We performed a comparison between SolidFire and VMware vSAN 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."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."
"Data reduction and compression. Sub millisecond latency."
"The most valuable feature is its speed."
"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 like the data reduction rates. That has been really helpful. You get 4U of Pure storage replacing something like two racks of spinning disks. One of the things that has contributed to that are the data reduction rates."
"Data deduplication is one feature I found to be the most valuable in the tool...Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"The mobile app is very helpful."
"At this point, I don't know anything that they could provide in a better way."
"It's got full API functionality and the performance is pretty steady."
"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."
"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."
"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 scalability and being able to implement it quickly."
"The most valuable feature is the performance, as well as how you manage performance on the system."
"If you buy the solution for its specific purpose it will work well."
"The system efficiency is excellent overall."
"Technical support has been very good. They respond pretty fast, especially if we have a critical issue. Their responses have been great."
"The lower skill cost of maintaining it meant that we could do more with the people that we had."
"Easy-to-use, and easy-to-scale product."
"We find it easy to deliver this solution."
"The solution is stable."
"Scalability in vSAN has been really good. It's very easy to add nodes in, to automatically generate the drives and the disk groups. It has been a piece of cake, surprisingly so."
"We are finding that vSAN is a lot more scalable and adaptable, because we can go in with hybrid arrays for our lower-end storage needs or with all-flash versions of vSAN for places where we need more performance, and it's coming in at a lower cost point than an actual traditional array."
"There is not a lot of maintenance required."
"It was not proactive communication."
"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."
"Pricing could be better in comparison to other solutions."
"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."
"In terms of the future, I have been excited by some of the copy data management stuff that they're talking about building into the environment. There are feature sets where I've done a lot of automation work. So, I am always looking forward to extensions of their API. They're also talking about a phone home centralized analytics database being used as a centralized management console with a list of new cloud features, but this doesn't seem finalized."
"One thing I'd like to see in a future release is integration between their main storage array and what they call their FlashBlade product; to be able to snapshot directly from the primary array into multiple different backup copies on FlashBlade."
"It goes at about 95 percent, so we have had some performance issues. It is hard to clear them."
"We do have an issue with the vCenter integration. Pure Storage says it has a lot of free space, but vCenter says its completely full. This is because their dedupes are saved as space, but Vcenter still detects the disk as completely full. So, we do have an issue with that."
"The technical support is really bad and has to be improved."
"So feature-wise, I would say more reporting tools that could be merged into it."
"We have a large fiber channel infrastructure, and that's one area that we haven't seen implemented in SolidFire, its more iSCSI."
"The inclusion of more protocols and interfaces would make it easier to integrate with other products."
"The user interface needs to be improved. Much of the client feedback involves comments such as "Oh, it's hard to navigate through.""
"The tool should improve its initial cost which is expensive compared to other products."
"This solution would be improved if it were made to be more compatible with other products."
"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."
"There are certain shortcomings in the stability of the product where improvements are required."
"It could have some automation. We haven't involved ourselves in a lot of automation around the vSAN environment capabilities. We're still running it using a very traditional setup. So, there could be some plugins to automate it using third-party environments, such as Jenkins."
"Based on my testing, I would like to expand deduplication to include hybrid deployments and not just for all-flash deployments."
"Ease of administration is one area where vSAN could be improved."
"They should provide Deduplication and Compression over the hybrid drives."
"I'd like to see better integration with the Update Manager, with respect to firmware updates for hardware."
"I would like to see a little bit more documentation on the initial setup, and a little bit more explanation on the expandability: How to extend out your vSAN much more simply through the console because, a lot of the time, you have to do it through the command line."
"I lose a node in a cluster vSAN, which is also used as a cluster HA. I lose not only the storage part, which is not necessarily serious (depending on the configuration of the vSAN cluster), but on the other hand, I lose also a node of Compute, which can make things complicated quickly."
SolidFire is ranked 19th in All-Flash Storage with 33 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 3rd in HCI with 226 reviews. SolidFire is rated 8.2, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.4. 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". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSAN writes "Very stable, easy to set up, and easy to use". SolidFire is most compared with NetApp AFF and Dell PowerStore, whereas VMware vSAN is most compared with VxRail, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, HPE SimpliVity, Red Hat Ceph Storage and NetApp AFF.
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