It might be considered expensive, but when evaluating performance, it represents good value online because you pay for what you get.

In India, we didn't use it much. It was being used for our sites in the US for banking operations, etc. Based on what I heard from other people, its price was on the higher side.

I believe the initial buy-in/purchase is more expensive, because you are starting out with 4 (minimum) nodes. It then becomes cheaper and easier to expand and grow.

For example, compared to the more traditional dual-controllers+shelf, expanding to a new shelf was a pretty big investment and you needed to fully populate it with drives).

That uses the same controllers, so you have added capacity but not performance. Whereas, adding another node is a relatively simple operation. You don't even have to add all the drives right away. Licensing is via your support contract.

Within HCI, the whole solution is considered to be quite extensive. As just a storage solution, however, SolidFire is at the same level of pricing as a full SSD solution like ASF. It really depends on what the customer's needs are. That said, it's quite well positioned in terms of price.

On a scale where one is a high price and ten is a low price, I rate the solution between three and four. It is an expensive solution.

While I don't know specifics about the licensing costs or procedures, my understanding it's comparable to other products. We did a comparison with Pure recently and the per-gigabyte charge was within a range of five to 10 cents difference.

We would probably use SolidFire more, except we're getting more bang for our buck with our purchases of ONTAP right now, and the deal we made with NetApp, so it's more of just a cost decision. Because we're going NAS, it doesn't really fit the pattern of where we're going, because everything is being presented via NFS, so it's just block storage. That would be the reason the footprint is not growing.

However, as long as the price is right, it is a no-brainer on block.

One thing I would advise people is regarding the price. This is a very important point here. When you go for being a gold partner, not as a customer, then you should get a better discount. And if you get a better discount from NetApp, then we can compete with any other solution. But here, it is really important to tell the customer what the total cost of ownership is, not just the starting point, because at the starting point, it's still a little bit expensive. But when you have a back-end gold partnership, then you can tell NetApp, "Okay, NetApp I am competing for the cheaper solution." Then you can get extra discounts to sell the product.

But then in parallel, you must inform the customer. If you want a Ferrari, you have to pay for that.You have to tell the customer, "Technically, it is very good." You have to convince your customer that if they want technical ability, agility, simplicity and real ease of management plus a lot of other things, then you have to pay for that. There's no free lunch at all. Somebody has to pay.

The pricing of the solution is fair and definitely competes in the marketplace. We have no monthly cost. We bought the product outright with all licensing included and have support with them for three years.

The price of this solution is more expensive than others.

I can't comment on the price of the product because I only deal with it on a technical level. 

The quality of service is unique. There's no one who does it like NetApp. Additionally, we can allow customers to do more with less while using this solution.