We performed a comparison between NetApp (All Flash FAS) and SolidFire based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Based on the parameters we compared, NetApp AFF (All Flash FAS) came out ahead of SolidFire. Even though the two products are straightforward to deploy and have good support, SolidFire has fewer valuable features and more areas that require improvement.
"The Pure1 component is most valuable at this point in time when comparing it with EMC. Pure1 is where you can have your diagnostics in the cloud, so you can look at things from your mobile phone."
"The most valuable features of this solution are its ease of use and performance."
"Pure has signature security technology, which cannot be deleted, even if you are an administrator."
"It's incredibly easy to use and greatly simplified our ability to both deploy and manage our storage subsystems."
"The duplication algorithm allows us to get a lot more use out of less storage. We're running a five terabyte array right now and we're running probably about 30 terabytes on it. So the duplication rate is pretty phenomenal, without a cost to performance. It still runs pretty smoothly."
"What I really like about this program, is that it is easy to use and easy to configurate."
"It is very easy to install and configure. It has got excellent diagnostics. If you really need to see how the box is performing, the console gives you a lot of information. You can set thresholds as well as alerts based on the thresholds, which is a very powerful functionality. They are very proactive. They know how to monitor and manage the systems. They see a problem, and they are all over it before us. They see the problem before we see it, which is very good."
"Pure FlashArray X NVMe will quickly overcome all the hurdles you face, including network and latency issues."
"The most valuable features are high performance and encryption. It also provides aggregate level dedupe."
"My favorite part is all-flash solid drives. All of my applications are running on an all-flash array. Before, we used to get too many severity tickets on performance, but as soon as we migrated everything to an all-flash array, our critical applications are at top performance."
"AFF helps us improve performance for our enterprise applications, data analytics and VMs. We have moved our primary data stores for production over to AFF, and a lot of the problems that might happened have gone away."
"We are spending less time putting out fires, so there's a tangible benefit right there."
"Speed. it's very performance designed. It's designed to have a lot of high speed."
"The most valuable features of this solution are the deduplication and the ability to move data to different clouds."
"I think it is a very stable product."
"We have SQL clusters across the United States. It has sped up our IOPS and made it a lot easier for users."
"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."
"Being able to provide quality of service as promised."
"I would say in terms of architecture and in terms of functionality, the product is quite good."
"The provisioning process is efficient and doesn't demand higher latency, ensuring optimal data transfer performance which is particularly valuable for tasks like data mining, where quick results are essential."
"We can add a node, we add compute, we add storage, and we've had really good luck with that."
"It is very easy to scale up SolidFire."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is its scalability."
"Individual settings you can put on each individual volume, if you want to do that."
"You cannot tag a LUN with a description, and that should be improved. What I like on the Unity side is that when I expand LUNs or do things, there is an information field on the LUN. This is the Information field that you can tag on your LUNs to let yourself know, "Hey, I've added this much space on this date". Pure lacks that ability. So, you don't have a mechanism that's friendly for tracking your data expansions on the LUN and for adding any additional information. That's a downside for me."
"The tool's pricing is higher than competitors."
"It is on the expensive side."
"Right now, the box itself is just strictly working as a backend storage system. It would be fantastic if we could access it directly like a NAS device through network access or SIS drives. I think they have an interface, but I am not sure how good it is. If we could address a box directly on the network without having to go through a server, it would be great. The replication schemas could be improved. We are not using replication on the storage level right now. We use a different type of replication. If their replication would be as good as the one that we have, I would probably run the replication schema because it might be faster, but I don't know that for a fact. So, I cannot say that they have good replication. All I can say is that they need to inform us better."
"In terms of what needs improvement, the dashboard and management could be simplified."
"We would like to see VNC integration or be able to use Pure Storage with VNC."
"There is room for improvement in catering to midrange storage needs, especially for customers seeking Enterprise-class features."
"The software layer has to improve."
"We'd like to see improvement in the time to retrieve from the Cloud, whether it's on-prem to cloud and whether it's public or private cloud."
"It would be nice to have better integration between SRM and VMware, as I've had some issues with that."
"In the past, NetApp designed it so that you have a 70% threshold. You would never fill up past 70% since you need to have that room available. Whereas with Pure, I can fill it up to 110% of what they listed and it's still going at full speed. NetApp can't do that."
"AFF could introduce different subscriptions on the platform."
"The Bezels need improvement."
"Migrating from a public cloud to on-prem or on-prem to a cloud can be a bit complicated. They have their own solution, but it should be easy to use."
"We would like to have a feature that automatically moves volumes between aggregates, based on the performance. We normally need to do this manually."
"FC and ATTO bridges are still needed for cross datacenter replication."
"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 tool should improve its initial cost which is expensive compared to other products."
"We had some false positives, power supplies failing, and that's really been about it. We had a couple of glitches during some upgrade processes but nothing that was really concerning to us."
"One of the challenges we faced while using SolidFire was that the product line that we were using in our company was discontinued."
"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."
"You don't have business continuity with SolidFire. I think it could be a nice feature to have in the future."
"The technical support is really bad and has to be improved."
"We have a large fiber channel infrastructure, and that's one area that we haven't seen implemented in SolidFire, its more iSCSI."
NetApp AFF is ranked 2nd in All-Flash Storage with 280 reviews while SolidFire is ranked 19th in All-Flash Storage with 33 reviews. NetApp AFF is rated 9.0, while SolidFire is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of NetApp AFF writes "Since switching, our clients have reported improved performance and reduced latency". 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 AFF is most compared with Dell PowerStore, Dell Unity XT, Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series, Pure Storage FlashArray and VMware vSAN, whereas SolidFire is most compared with Dell PowerStore, VMware vSAN and Pure Storage FlashArray. See our NetApp AFF vs. SolidFire report.
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.
