We were evaluating it head-to-head with NetApp. At that time, it was not yet acquired by NetApp, and we already had NetApp storage in use.

We did an extensive evaluation of several products and vendors, looking at SF, Kaminario, Nimble, Pure Storage, EMC, and HPE.

Price was a factor, but it was not the only factor. We are not a huge shop, but are growing, so we wanted something that had a solid architecture for now and for later.

We wanted it to be as bulletproof as possible, and yet be able to change/grow with us. The more standard, dual-controller-with-1-shelf can survive with a controller failure, or 1+ drive failures, but what about a shelf failure? While this is unlikely, it is still a possibility.

With SF, a few minutes after a drive failure, the data (blocks) that were located on that drive are re-duplicated elsewhere. In a very short time (a few minutes), you are fully-protected again. And as long as you have sufficient spare capacity - you can lose an entire node with no data-loss and reportedly only a small performance hit (even software upgrades are non-disruptive, as they are done 1 node at a time).

That entire node's data is re-duplicated elsewhere on the remaining nodes. If you don't have a node's worth of spare capacity, that becomes more problematic, of course.

What this also means is, as you add nodes, for increases in both capacity and performance, a.k.a. the scale-out model, you also get faster recovery times in case an entire node fails.

Adding nodes is a simple as:

1. Adding a node to the cluster
2. Adding the drives.

Data is re-balanced across the new nodes automatically. Removing/Decommissioning a node is just as easy:

1. Remove the drives from the cluster
2. Allow data to be re-located
3. Remove the node from the cluster

There is another unique option. Let's say I grow to 10 nodes, but the LOB application changes, and the role is no longer the same. I can break that into 2 x 5-node arrays and redeploy in different roles.

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update: since doing the initial review, we have added two additional nodes.  Very easy to do, the data re-balancing (distribution) is done automatically.

I can't compare the solution with any other product in the market since I haven't used any other tool.

We were really looking for the highest performance combined with very specific requirements regarding the platform. Of course, we looked at the NetApp portfolio, but they couldn't offer anything that matched our requirements in both ways. All of a sudden, our upper management came up with, "Look at these guys. they're doing great job.", and that's how we ended up with SolidFire.

Of course, we evaluated some other vendors, as well, but the package that SolidFire delivered was simply the best. It was not only the performance or price. In fact, the price is quite high compared to other vendors, but what we really loved about SolidFire was the agility of the team. If you deal with really large vendors, like EMC, NetApp, or HPE, you do not have much leverage when it comes to, “We want that, we need that and please change the product this way.”

SolidFire was very open, their support was great, and they fixed a lot of problems on our side with their solution.

When my company selects a vendor, the reputation is not a key factor for us. That's why we looked at SolidFire in the first place. For us, it was very interesting to work with a small provider. We always try to get some leverage there; that we can influence the development. That's why we focus, in the evaluation also, on small vendors. Of course, we looked at different providers, like Pure Storage, Nimble and so on, but in the end, SolidFire delivered the perfect package for us.

After NetApp acquired SolidFire, we were a little afraid that it wouldn't work out, because we all have seen acquisitions that went totally wrong. As soon as we got the word that they were acquired, we immediately started looking at other vendors. But, at the moment, we're still really happy with them and it seems that the combination really works out. What happens with NetApp is, now that we're looking at the rest of the NetApp portfolio, because the integration of SolidFire seems to work quite good, the other products get more interesting for us as well.

EMC.

We considered hybrid storage but they were eliminated because they're a legacy architecture, for most of them; with bolt-ons. And the other ones were dual control or architectures; we are not about scale up anymore. We want scale out.

There were a couple of them: Hitachi, EMC. But I'm pretty much into NetApp's side of it.

It's all been NetApp products. There's been AFF FAS and then we just thought we would look at SolidFire because we've had such great luck with AFF and FAS for many, many years. We've been a long standing NetApp customer and it just looked like a good solution for us to try, do the proof of concept, and it worked out well for us.

We did not consider hybrid storage for this specific use case, but we do have hybrid storage from that NetApp in other parts of our infrastructure. We are also adding some other tiers of storage into this cloud solution, potentially storage grid and potentially some other FAS-type thing for protocol-based access.

We looked at EMC, we looked at Pure Storage, and we also looked at DDN. And for what we needed to do, none of those vendors fit the bIll. None of those had been there to give us what we needed.

We also considered hybrid storage. But SolidFire is a specialized product. For hybrid we can use a fast product line. But SolidFire, it's designed, as far as we see, for a specific use case and that's why we are targeting it for our workload.

We've got quite a few different vendors on our floor today. Just about any vendor, you name them, is on our floor. For the applications, and what we were trying to move towards, the SolidFire seemed to fit every niche we were looking at, for the part we brought it in for. It was a very good product.

I don't think we looked at much in the hybrid. SolidFire met all the criteria of what we were looking for, for that part of our infrastructure. 

We were down between SolidFire before it was acquired by NetApp, so this would be even pre-merger, and our other one was Pure Storage. We chose this solution because of the flexibility to scale out compared to the competitors, such as Pure; along with cost, at almost about a three-to-one cost difference.

Operational costs, flexibility. The more nodes you add the more cost it is, but it's definitely significantly cheaper compared to other competitors that are on the market.

We did not want to consider hybrid storage because we previously had hybrid storage, and we had problems with our VDI, our virtual infrastructure, to where we wanted to get flash array. All flash was a big deal for us to get to.

We looked at Texas Memory, we looked at Violin Memory, we looked at XtremIO. All those solutions just didn't compare with what we could do with SolidFire in terms of performance, support, product stability. SolidFire definitely just blew the competition away.

We've evaluated three or four different all-flash type solutions. We actually went with one of the other solutions first. We ran into a very large bug about a year or year and a half ago, with an all-flash solution, and that particular provider was having issues correcting it. They still really haven't corrected it, so we can't push it as hard as we want to. When we were starting to look at a different solution, SolidFire came back with a good pricing model for us, as well as being able to meet the demands of what we're trying to deal with, and provide a rip and replace solution on our storage area that worked awhile back.

We also looked at hyper-converged infrastructure competitors.

We actually have both in our environment. We're really assessing both at the same time and trying to see which might be better for certain use cases. One is more storage focused and the other one's computing and storage. There's that problem, too, where you just want to compute. Expanding on storage is more difficult with the hyper-converged stuff but with SolidFire, you can just expand on the storage without worrying about compute.