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Red Hat Ceph Storage vs SwiftStack [EOL] comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Everpure FlashArray
Sponsored
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
217
Ranking in other categories
All-Flash Storage (4th)
Red Hat Ceph Storage
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
27
Ranking in other categories
Software Defined Storage (SDS) (3rd), File and Object Storage (1st)
SwiftStack [EOL]
Average Rating
8.6
Number of Reviews
8
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Featured Reviews

Sowjanya MV - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Lead at Wipro Limited
Has improved performance for mission-critical workloads and enabled seamless non-disruptive upgrades
The availability is 99.99%, which is the main factor any customer would need because their data should be available whenever they want to access it. This is one main critical thing. It is very easy to upgrade since Pure Storage FlashArray handles it well. Everything is non-disruptive now; previously, there were forklift shifts, but now that is not the case. Pure Storage FlashArray says no to forklift upgrades. Usually hardware requires downtime, but Pure Storage FlashArray has improved their footprint so that they are not asking for downtime; everything is just a non-disruptive activity, which is why customers are more inclined towards Pure Storage FlashArray. Customers want more of the models in their environment due to the performance they are giving, and everything is in one Pure1 Array console where we can view all the models on one page or just an orchestration tool. You don't miss anything; you have replication, notifications about replication, and details about which host groups replication is happening in and if that replication is successful or failed. On a daily basis, our purpose is to create volumes for infrastructure; our daily activities include creating volumes and mapping them to the host, doing any migrations from a VM, clearing the data stores, and carving the volumes to those VMs. One key factor is the data compression with a ratio of 5:1, focusing on space efficiency, inline deduplication, and the compression Pure Storage FlashArray works on; that is a major factor we can suggest to any customer. Analytical capabilities are crucial. Daily, we check the throughput and consumption, and Pure Storage FlashArray provides predictions for one year regarding usage. This prediction helps plan updates well ahead. For support, we just raise a case, and they follow up and get it done. There is also AI readiness, but with the model R2, we don't have much of that AI readiness. For others, we do have AI readiness that predicts capacity based on daily or monthly trends, enabling us to analyze how much space we need or if we need to expand the disk shelf. From an operational point of view, a good feature is that if you accidentally delete a volume, it will be retained in the destroyed state for the next twenty-four hours, which is not the same with any other vendor. I have worked in this storage domain for the past fifteen years, and this option is remarkable, benefiting any L1 or L2 engineer. Additionally, from a compliance perspective, Pure Storage FlashArray has REST APIs enabled. I have not explored automation much, but from a security standpoint, it is strong with encryption data. If you want to automate, you can easily integrate with all clouds and explore Pure Cloud for scheduling workloads, including volume creation. Customers find benefit in Pure Storage FlashArray's single management pane of glass due to the dual controller and active-active setup. If one of the controllers goes down, all workloads automatically shift to the other controller, ensuring their data is safe and accessible at all times. This is a highlighted feature that any customer desires because their data should always be accessible. For SAN workloads, we use Pure Storage FlashArray because for SAN FC fiber channel, we don't use it; we use NetApp for NAS activities. We have clearly split this, so SAN is for mission-critical applications, while network-attached storage handles file systems. This architecture helps us maximize the benefit from Pure Storage FlashArray due to the significant workloads from this giant retail client. From a footprint and energy consumption perspective, you can see energy consumption from the Pure1 storage portal on a daily basis, and it is very compact. The three models we use consume only three units, which is quite low. From a footprint and data center perspective, it doesn't occupy much space. As everything moves to cloud, there are requirements to avoid excess spending on data centers, and Pure Storage FlashArray is efficient in energy consumption and is environmentally friendly.
Rifat Rahman - PeerSpot reviewer
Infrastructure Architect & CEO at Tirzok Private Limited
Offers reliable performance and availability for large deployments
