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.
"This solution has improved our organization. In the past, we had reports that were taking up to two hours and after switching to SSD storage the overall processing power dropped to half an hour. The end users saw an immediate performance gain."
"It's extremely stable and has good performance."
"Pure Storage FlashArray's overall speed is its most valuable feature."
"It is an SSD array that has awesome performance, low submillisecond latency, and does what it is supposed to do. It just works, which is difficult for things to do anymore."
"It has improved my organization because now have lower latency, we get fewer complaints from customers, and we see a constant response time."
"They have really good baked in analytics to show you trends for growth history, so it does help with future planning for data growth."
"It has made working with storage as easy and simple as it should be."
"The management features are well organized and they have a very good dashboard."
"If you need a replacement part, they will provide it."
"The Active IQ feature is a productive mechanism that automatically collects reports and users' statuses."
"The scale up version of it is the most valuable feature. You can go to 24 nodes, which is very cool."
"I'm from Germany, so we have lots of metro clusters. The ability to have two sides that are redundant across hundreds or thousands of kilometers is critical for our customers. We have several hundred customers with metro cluster systems, so that is one of the best features."
"This solution makes everything a lot faster. The time to move data around, boot and migrate VMs is much faster."
"The most valuable feature of NetApp AFF for us is its ability to manage multiple IP spaces for our customers in a shared environment."
"Storage is very reliable. You don't have to do much maintenance."
"The file-based protocol supports NFS and CIFS."
"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."
"It's got full API functionality and the performance is pretty steady."
"Overall performance of the solution."
"The dashboard is such that you don't need to be a storage expert to administer it."
"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."
"The simplicity of it."
"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 would be nice to have a better view of the allocated capacity on their Platform as a Service solution because we have to do some manual calculations to understand how much we are going to pay every month to use the storage that is allocated."
"We've had it in place for about a year and a half and have had zero complaints, other than that box-to-box replication is not encrypted."
"I would like to see the NAS add-on component become more fault-tolerant than just a single virtual machine running inside the array. I'm unwilling to use it for that reason."
"Pure Storage FlashArray could improve the recent file storage capabilities because it is lacking a lot of features."
"Self-backup is the only feature lacking in this solution."
"I would like to get a weekly report of how our storage has been used, and if there is any storage sitting there not being used."
"I would like to see more detailed reporting on the data. However, it would be nice to know what are the exact VMs usage after deduplication and/or what that VMs actual latency and bandwidth is, outside of VMware."
"Historical analytics would be useful. At the moment, they don't have any type of application built for historical analytics."
"A while ago, they performed quite slowly."
"The stability is good but there is room for improvement with other options."
"Something I've talked to NetApp about in the past is going more to a node-based architecture, like the hyper-converged solutions that we are doing nowadays. Because the days of having to buy massive quantities of storage all at one time, have changed to being able to grow in smaller increments from a budgetary standpoint. This change would be great for our business. This is what my leadership would like to see in a lot of things that they purchase now. I would like to see that architecture continue to evolve in that clustered environment."
"NetApp AFF needs to focus more on block storage. It has to focus on high-end, performance-driven applications."
"As for AFF itself, I don't have any suggestions of what I would be excited about seeing. I think that adding the support for the rest of APIs to AFF would be super handy. I think it's something that we've been waiting for for a while which would be fantastic."
"In the current atmosphere, private cloud is improving. NetApp AFF needs to provide flexibility in terms of hardware and capital expense."
"There are some bugs with the solution which need to be fixed."
"The ONTAP S3 implementation is not feature-complete as compared to StorageGRID. We had to move our lakeFS instance from ONTAP S3 based on AFF to StorageGRID."
"I think there is room for improvement needed with its storage capability. A bigger node is needed."
"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."
"The technical support is really bad and has to be improved."
"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."
"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."
"I would like to see integration with the cloud, number one. Being able to spin SolidFire in the cloud."
"A little better segregation of the multi-tenancy. Right now, it's just VLAN-specific, that's all you can do."
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, VMware vSAN and NetApp FAS Series, whereas SolidFire is most compared with Dell PowerStore and VMware vSAN. See our NetApp AFF vs. SolidFire report.
See our list of best All-Flash Storage vendors.
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