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."The tool is simple and easy to use. It has neat features like protection from device removal. Moreover, you can undo the deletes. The solution is easy to work with and not as complicated as CAC"
"We've been using FlashArray's snapshot for backups. Their replication across sites and response time are also excellent."
"It is the SAN backbone for our company."
"The predictive performance analytics are good."
"The solution is easy to scale. I'm running two environments right now, so I need to scale. I'm running a part technology. I've got an A-side and a B-side."
"Technical support has been amazing."
"It's simple, powerful, and ready to use."
"The initial setup was very straightforward and very quick. It was up and running in our data center within 24 hours of receiving it."
"It performed great originally, and when it performed great, it was awesome."
"The initial setup is straightforward."
"It has reduced our electricity usage by reducing the amount of disks needed for the virtual environment."
"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."
"EasyTier/hotcaching: Valuable because it allows greater performance than standard SAS disks"
"It provides a combination of all the protocols that you need, without losing deduplication and compression."
"Data Compression: Up to 80% space reduction in the database"
"It's a very compact device. For a medium-sized business, it's very helpful because the device is efficient and very fast."
"I would say in terms of architecture and in terms of functionality, the product is quite good."
"SolidFire provides seamless performance across your storage system when you need to scale up. Other storage systems do not do that."
"The system efficiency is excellent overall."
"If we get complaints about any kind of performance metric issues, whether it's storage related or something on the virtual side, we use it to pinpoint what the actual issue is."
"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."
"Templates are already predefined for it. If you're coding it up, it will take two days. You can pick up a template right there from the API, and it just works for you. Implementation done in 10 minutes."
"It's got full API functionality and the performance is pretty steady."
"It goes at about 95 percent, so we have had some performance issues. It is hard to clear them."
"I would like to see more cloud integration."
"It's not so scalable. It's got moderate scaling capabilities right now. The clustering technology needs a bit of work, they need to improve that."
"The problem is that we can only make a few groups, around five or six groups. I like groups and we need a lot of them. We had to put all the information in only a few groups and cannot make a more detailed separation of them."
"This product has only two active controllers, whereas other solutions can have more. This is something that needs to improve."
"I like what they're doing, but some of my customers complain that they do not have all the bells and whistles and knobs to fine-tune workloads that some of the competitors have. In my opinion, that's good. All customers don't have dedicated storage gurus, and they can get themselves into trouble if they fine-tune too many of those high-performance knobs, but they do get knocked down. Pure Storage takes a hit in the minds and opinions of some of the customers because they cannot customize things as much as compared to a legacy storage provider's appliance such as NetApp, Dell EMC, or even HPE. I personally think 95% of my customers are better off letting the system fine-tune itself. That was something that you needed to do 12 or 15 years ago, but now with all-flash, the technology can handle what it needs to handle. Customers just end up shooting themselves in the foot if they are tweaking too many default settings."
"The connectivity needs improvement. You do not have the possibility to have a file and block connectivity at the same time on the same machine. It has limited ability to do so."
"We need to add more storage in Pure Storage FlashArray with the cluster mode activated for us to have better performance."
"It's somewhat scalable, but maybe not so much as some of the competition."
"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."
"Technical support is bad. It'd grade them at 30% or 40%. The response time is terrible."
"It only keeps one hour of real-time data without the ability to do deep analysis of each element."
"Snapshots are not as easy to access as on a NetApp device."
"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."
"They need to offer better integration for a virtual platform to enable you to create hyper-converged solution."
"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."
"The scalability of HCI or SolidFire as such isn't a concern, but when you compare it to PowerMax or NetApp AFF series devices, scalability is a concern because it's only the drives that are connected to the nodes. We don't have any shelf connectivity."
"SolidFire should start from two nodes instead of the four nodes. That's the only thing. In a lot of solutions, we have to use four nodes, that's the better thing. But as a starting point, two is better. That's why their starting point is expensive."
"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 inclusion of more protocols and interfaces would make it easier to integrate with other products."
"The technical support is really bad and has to be improved."
"The upgrade process could be better."
"One of the challenges we faced while using SolidFire was that the product line that we were using in our company was discontinued."
"A little better segregation of the multi-tenancy. Right now, it's just VLAN-specific, that's all you can do."
Earn 20 points
DDN IntelliFlash is ranked 29th 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 8.2. 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 and Tintri VMstore, whereas SolidFire is most compared with NetApp AFF, Dell PowerStore and VMware vSAN.
See our list of best All-Flash Storage vendors.
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