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

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs SwiftStack [EOL] comparison

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
7.3
Number of Reviews
219
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

"Very stable; no worries about how much it can handle."
"Their evergreen solution is probably the most needed in any industry, especially today in unprecedented times and supply chain issues, their evergreen solution is amazing."
"Simplicity and reliability are the most valuable feature of Pure Storage FlashArray."
"From an intangible standpoint the lack of care and feeding is notable and freed up the Storage Team to do other things."
"This solution is very scalable."
"It has been quite satisfactory in performance and scalability."
"The money I saved by not renewing maintenance on the Dell EMC devices paid for the Pure Storage devices."
"With Pure Storage, we don't see any latency or IOPS. It has been a very seamless integration."
"I like the distributed and self-healing nature of the product."
"Ceph’s ability to adapt to varying types of commodity hardware affords us substantial flexibility and future-proofing."
"We have some legacy servers that can be associated with this structure. With Ceph, we can rearrange these machines and reuse our investment."
"The solution is pretty stable."
"Most valuable features include replication and compression."
"I would definitely recommend Red Hat Ceph Storage. It is a complete solution for cloud-native storage needs."
"It's a very performance-intensive, brilliant storage system, and I always recommend it to customers based on its benefits, performance, and scalability."
"The configuration of the solution and the user interface are both quite good."
"The quality is really good, the stability is fantastic, and it requires very little manpower."
"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 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 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."
"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 performance is good. It is a secondary storage platform designed for archive and backup, so performance for the right use cases is very good. We have been pretty happy in that regard."
"Their support staff is second to none; they're the best support staff I've ever worked with, with any vendor of any caliber, in the past 20 years."
 

Cons

"The GUI is simplistic and basic. I feel like it's explanatory, but not enough, it needs a little more to it."
"I would love to see a true one click upgrade solution."
"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."
"I would like to migrate to the cloud in the future and know how that would actually work with this product."
"We would like to see more cloud support, which we know is coming, although it's not out yet. It's going to be released in the next versions. That would be the biggest win, if additional cloud support is built into the array."
"I would like to see a Nagios monitoring plugin which watches the health and performance of the system. The only one available just checks volume capacity."
"It needs to improve its price."
"Pure Storage FlashArray has not helped to decrease the total cost of ownership, and I believe our total cost has probably gone up, but that's balanced by our increased amount of data and number of use cases."
"What could be improved in Red Hat Ceph Storage is its user interface or GUI."
"Rebalancing and recovery are a bit slow."
"This product uses a lot of CPU and network bandwidth. It needs some deduplication features and to use delta for rebalancing."
"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."
"I have not identified any drawbacks, however, the response to public platform inquiries could be faster."
"Geo-replication needs improvement. It is a new feature, and not well supported yet."
"Geo-replication needs improvement. It is a new feature, and not well supported yet."
"[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."
"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."
"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."
"The biggest room for improvement is the maturity of the proxyFS solution."
"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."
"I would like to see better client integrations, support for a broader client library."
"On the controller features, there needs to be a bit more clean up of the user interface. There are a lot of options available on the GUI which might be better organized or compartmentalized. There are times when you are going through the user interface and you have to look around for where the setting may be. A little bit more attention to the organization of the user interface would be helpful."
"They should provide a more concise hardware calculator when you're putting your capacity together."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"When you are paying more than you were paying for the storage space, you'd like the cost to be less. If they could get into the spinning disk kind of cost, that would be it."
"We are finding the TCO of flash to be lower than SSD implementations."
"We evaluated Oracle and Hitachi, but Pure Storage had the better pricing."
"There are no fees for licensing. The hardware is paid for only once."
"We have an Evergreen Storage subscription, which I think is a great feature."
"It was less expensive than some of the alternatives. It's not as though it was a premium price to get that kind of quality. It's a very competitive product from a price perspective..."
"It is a more expensive solution, but it is worth it. You are getting what you paid for."
"You get what you pay for. It is expensive, but it really works."
"I rate the product’s pricing an eight out of ten."
"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."
"We never used the paid support."
"The price of this product isn't high."
"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 Red Hat Ceph Storage is reasonable."
"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."
"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."
"COST_SAVING; We have had a 40 to 50 percent reduction in CAPEX on the acquisition of new hardware, which is probably conservative."
"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."
"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."
"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."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which File and Object Storage solutions are best for your needs.
894,668 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
12%
Construction Company
8%
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
15%
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 Business66
Midsize Enterprise36
Large Enterprise155
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...
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 Red Hat, Dell Technologies, Nutanix and others in File and Object Storage. Updated: April 2026.
894,668 professionals have used our research since 2012.