I would like to see improvements in Red Hat Ceph Storage not because I necessarily think it needs improvement, but because I generally prefer to do things manually rather than following the containerization part. Current deployments are based on containers, but I deploy manually with my scripts and controls. If there are no Kubernetes-like requirements, I often prefer to deploy a whole manual process. I don't ask for improvements in the deployment model because Red Hat has its own philosophy about making things, but it's my personal choice that I prefer things manually. Some features are available only in the containerization part, so if those are also available in manual deployment, that will help.
reviewer1759539 - PeerSpot reviewer
System administrator at a library with 11-50 employees
A nicely-done product that provides a lot of graphs and reports to see what's happening in the background and makes configuration easier
It's very well done for what it's supposed to do, and I don't have anything to add, but I would like them to keep it available to the public. SwiftStack is going out of the market. NVIDIA purchased SwiftStack a couple of years ago, and they won't be making it available to the public anymore. Our license is up to March 31st.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Pure Storage FlashArray has significantly improved our data center performance. It handles high workloads efficiently, providing better performance in the environment. With increased storage capacity, it has led to improved overall system performance. The tool's technology is a standout feature. It has helped me reduce storage costs by 15 percent."
"We've been using FlashArray's snapshot for backups. Their replication across sites and response time are also excellent."
"Our clients see a reduction in total cost of ownership by around 40%."
"This is a very good product at a very good price, with very good support."
"The technical support is very good."
"Compared to Unity, these arrays offer significant advantages, such as NVMe technology and higher IOPS."
"If it's financially viable for you and you can afford it, it's worth it."
"You can get your storage access within two minutes, which is great, because it is a lot quicker for our team to get the servers up and running."
"Replicated and erasure coded pools have allowed for multiple copies to be kept, easy scale-out of additional nodes, and easy replacement of failed hard drives, and the solution continues working even when there are errors."
"Most valuable features include replication and compression."
"It opens doors for completely open-source cloud."
"Ceph’s ability to adapt to varying types of commodity hardware affords us substantial flexibility and future-proofing."
"It has helped to save money and scale the storage without limits."
"We are using Ceph internal inexpensive disk and data redundancy without spending extra money on external storage."
"The high availability of the solution is important to us."
"Ceph has simplified my storage integration, as I no longer need two or three storage systems since Ceph can support all my storage needs, replacing OpenStack Swift for REST object storage access, NFS or GlusterFS for filesystem sharing, and LVM or DRBD for virtual machines in OpenStack."
"The most valuable feature is its versatility. We use 1space and we can use it for almost anything: for our cloud service, for backups of VMs."
"The general consensus on what we've done is that the restores coming back from it have been faster than they were from our prior vendor. Ingest speeds are fine. The restore speeds have improved."
"The quality is really good, the stability is fantastic, and it requires very little manpower."
"It has helped us with the ability to distribute data to different data centers. As part of our DR strategy, we have nodes automatically replicating data from one data center to the other. This makes it easier for us to not have to shift tapes around."
"In terms of the hardware flexibility, with SwiftStack not being a hardware company, I literally buy any hardware that's the least expensive, from any vendor... from a flexibility standpoint, I think it's fantastic. I can go to anybody, anywhere - any vendor - and get my hardware."
"The SwiftStack Controller, which is the web UI, provides out of band management. This has been one of the best features of it. It allows us to be able to do upgrades and look at performance metrics. It is a top feature and reason to choose the product."
"The biggest thing about SwiftStack is freedom; it's freedom from vendor lock-in, freedom from one cloud provider, and freedom to scale when you want, how you want, and when you want."
"The biggest feature, the biggest reason we went with SwiftStack, rather than deploying our own model with OpenStack Swift, was their deployment model. That was really the primary point in our purchase decision, back when we initially deployed. It took my installation time from days to hours, for deployment in our environment, versus deploying OpenStack Swift ourselves, manually."
 

