The most significant benefit lies in its exceptional performance, driven by its Flash-based architecture. This enhances routing speed and, consequently, database performance. The provisioning process is efficient and doesn't demand higher latency, ensuring optimal data transfer performance which is particularly valuable for tasks like data mining, where quick results are essential.

In our environment, we had both HCI and SolidFire. It worked well. It was a good device. All the operating systems in NetApp are customized units. It's very user-friendly and easy to understand. It was previously owned by a different company, which was acquired by NetApp in 2016.

It's a very compact device. For a medium-sized business, it's very helpful because the device is efficient and very fast. 

• Expandability (incrementally and non-disruptive
• Compression/Deduplication/thin provisioning
• Recovery from failure/data-protection
• Guaranteed IOPS per volume
• Simple browser web-admin (with extensive out API interface)

Feature-wise, it is a good solution allowing users to monitor and simplify their networks. The solution also provides its users with flexibility by enabling them to utilize its extensions.

The performance with the QoS is its most valuable aspect.

The integration with VMware is excellent. There are different plugins to manage the SolidFire storage from the vCenter level. That I really appreciate. 

SolidFire even as a standalone storage platform is excellent. 

I would say in terms of architecture and in terms of functionality, the product is quite good. 

It's block access storage, however, for block access storage we have the guarantee of performance. 

We have the duplication and we have the encryption with this solution. We have almost all the standards needed for storage with SolidFire. In terms of protection, with the level of protection we can set between the SolidFire nodes, it's very good.

SolidFire integrates with a platform, OpenStack, that we use in our company.

From my point of view, the best feature is the auto-support I've received over the last two years. The auto support is triggered automatically if there is any node issue, node failure, disk failure, or even a small glitch in the particular port. It directly creates a support case, and those people follow up with me. They ask for the logs and work on the issue. Support-wise, I feel SolidFire has very good support, and by using it, I feel very satisfied.

Another thing that makes me happy with SolidFire is its support. It makes me feel extremely satisfied.

Simplicity is definitely up there. It's not my number one. Number one is scalability. Simple to scale, scale up, scale down. When you look at something like a VMAX, there's a ton of pre-planning that has to happen to buy them. And then, if you didn't plan well, you're going to have a messed up implementation. With the SolidFires, I don't have to think about those things. We can just buy them, scale them as we need on demand, and we don't have to spend so many front end cycles on designing the architecture.

Also, green initiatives. Power, cooling, datacenter footprint. Ultimately, it's about cost, on that front. I think we can tie that one to some capex and opex. The front-end, I was just really talking about soft savings. We have a large company. We have an aging workforce and we can't just keep acquiring highly skilled employees as people retire.

If I go ahead and put it up with the OpenStack, the OpenStack stuff goes so smoothly with SolidFire, increasing the capabilities of the VMs to bring them up. I think it's just fantastic.

Also, the scalability, as well as the performance, and then the way it goes with the API part of it. That is the amazing part. The API, it's not that complicated. You can choose an item, you can go ahead with PowerShell, anything; it's not that complicated to go ahead. Templates are already predefined for it. If you're coding it up, it will take two days. You can pick up a template right there from the API, and it just works for you. Implementation done in 10 minutes.

The product is easy to manage and deploy. It's got full API functionality and the performance is pretty steady. 

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. 

The most valuable feature is the QoS and its ease of use. The dashboard is such that you don't need to be a storage expert to administer it.

The replication works well.

They now have a 100GB network interface, which is nice because I was disappointed with the original iSCSI protocol. That was all that it supported and I found it to be a limitation.

For us it's the horizontal scalability. We traditionally run our private clouds for our R&D engineering on AFF, which worked quite well. But we ran into IOP-driven scalability. So instead of adding more clusters and more HA pairs with all-flash disks in an AFF scenario, we were able to just scale with SolidFire. That is so much better because we can add a node, we add compute, we add storage, and we've had really good luck with that.

What I like about SolidFire is the ease of administration. It's a slight deviation from what we are used to before the ONTAP interface. SolidFire comes with its own interface and APIs, and that makes it much more intuitive and a little simpler to use when we're creating volumes, and managing it.

It's very automated. One of the presentations we saw this morning here at NetApp Insight explained that if a workload is more demanding, it accommodates increasing workload, without us, as admins, having to go in and do the manual administration. So it seems to be intuitive as to what's taking place within the system and the workloads.

Greater IOPS, speed, it's all-flash. So seeing that everything is going to all-flash, all SSDs, SolidFire fits right in there with the emerging trend in IT.

SolidFire has seamless performance for the nodes and extensions. I also like the tool’s scalability. The product’s performance does not get affected when we scale either up or down. This is not the case with other products.

The scalability and being able to implement it quickly.

Because we're a service provider, we have customers that need to grow and need their data increased quickly, so it helps us with that. We're also incorporating SolidFire into being our cloud-providing mechanism, so it allows customers to get in and out of our cloud, as well as move into the main cloud.

