We transitioned from VIOLIN storage to SolidFire primarily due to the need for IOPS optimization in our environment. Our customers had varied requirements, with some demanding higher IOPS and others not needing as much.

We have some older EMC boxes that were not sufficient to the task. We wanted an AF (all-flash array).

The product we have been building was brand new, so we didn't have any legacy we had to deal with.

I don't think they have any hidden costs. As far as I know, they are very transparent with their pricing.

We're replacing VMAX. All-purpose, general compute, block storage for the enterprise.

The biggest challenge is for block storage. What we're talking about here is, really, support. They're spinning magnetic drive disks. Sometimes we deal with some performance issues and if we didn't do a lot - if we did not have all the right information to get requirements from our customers so that we can architect the appropriate size solution - then it'd blow up on our face.

With a SolidFire I think that problem goes away. I just ask, "How much capacity do you need?" And I'm good.

I'm also familiar with Pure, NetApp, and VNX.

Pure's are more traditional to controller architecture as opposed to the distributed architecture of SolidFire. It's also all-flash, just like SolidFire. It's even simpler than SolidFire in terms of deployment and management. They've got an active controller configuration so that upgrades are essentially transparent as you upgrade a node or scale. It's just the way that the architecture's designed on the back end.

I have experience with Pure Storage and NetApp is the better option. The software is similar and the Pure Storage has better performance but with NetApp, it is easier to scale up and scale-out.

We had initially purchased AFF for this solution and, while it met our needs, we thought that SolidFire might be a better fit based on how we wanted to configure OpenStack and what our workload was; and again, for the scalability in terms of IOPs and how we have to grow that for AFF versus SolidFire.

Purely the scalability, being able to add a node, add compute, add storage, and being able to restrict IOPs for specific applications and workflows is a really a huge benefit for us.

We had a large implementation of spinning disks, hard drives, and they would fail often. We went to all-flash for our ONTAP systems and SolidFire began all SSDs which ensured that we would have fewer broken disks. We'll have longer up-time, running.

NetApp overall has been very good at helping us incorporate things quickly. The SolidFire was a quick, scalable solution. You can add nodes as quick as you need them. 

Where we were before that was bringing in and setting up whole arrays and then trying to get the pieces we need. The scalability with that is a lot tougher because you're not scaling the nodes, you're scaling strictly storage, unless you bring in another whole set of clustered environment, which takes time. 

We had some NetApp 8040s and 6220s, which we still use for certain workloads because the SolidFires only do block; they don't service our NFS workload. The NetApps we had were flash pools, basically spinning disks fronted by SSD. Even with that configuration, they weren't really able to keep up with our workloads, so we needed something that had a lot higher throughput, so we started looking at all-flash technologies.

At the time, we didn't feel the NetApp offering was as mature as it needed to be, though we didn't technically evaluate that. We looked at ExtremeIO, we looked at Kaminario and finally the SolidFires. The ExtremeIO was really expensive. The Kaminario seemed slightly better but we liked the scalability story around the SolidFires. We then talked to some other customers who had them and confirmed that they really did live up to what the marketing hype said, and that sold us. For our highly dynamic VM workload, it's what the platform was built for, and it was a really good fit for us.

Number one was reliability. We had a competitor of SolidFire that was never up, we had multiple downed outages where our whole business was down, and we have 20 dealerships or rooftops. Being down is not acceptable. Obviously, reliability was a big thing, and then, obviously, the scale out and getting to a flash array for VDI was very important for us.

In terms of solving those challenges, it's simple, it's straightforward, it literally just runs itself, and the scalability. When we need more space or storage array, we can just add to our cluster, which is huge, because we can't predict growth in our industry for automotive.

Density is the key here. Getting high-performance drives in a small package was what we were looking for. We still continue using NetApp, just a newer system, and when we want old flash arrays.

We have had to stop using this solution because the price was too high for global implementation. We are now using NetApp MetroCluster. We were happy with the functionality and switched only because of the price.

Management of traditional SANs was becoming cumbersome. We wanted to look for a more efficient solution. That's why we started looking at SolidFire.

Our biggest challenge was QoS - not getting guaranteed IOPS at the volume level.

We deal with and promote similar solutions from NetApp and Kaminario.