No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs SwiftStack [EOL] comparison

Why PeerSpot?
Sponsored
 

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
7.2
Number of Reviews
232
Ranking in other categories
All-Flash Storage (3rd)
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 (2nd)
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.
it_user1759539 - 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

"The speed of the Pure FlashArray is very, very fast and nothing in the market can compare to it."
"It is all-flash. This makes it a lot faster than the rest of what we have, as it is able to drive high I/O loads, which is big for us."
"It saved a lot of space, as far as physical space in our data center."
"My favorite feature about Pure Storage FlashArray is definitely the simplicity; in one word, it's simple to install, simple to upgrade, simple to maintain, and simple to manage."
"Simplicity and reliability are the most valuable feature of Pure Storage FlashArray."
"The best features of Pure Storage FlashArray are its ease of use and user-friendly interface, and the performance allows all types of services to be visualized from a single point of interface, making it more robust and user-friendly."
"I am very satisfied with this solution and I would recommend it to others."
"Very stable; no worries about how much it can handle."
"radosgw and librados provide a simple integration with clone, snapshots, and other functions that aid in data integrity."
"I like the distributed and self-healing nature of the product."
"Most valuable features include replication and compression."
"The setup is very easy, deserving a ten out of ten."
"What I found most valuable from Red Hat Ceph Storage is integration because if you are talking about a solution that consists purely of Red Hat products, this is where integration benefits come in. In particular, Red Hat Ceph Storage becomes a single solution for managing the entire environment in terms of the container or the infrastructure, or the worker nodes because it all comes from a single plug."
"We are using Ceph internal inexpensive disk and data redundancy without spending extra money on external storage."
"Ceph has simplified my storage integration. I no longer need two or three storage systems, as Ceph can support all my storage needs. I no longer need OpenStack Swift for REST object storage access, I no longer need NFS or GlusterFS for filesystem sharing, and most importantly, I no longer need LVM or DRBD for my virtual machines in OpenStack."
"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."
"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 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."
"The scalability is phenomenal. It seems infinite, as long as you put enough storage in place, add enough nodes."
"Management of clusters is easy and it is simple to reduce the man hours needed for a deployment."
"The impact on our business was that we launched a new product which has allowed us to generate additional revenue for our business with it."
"The graphs are most valuable. They have a lot of graphs and reports that you can run to see what's happening in the background to configure OpenStack Swift."
 

Cons

"From a scalability perspective, it is a very small storage solution, so it's not very expandable."
"We would like to see more development on their Copy Automation Tool (CAT) for Oracle, as well as better integration for our customers running Oracle VM."
"They need to find another way of doing data protection, RAID is not working very well."
"The time-to-market could be better at times, but I think that's true for all vendors of hardware."
"Pure Storage FlashArray could improve in the area of cryptographic information in the consoles. The user-friendliness could improve. The Pure Storage FlashArray team should come and log into the system with their maintenance credentials and then pull out the information as evidence of cryptography."
"The way Pure Storage does the controller storage warranty or replacement has been an issue for some people who just replace the controllers every couple of years, and that's where some of the confusion with pricing and support has come in. They should be clear on the way the controller replacements happen, as it is important to know whether or not you can get a good return on them, because it can be a little confusing."
"They could improve the price."
"Pure Storage FlashArray has not helped decrease the total cost of ownership."
"We have encountered slight integration issues."
"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."
"Areas of Red Hat Ceph Storage that have room for improvement include more promotion. Many people do not know about the Stratus case, which is one of the most reliable systems available in the world, but they are not aware that a system can keep working even if there is a hardware failure."
"Some documentation is very hard to find."
"This product uses a lot of CPU and network bandwidth. It needs some deduplication features and to use delta for rebalancing."
"Ceph Storage lacks RDMA support for inter-OSD communication. That is a huge loss in terms of performance."
"I have not identified any drawbacks, however, the response to public platform inquiries could be faster."
"Please create a failback solution for OpenStack replication and maybe QoS to allow guaranteed IOPS."
"The file access needs improvement. The NFS was rolled out as a single service. It needs to be fully integrated into the proxy in a highly available fashion, like the regular proxy access is. I know it's on the roadmap."
"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."
"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."
"I would like to see better client integrations, support for a broader client library. SwiftStack could be a little bit more involved in the client side: Python, Java, C, etc."
"Don't use it because it will go off the market in three months. It won't be available."
"We find the pricing rather steep."
"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."
"They should provide a more concise hardware calculator when you're putting your capacity together."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Pure Storage has not helped to reduce our HANA licensing costs."
"All storage is expensive so any price improvement would help."
"While it comes with a higher price tag, this investment often translates to significant improvements in performance."
"The price is too high."
"I have had a couple of customers who have complained about the cost. It can be a little more expensive than some of the other platforms. After it has been installed, I have never had a customer say, "I wish we wouldn't have spent all that extra money." They have always been happy with the product after it has been installed. They might be on the fence about it because of the price, but everybody who I have ever seen install it, they are always happy with it."
"We feel that the pricing is fair and the licensing process was easy for both."
"It could always be lower, but it's okay."
"Pure Storage FlashArray's pricing is very competitive."
"The other big advantage is that Ceph is free software. Compared to traditional SAN based storage, it is very economical."
"There is no cost for software."
"I rate the product’s pricing an eight out of ten."
"Most of time, you can get Ceph with the OpenStack solution in a subscription​​ as a bundle.​"
"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 operational overhead is higher compared to Azure because we own the hardware."
"The price of this product isn't high."
"The price of Red Hat Ceph Storage is reasonable."
"We have had a 40 to 50 percent reduction in CAPEX on the acquisition of new hardware, which is probably conservative."
"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 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.""
"One of their advantages of being a commercial open source platform is, for the scale that they offer, the pricing is pretty competitive."
"It's pricey for us because we're a nonprofit. I'm not privy to any amount or cost, but I have been told that it is pricey. There are no costs in addition to the licensing fees, and it seems to come with the support."
"COST_SAVING; We have had a 40 to 50 percent reduction in CAPEX on the acquisition of new hardware, which is probably conservative."
"The pricing model is great and makes sense. We have talked about how to get into more of a frequent billing cycle than once a year. That would be an interesting concept to add into the product, having the ability to have monthly billing instead of having to do a one-year licensing renewal. However, the way the license works by charging for storage consumed is definitely what makes them the most competitive."
"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."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which File and Object Storage solutions are best for your needs.
917,884 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Outsourcing Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Computer Software Company
9%
Outsourcing Company
15%
Construction Company
13%
Comms Service Provider
12%
Financial Services Firm
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business73
Midsize Enterprise38
Large Enterprise160
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?
When comparing cost, I find that the cost is either the same or slightly higher, but that is returned by the ease of ...
What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashArray?
The only thing I think could be improved is price. The price is the main concern for our customers.
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...
Ask a question
Earn 20 points
 

Also Known As

Pure Storage FlashArray
Ceph
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Nielsen, Lamar Advertising, LinkedIn, Betfair, UT-Dallas
Dell, DreamHost
Pac-12 Networks, Georgia Institute of Technology, Budd Van Lines
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, Red Hat, Nutanix and others in File and Object Storage. Updated: October 2026.
917,884 professionals have used our research since 2012.