Cons

"There are a lot of things to improve."
"The product could improve by providing the capability to support NAS storage – CIFS and NFS."
"A year ago they promised that they would be able to read through the database encryption with more metric and they have not delivered on that patch, which is significant because it gives us back so much more storage room."
"The negative aspect of Everpure FlashArray is that migrations can be somewhat complicated."
"The interface lacks the same level of control as some other arrays I've used."
"Going forward, don't complicate things for the customers."
"It needs to improve its price."
"We did have one hiccup with the integration of vCenter. When we were installing Pure Storage, we were using vCenter 6.7, which defaults to the HTML5 Web Client. The current plugin for Pure Storage doesn't show up in that client at all. You have to go and use the legacy FlexFlash client to see the Pure Storage plugin in vCenter."
"Ceph Storage lacks RDMA support for inter-OSD communication. That is a huge loss in terms of performance."
"The management features are pretty good, but they still have room for improvement."
"Please create a failback solution for OpenStack replication and maybe QoS to allow guaranteed IOPS."
"I would like to see better performance and stability when Ceph is in recovery."
"If you use for any other solution like other Kubernetes solutions, it's not very suitable."
"It needs a better UI for easier installation and management."
"Ceph does not deal very well with, or takes a long time to recover from, certain kinds of network failures and individual storage node failures."
"I would like to see better performance and stability when Ceph is in recovery."
"The biggest room for improvement is the maturity of the proxyFS solution."
"The biggest room for improvement is the maturity of the proxyFS solution. That piece of code is relatively new, so most of our issues have been around the proxyFS."
"We find the pricing rather steep."
"[One] thing that I've been looking for, for years as an end user and customer, for any object store, including SwiftStack, is some type of automated method for data archiving."
"At the moment we are using Erasure coding in an 8+4 setting. What would be nice is if, for some standard configurations like 15+4 and 8+4, there were more versatility so we could, for example, select 8+6, or the like."
"Don't use it because it will go off the market in three months. It won't be available."
"On the controller features, there needs to be a bit more clean up of the user interface."
"I would like to see better client integrations, support for a broader client library."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price of the Pure Storage Flash Array is too high and there needs to be more contact clarity. We went with the Evergreen plan and I don't have clarity on what am I supposed to pay each year or every three years. There was not much contract clarity."
"In the beginning, we saw that the price is not very good. When we made some compilations about the deduplication and the compression and what the equipment does, including the differentiation of upper management of the storage, the price was not so bad. However, in the beginning, the price was very difficult to justify."
"The price, in general, is around $100,000, however, I know it costs more."
"FlashArray is expensive, but the quality justifies the price."
"We feel that the pricing is fair and the licensing process was easy for both."
"There is always room for negotiation."
"The Evergreen Storage subscription is a really cool concept. As long as we maintain our subscription, we will get new controllers every three years and really never have a forklift upgrade like we currently are doing. Just that future-proofing is an ease off of my mind to know that I won't have to do what I'm dong right now again."
"The price of Pure Storage FlashArray is expensive."
"Most of time, you can get Ceph with the OpenStack solution in a subscription​​ as a bundle.​"
"The price of Red Hat Ceph Storage is reasonable."
"I rate the product’s pricing an eight out of ten."
"There is no cost for software."
"If you can afford a product like Red Hat Ceph Storage then go for it. If you cannot, then you need to test Ceph and get your hands dirty."
"The price of this product isn't high."
"We never used the paid support."
"The other big advantage is that Ceph is free software. Compared to traditional SAN based storage, it is very economical."
"We find the pricing rather steep. Of course, you get quality for your money, that's absolutely true... [But] when you look at the prices of the licensing and the prices of your hardware, it's quite substantial."
"The pricing and licensing are capacity-based, so it's hard to put my finger on them, because so many different vendors charge in different ways. We are still saving significantly over any of the other options that we evaluated because we can choose the best hardware at the best price, then put SwiftStack software on it. So, it's hard to complain, even though a part of me goes, "It would be nicer if it were less expensive.""
"Dollar per gigabyte, it costs us more because we are storing more. However, if you look at it from a cost per gigabyte perspective, we have dropped our costs significantly."
"All in, with hardware and everything else - and I hate to say a dollar amount because it's been awhile since I computed it - I know I'm under the $300 to $500 per terabyte mark. I call that my "all in" price, which has replications built in and protections built in."
"We are able to dynamically grow storage at a lower cost. We can repurpose hardware and buy commodity hardware. There is a huge cost savings, on average $100,000 a year compared to traditional storage for what we have at our size."
"The annual support and maintenance costs compared to our old solution for backups had about a two-thirds savings, so about a 60% annual savings on our support and maintenance contract. That savings funded additional expansion for what it was costing us for the support and maintenance contracts on old solution."
"One of their advantages of being a commercial open source platform is, for the scale that they offer, the pricing is pretty competitive."
"COST_SAVING; We have had a 40 to 50 percent reduction in CAPEX on the acquisition of new hardware, which is probably conservative."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
12%
Construction Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
8%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Comms Service Provider
14%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Construction Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business65
Midsize Enterprise36
Large Enterprise151
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business13
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise15
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise3
 

Questions from the Community

Which should I choose: HPE 3PAR StoreServ or Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform F Series?
Both are great platforms, but if you are considering all flash solutions, I would recommend you to consider Pure Stor...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pure Storage FlashArray?
The only issue is the pricing. Because we have competition, our customers always take another brand and say they can ...
What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashArray?
Our customers using Dell storage also use competing solutions. Our customers who have Everpure FlashArray may also ha...
How does Red Hat Ceph Storage compare with MiniO?
Red Hat Ceph does well in simplifying storage integration by replacing the need for numerous storage solutions. This ...
What needs improvement with Red Hat Ceph Storage?
Areas of Red Hat Ceph Storage that have room for improvement include more promotion. Many people do not know about th...
What advice do you have for others considering Red Hat Ceph Storage?
I do not have experience working with solutions such as Red Hat Ceph Storage and StorPool. I have plenty of experienc...
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Also Known As

Pure Storage FlashArray
Ceph
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Overview

 

Sample Customers

Nielsen, Lamar Advertising, LinkedIn, Betfair, UT-Dallas
Dell, DreamHost
Pac-12 Networks, Georgia Institute of Technology, Budd Van Lines
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