ". 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". DDN IntelliFlash is most compared with VAST Data, NetApp AFF, Tintri VMstore, Dell Unity XT and DDN SFA7990X, whereas SolidFire is most compared with NetApp AFF, Dell PowerStore and VMware vSAN.

    See our list of best All-Flash Storage vendors.

    We monitor all All-Flash Storage reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.