The most valuable features for us are their QoS, the scalability and the serviceability of the environment. Our ability to add nodes or take nodes out for service and the QoS policies we're able to wrap around volumes are all very helpful.

Getting predictability in our analytics for space trending, performance analytics. We use to correlate data with other tools that we have. If we get complaints about any kind of performance metric issues, whether it's storage related or something on the virtual side, we use it to pinpoint what the actual issue is. It has proved really useful for that.

It is fast. By default, its APIs expose pretty much all of its configuration items. On the ONTAP systems, we use WFA to expose the APIs, where with SolidFire, everything is pretty much out-of-the-box, so the customers like it. The main uses are virtual machine environment. This is internal, on a private cloud. In India on most of their workstations are on virtual machines, and those all are hosted on SolidFire.

SolidFire is one of the products that does have great APIs right out-of-the-box. It works great. The tools and the other stuff seem to work a little better right out-of-the-box than the ONTAP stuff does, C-Mode.

• The simplicity of it
• Ease of use
• The flash array
• Performance
• Reporting

• Power
• HVAC
• Density of drives

The square footage for doing development is at a premium when dealing with government networks. To be able to put a lot of IOPS in a lot of high-speed performing drives in a very small location which requires very little HVAC with very little power, it is very valuable to us.

With our Solidfire, we're going to be doing things like DevOps for ease of use. We're going to be able to expand in a condensed environment with a lot of IOPS to create a very small footprint on an all-flash array using a web interface, which makes it easier for some of the lower technicians to use it.

In terms of SolidFire's most valuable features, simplicity is the key component and key feature of SolidFire. It meant that the administrator or the user do not need to learn about storage RAID Groups or something like that, but they only need to provision the storage space that they need for the host. SolidFire's is being used in NetApp HCI(Hyper-converge Infrastructure)solutions that comes with a Deployment Engine to make the solution more simpler faster and easier to deploy.When you need a software defined storage system SolidFire's is really, really good.

When a customer need complete "Software defined Data-center Solution" with compute and storage; then NetApp HCI is far better choice than any other HCI Solutions.

SolidFire's really simple to deploy. you don't need to learn a lot. When you compare the NetApp storage system with SolidFire, both are very simple to deploy, but comparing to the other products from NetApp, SolidFire is even more simpler to deploy.

One of the most valuable thing aspect of the solution is the fact that it's all in one and all in a very small physical footprint. It has all of your major components, including your storage area network, servers, and networking footprint.

The delivery of the product is very fast and the solution itself deploys quickly, it is up and running within hours.

The product is competitively priced and technical support is good.

You can easily and effectively scale this solution. It's one of the main selling points and one of the features that makes it far superior to competitors.

The most valuable feature of this solution is its scalability. That is the biggest benefit of using this solution. 

• The resiliency of the platform
• No down-time with the product itself
• Overall performance of the solution
• The dedupe

All of the feature set has been fantastic.

I like SolidFire's technology and the way that it is implemented, from a node perspective instead of having a controller shelf architecture. One node can control everything, but if the node goes down, obviously the other nodes can bring everything back up. Going into the next generation data center, that's very compelling, as well as being able to use QoS settings and maintain a standard of performance for the VMs and things that are underlying it.

The SolidFire's technology and architecture allow for a more fluid and dynamic data center. It moves away from the controller and shelf design philosophy to a node design. This means that each node has the ability to control the entire cluster. In essence, you have the same number of controllers as the shelves.

If a node goes down, the other nodes easily take the load. This is accomplished both by the node technology as well as the Double Helix technology. If needed, you can easily remove one node and ship it to another location or attach it to a different cluster, with very little effort. The implementation of the structure is fairly easy, as well. Our first 5-node cluster from the box to serving data (for testing), took about five hours.

The most valuable feature of the product is its resiliency. 

• Ease of use
• Performance guarantees that you can set
• Individual settings you can put on each individual volume, if you want to do that
• Ability to scale up, scale down whenever you want
• Scale-out ability, and the ease of adding a cluster - When you get a new node, if you farm out the datacenter tasks like we do, there is no technical ability required for them to plug it in and connect it and we can just add it.
• Open RESTful APIs are great

The quality of service features are valuable. They are able to allocate a certain number of IOPS in your throughput to your LUNs. That's something that's a little bit more difficult using traditional methods.

VDI is a perfect use case. If you have ones that need more performance than others, it's easier to allocate it on a prolonged basis for a VDI environment for your specific virtual desktop users.

• Being able to provide multi-tenant applications
• Being able to provide quality of service as promised
• Being able to accommodate extreme needs, like burst IOPS
• Finally, being able to solve the "noisy neighbor" problem

The most valuable feature is the performance, as well as how you manage performance on the system.

The quality of service for minimum iOS to maximum iOS in a multi-terminal environment is very powerful. The SQL service feature is the best part of SolidFire.