"Although there is commonality in enterprise storage management capabilities, significant differentiation exists today in QoS controls. SolidFire sets the bar by providing a complete set of controls on the array itself, as well as extensive integration with QoS controls on third-party platforms, like VMware vSphere,” said Eric Burgener, research director, Storage Systems, IDC. “As customers start to use AFAs more and more as general-purpose primary storage arrays, contention for system resources will become a real concern. As a group, service providers using AFAs tend to run them at the highest levels of utilization, and SolidFire’s strong position in QoS is due in large part to its initial focus on the service provider market, which has since expanded to more broadly target enterprise users as well.”
