There is room for improvement with a focus on creating a centralized storage system, functioning similar to AWS. This involves diverse storage tiers that can be designated for various customers.

The scalability of HCI or SolidFire as such isn't a concern, but when you compare it to PowerMax or NetApp AFF series devices, scalability is a concern because it's only the drives that are connected to the nodes. We don't have any shelf connectivity. I don't know if they have updated it recently because, for the past year, I've been working on other products.

The level of monitoring could be better. They give you access to stats and it is very informative. But you really need to do your own internal availability monitoring. Perhaps they just assume you are. And part of the thing, perhaps an adjustment on my part is needed, is that because something like a drive failure is handled internally and data-blocks are re-duplicated automatically, a failure somehow becomes less urgent. That is not second nature to me.

Having said that, 1) support reaches out if there is an issue, and 2) the on-line reporting is pretty good and only getting better. 

The security provided by the solution is one area that can be improved.

The only thing I would see as a drawback of SolidFire, is that it's a storage that we can address only with the iSCSI protocol and no other protocol such as FC, or things like that, unfortunately. It's probably the only point that I can see that is not positive compared to other storage solutions. 

It would be ideal if the solution could be more open with access protocols. 

Sometimes we have to be careful when we need to add some storage. I'd say some tips and some best practices with respect to that would help. 

You don't have business continuity with SolidFire. I think it could be a nice feature to have in the future.

The company providing the solution had faced some difficulties with their product line, which they must resolve. One of the challenges we faced while using SolidFire was that the product line that we were using in our company was discontinued.

SolidFire could improve in terms of hardware robustness. We often experience many hardware failures across the environment compared to EMC, with many discs and other known failures. In comparison, Fujitsu is the best, as we don't experience any hardware failures.

SolidFire would rank third in hardware robustness, with EMC coming in second. Overall, I feel that the hardware structure of SolidFire is more fragile than that of EMC.

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. If I have a 40-node cluster, it just irritates me. I really wish that they would use IPv6 Autoconfiguration to discover the other nodes and let me just do it by configuring one node.

I think there are some reporting tools like Grafana.

Kubernetes is already there, and VMware is already sorted out. I just came out of that particular session right here at NetApp Insight 2017 and that was amazing.

So feature-wise, I would say more reporting tools that could be merged into it. I'm not sure if you've heard something called Data Protection Adviser, it's a reporting tool. The way you are monitoring your environment, I think it's important.

We have had some issues with it scaling as high as the marketing says it can. We've got some very large clusters of up to over 20 nodes and when you get to that size your upgrades tend to take a long time or just waste. We tend to have issues beyond 20 plus nodes.

The upgrade process could be better. Lately, we've had lots of hardware having general issues with lots of failures. It seems like every month at least we're replacing an entire node, as opposed to just dry failures which you would normally expect, or small components. It seems like we have to replace an entire node pretty often. The hardware reliability isn't quite there.

For people using FC SAN, SolidFire is not an option because of the interface.

The inclusion of more protocols and interfaces would make it easier to integrate with other products.

Adding NFS or another file service would be a good feature, on top of the block storage. There are, however, already other solutions for this in the NetApp portfolio.

We're really in our infancy right now for what we use it for. We haven't really gotten into a lot of the advanced features and functionality of SolidFire because we get so many things out of the OpenStack overlay. For now it's doing what we wanted it to do.

Anything we've had, were covered by Hotfix. We had some false positives, power supplies failing, and that's really been about it. We had a couple of glitches during some upgrade processes but nothing that was really concerning to us.

Everything has been resolved.

It happens with any product. It wasn't anything that stood out for us, to be a red light.

I'd like to see a fiber channel being implemented in it. We have a large fiber channel infrastructure, and that's one area that we haven't seen implemented in SolidFire, its more iSCSI.

It's not a deal breaker, its just something that we would like to see. And I believe they mentioned it will be implemented soon, so we're just waiting for that part to be added into it.

The tool should improve its initial cost which is expensive compared to other products.

I would like to see more of the fiber channel connect, legacy-type, Linux-type front-ends to it. That would really help in our environment.

It's a very good Windows-type solution. But we do a lot of legacy systems and the like. So it's getting that incorporated into it that would help us.

