I would rate its customer service and support nine out of ten.

We contacted them. They were responsive, and they were able to resolve our issues.

Customer Service:

Customer service was good. I haven't needed much so far. We prefer to be our own source of knowledge and reach out to clarify or confirm something.

Technical Support:

Technical support is good and helpful. While you can schedule the node S/W upgrades and have them take care of, I had them walk me through it, as we were in pre-production at the time. Knowing/understanding more about the process gave me a better feeling.

I don't like black boxes, so anything I can understand or wrap my head around things provides comfort. The nodes are ubuntu and they leverage ubuntu/debian update mechanisms. These methods are well-known and understood, so no re-inventing the wheel was necessary here.

I have previously contacted the technical support team of the solutions provider, and I had no issues with them as they provided good service.

The only time I had an issue was with a motherboard. In fact, with the SolidFire technology, NetApp was able to acquire Active IQ. Active IQ is the software layer that is pushing all information on the health of the SolidFire platform. 

Therefore, the support is really quite proactive, in fact. Each time there was something to do, a component to change, or an upgrade to do on the platform, it was followed by emails from the NetApp support, who would remind me of necessary changes. Even with Active IQ, we've had advice on what we could do on the system to get better performance or better organization about the data that resides on the SolidFire platform. 

It's got really great proactive support, and we're quite satisfied with them.

I do have experience with the solution's technical support. They try to provide resolutions to our issues. I rate the technical support a nine out of ten.

Technical support is very good. We had some minor issues when we started the US data center, because we did not reach the performance level that we were promised and that we had in the European data centers. We figured out, it cannot be a hardware problem; it must be somewhere within our implementation. The SolidFire guys were very, very supportive and now, with over-provisioning, we reach levels that are far beyond the guaranteed levels.

The support team is very good.

I called technical support once, early on. So I don't know how that's changed with NetApp acquisition.

I haven't used it directly, but I know how many cases have been raised, and it's quite on the low side.

I've never really dealt with technical support. There was another engineer that mostly dealt with them. The times that I dealt with support, they were pretty knowledgeable. That was definitely before NetApp purchased SolidFire. Their support was top-notch. Since then, if we can get past the first layer of support, it seems to be better than what I would expect, however, there have been issues with calling in and not getting the right support. It just takes time to get past the level that isn't as knowledgeable as the next level up.

Each time I have been in contact with technical support, it has been proactive. They always call me before I realize that there is a problem. They will call or send an email, at which point they will explain whether there are updates that you should consider installing.

We are connected to NetApp using Active IQ, and the support contacted me to say that there was a disk that was not behaving as expected, according to their metrics and analytics.  They sent me a new disk and we changed it, which was a very easy process. 

In a previous experience, I had a SolidFire platform in the lab, and I remember that we changed a motherboard on one of the nodes. It was not a problem and it was done without disruption. The data on the system was still available from the other nodes.

Overall, I have no complaints about the NetApp support around SolidFire.

Any small, minor issues that we've had have been resolved by support really quickly and support has been extremely good with SolidFire.

I have not used technical support. We looked at the documentation. We had minimal input from our accountant team. We're a very experienced NetApp shop. So we more or less know how to manage storage systems. And again, SolidFire, it's very intuitive as to how you go about using it.

The tool’s technical support is very good. We encounter very few issues with the tool. Therefore, the requirement for support is low compared to other products.

I have dealt with technical support many times. They’ve been very good. What they tout is they only have level-three engineers; there aren’t the normal layers of trying to get to somebody who can actually answer your question, because the first engineer you get ahold of usually knows the answer. If they can't, they basically have direct access to the engineers and developers. It's amazing; it works very well.

We've used them twice. They were great.

It is fine.

That is a problem we have. When we call tech support, we have to open a tunnel to the SolidFire device, then tech support can get in and look at it. The tunnel keeps closing on them. So we'll open the tunnel, 10 minutes later I'll get a phone call. "Hey, the tunnel closed. Can you open it?"

The only way to keep the tunnel, and I think it might be an issue with our proxy on our end, but something is closing the support tunnel. I don't know if it is a NetApp issue. We haven't been able to fix it on our end, so I don't know if they can give me any feedback on it, but it is a chronic issue. We have to babysit that tunnel, and I don't know why.

Hit and miss, to be honest. I've had some bad experiences, I've had some good experiences. All-in-all it's been good, above average, but I have had some unfortunate experiences.

On the negative side of it, I'm working on support, and I would get not enough detail or the support tech would say, "Check the manual." They'd send me the manual, and its a 680-page manual. We're all busy. I have a job too. I don't have time to read through 680 pages. Send me the three, four, five pages that I need that's effective to my problem.

And ultimately just follow-up in another situation where we're working through a case. They tell me I'm fine. Then, a month later, they tell me I've got a problem on my SolidFire array, and all of a sudden. That was not told to me for the past 30 days, and it kind of caught me off guard from a communication standpoint. To me, the customer, I felt it could have definitely been improved.

Tech support was fine. The fact that I had to contact tech support just to get administrative at the BIOS level was kind of painful. But other than that, yeah, lovely.

The product is really amazing, so I will not even think about the technical support because it's so easy to manage. There is no problem when you apply the solution according to the requirements and the documentation. You don't need support. In comparison other storage systems like Oracle, and others, have lots of problems and you need support. But with NetApp I only need the support to replace the component and that's easy to do. Also, the fault frequency of NetApp is really low compared to other storage systems.

I didn't experience any kind of problem which took a long time with NetApp support, but I did find a lot of problems which held me with support for other storage solutions like Oracle and EMC. This is very important because the backend engine is very strong. This is really a very smooth experience through the warranty period and of course after the warranty period. I got very good support from NetApp.

The technical support of the solution is quite good. They are responsive and knowledgeable.

The technical support for this solution can be good and bad. If you have a really big issue then it's bad because it takes quite a long time for the issue to be solved.

There are different levels of service. You can have a technician who is able to do the troubleshooting and is allowed to set up the commands.

If you just have questions with no due date, or you just have to fix a small package, the support is good. You always get the answers you need. However, in critical situations, we have had problems. For example, in the last three years, we spend three or four hours on the phone with support where nobody could escalate our tickets. 

Honestly they have probably one of the best technical support staff we've worked with. One of the things that we did do during our PoC, is we actually made support calls at two in the afternoon, asked specific questions. We actually opened up support calls at 2am, just to see if we would actually get the same response which is exactly what we saw. It was good to see.

The technical support is great. I've never had an issue with the technical support. When we open up a ticket – whether it's email, phone, whatever it happens to be – we usually get something back fairly quickly; they'll jump on the problem. We can give them access to the arrays or the clusters fairly easily so that they can figure out what the issues are. Getting new nodes or hard drives or whatever, in-house, usually happens fairly quickly. I have had a couple of issues with that in the past. Nothing major, but that's probably where they lost some of their points.

I've had a very good experience with technical support. 

For the most part, it's been pretty good. We've had to use it a lot for what I explained earlier, the hardware failures. This was mostly before it was integrated into NetApp support. We haven't really used them recently, so I don't know how the assimilation into NetApp support has taken effect.

I did have an issue where, when I was deleting stuff, it did not detect that I had deleted something. I just reached out to the SE and he gave me the script to unmap the blocks that I had originally used. That was the only time I had an issue. They were great, excellent, and responsive.

They're very knowledgeable. They provided us good documentation.

The technical support from NetApp is really bad.