The upcoming release is supposed to have much richer VMware virtual volume (VVOL) support, which is something we're very interested in. For our particular environment, we also use the VMware Integrated OpenStack, and so our VVOL adoption is waiting on VMware because they have to update their VIO product, but that's definitely a direction we want to move.

Nothing I can think of that they don't know about right now. They're looking at making some of the custom widgets and reports a lot easier to deal with. They're heading down that direction already, so I don't think that's a big deal.

For example, the ease of use with the reporting. Right now it's not impossible, but you have to know Sequel. It's a little time consuming to get those customized reports in there.

They could do a file-based NAS: SolidFire NAS-based. It's probably not its niche, but that is our direction, not to use block, and it's block. Solid state block is what it is.

If it was the same price as C-Mode and did file-based storage, because this is what our company is heading towards.

We are looking for, potentially, on the Active IQ reporting side, to do reporting based on the datastore. Right now, I can report on the whole SolidFire, or I can report on just a certain datastore or a volume. I'd like to take all of my VDI infrastructure, which as an example would be multiple datastores, which I would select, and then do reporting on that for dedup, compression, IOPS - all the different metrics that we currently measure in the SolidFire. It'd be nice to be able to selectively pick what you want to monitor, as far as reporting.

I'm seeing what I want to see. They're expanding and doubling the I/O per every 2U on their new 19210, or something like that. I'm looking forward to getting in there and testing it out as well. I'm really liking the performance of the network.

However, it would be good to provide administrative access at the root level to be able to do things with the system, if need be.

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. 

There is another thing - they should have a mixed/Hybrid disk option too; like other solutions have. If you get around the two things, then you can also compete with the cost. The others have mixed/Hybrid disk options. That's why they are cheaper.

The entry-level for this solution is so high that we had to use other solutions for some of our smaller office locations that are in different parts of the world. As a consequence, because we could not use it across our entire organization, we have changed to something else. I would like to see the entry-level changed so that you can do really small systems with SolidFire.

This solution would be improved if it were made to be more compatible with other products.

Really, everything our business needs, the solution currently has. Some of the other things that we are really looking forward to are some of the CloudConnect abilities. 

We only have one array today, so we want to add an additional arrays in a different datacenter so then we can actually do some of the Snapshot mirroring. That capability is already there, we just don't have an additional solution for it. Right now, for us, there is not much else that we really need. 

I do like their automation, some of the things that they've actually built in with their PowerShell. A lot of that stuff will help us automate our day to day operations. They've been on track with everything that we're looking for and it's just a great solution.

The product does what it's meant to do and I don't think there's any need for improvement at the moment. The same applies to additional features, which would make the product quite expensive and I don't think it requires that. If you add features, you might lose the things that the product is best at. It makes the most sense to let it be what it is. If you buy the solution for its specific purpose it will work well. Once you add additional features like Essex, you diminish the system and that would be a shame. 

They could make the mNode more user-friendly. Now you need to configure and add nodes by CLI and it’s not really easy to manage. If they created a web interface to do the management of the mNode, that would be great!.

A little better segregation of the multi-tenancy. Right now, it's just VLAN-specific, that's all you can do. There's no authentication domain separations, things like that. For example, the NetApp product has storage virtual machines, which has a lot better segregation, and a lot better multi-tenancy, a lot better role-based access. That's probably the biggest thing that I would say, so we could actually use it for different tenants.

I now know their best practices associated with allocating IOPS to your LUNs. I wish that was more apparent to me when actually configuring the system. That's really the only feedback so far.

Also, in a competitor's solution, they have this ability to tell you what platform you should buy next to expand your environment based on your current needs and your predicted needs for the future. It tells you what models to buy. Maybe SolidFire could do the same thing.

I would like to see integration with the cloud, number one. Being able to spin SolidFire in the cloud. The hybrid cloud vision means that you should be able to run your application anywhere, on-prem or off-prem, so any product should meet that.

The technical support is really bad and has to be improved.

They took away the centrifugal outlook and it is not included anymore which is unfortunate. Additionally, I think there is room for improvement needed with its storage capability. A bigger node is needed.