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Red Hat Gluster Storage vs StarWind Virtual SAN comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 5, 2024

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 Gluster Storage
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
Software Defined Storage (SDS) (11th)
StarWind Virtual SAN
Average Rating
9.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
206
Ranking in other categories
Software Defined Storage (SDS) (1st), HCI (4th)
 

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.
GiovanniRamirez - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior IT Consultant at Xerif
Flexible and scalable file system for growing storage needs
Gluster FS is used for various purposes, including virtualization, collaboration, and data center environments. It is also applied in personal environments. Some specific use cases mentioned include scaling a three-terabyte file system into a 12-terabyte file system with minimal downtime Gluster…
Jccerong Heron - PeerSpot reviewer
System Engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Support team has guided us through deploying virtual storage on legacy hardware and reducing operational costs
The reason I chose StarWind Virtual SAN for this particular scenario is really the features, the ease of use, and most importantly, the price. In my opinion, the best features StarWind Virtual SAN offers are easy integration with the system installed in the data center. The integration with my existing systems in the data center works well, especially with VMware, as we already have a big cluster in VMware, and the easy integration with that is helpful to solve some problems with the platform. StarWind Virtual SAN has positively impacted my organization by reducing OPEX costs. My OPEX costs have gone down as we reutilize some old servers, and this reduces the CAPEX of hardware in the data center.

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 simplifies maintenance and management with its intuitive GUI, making storage allocation and other processes easy to understand, even for beginners."
"Once it's set up, it just runs on its own and only requires the occasional checkup."
"As we needed to grow in capacity, we were able to do so without increasing footprint by replacing smaller devices with larger ones."
"The most valuable feature is its speed."
"It worked flawlessly."
"It has been very stable. I have not seen or heard of downtime storage issues after moving over to it."
"The initial setup was really straight forward."
"Now with Pure Storage, our developers work a lot faster and more efficiently which has definitely improved our productivity."
"If it is designed correctly, it can be used for everything, it has high availability, and that is what we need it for, and the price tag is good compared to the amount of data and high availability provided."
"It's very easy to upgrade storage."
"The technical support team is excellent."
"The most valuable feature of the product is that it's very easy to upgrade storage."
"Notable features of Gluster FS include flexibility, scalability, stability, and ease of use."
"The price tag is good compared to the amount of data and high availability provided."
"Overall it has been a great product and company to work with for the past five years and many more to come."
"During the failover, only a few seconds of downtime were seen, proving to me that I can count on StarWind during business hours and know that they have our back at the host level."
"It helped us to save money by not having to purchase a new hardware SAN, the VSAN works better than our existing, older SAN, this software works well for the vital signs capture software we were implementing in a new Hyper-V failover cluster, our organization has less hardware to maintain since we didn't have to purchase a new SAN, and being able to run this software in the new virtual machines saved time and money."
"This solution has helped us maintain high performance and data high availability on minimalistic resources, and we have saved about 80 percent versus purchasing a physical SAN and gained peace of mind, which is important."
"Using our own choice of HW allowed us to price our service to answer our customers' needs."
"The feature I have found most valuable in VSAN is its high availability capability."
"The solution validation session with StarWind engineers was one of the best we have experienced and the vendor has also demonstrated a willingness to create a long-term relationship."
"In our case, the cost and high availability are the two most important factors which we were looking for in a solution."
 

Cons

"The pricing needs to be improved as they offer very high budgeting prices. Searching is a big challenge in Pure Storage FlashArrays, especially when trying to restore a VM."
"Some services could be inserted directly into the SAN, so Pure Storage could complete with the HyperFlex."
"The overall scalability for this product could be improved as well as having a single console to management multiple arrays."
"The price should be lower."
"The solution needs an integrated NAS platform, file platform."
"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."
"Reports of performance and LUN utilization could be improved."
"The best way to improve Pure Storage FlashArray is the active DR because that can get very confusing, especially when you're trying to test a failover and replicate back; better instructions on how to do that would help because we actually lost an entire volume when we were testing out some stuff as the fingerprint got reinitialized, and when you replicated back, it didn't know about that volume, causing a failure in that process."
"The system should be more intuitive and easier to manage."
"In terms of improvement, my initial suggestion would be that the user interface could be simplified."
"There is a feature in Red Hat’s commercial version that could be beneficial if integrated into the open-source version."
"The performance of the solution must be improved."
"The system should be more intuitive and easier to manage."
"The user interface could be simplified."
"The scalability is probably not that great; with StarWind Virtual SAN you can either have a two-node cluster or a three-node cluster."
"It is not very clear within the StarWind Management Console or the StarWind support documentation how to perform maintenance on a single node in a two-node HA cluster."
"It is difficult to control all of the hardware components."
"The cluster configuration is time-consuming and tedious."
"Management of VSAN itself could be improved."
"I would like to see options for automated notifications of any changes, including, for example, synchronization issues."
"I'm sure it needs bug fixes..."
"I would like to have an easy way of automatic notification about issues, even when I'm away."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Its price is almost double than any other flash storage solution."
"We have an Evergreen Storage subscription, which I think is a great feature."
"The price of Pure Storage FlashArray is expensive."
"The price of the solution is not expensive."
"For us, as the customer, it reduced the price of the management."
"Our licensing is on a yearly basis. So, every year, we renew. We could do a three-year contract, but right now, we only do a one-year."
"The price of the solution can be a bit expensive. There is an additional fee for support."
"It is a cheaper solution."
"If you need cheap storage, but still need high availability, it's a good product to look at."
"The scalability limitation for us is its licensing. At some point in the fairly near future, we will probably have to upgrade our license so we can store eight terabytes instead of four. We are currently at four terabytes, but we're starting to knock on the door of that capacity."
"I think the cost of this solution is quite fair."
"There are two tiers of support and in my opinion, support is worth the cost."
"The support contract is well worth it. The price for it was very reasonable and their team has been very engaged whenever we reach out."
"StarWind is a low-cost, full-featured alternative to the traditional SAN environment, and their support will guide you every step of the setup."
"This solution has competitive prices and the implementation is very easy."
"The pricing is fine for the work that it does."
"If you are looking at a traditional SAN for a small cluster, give StarWind vSAN because you will save thousands without any compromise."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
12%
Construction Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
8%
Healthcare Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Construction Company
8%
Computer Software Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business65
Midsize Enterprise36
Large Enterprise151
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business166
Midsize Enterprise54
Large Enterprise34
 

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...
What needs improvement with Red Hat Gluster Storage?
There is a feature in Red Hat’s commercial version that could be beneficial if integrated into the open-source versio...
What is your primary use case for Red Hat Gluster Storage?
Gluster FS is used for various purposes, including virtualization, collaboration, and data center environments. It is...
What advice do you have for others considering Red Hat Gluster Storage?
I would highly recommend Gluster FS to others considering it. The system is robust, flexible, and easy to use. I'd ra...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for StarWind Virtual SAN?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that we are using the free version, so we did not incur any ...
What needs improvement with StarWind Virtual SAN?
The better features are in the paid version, and I would like to see something from the graphical user interface in t...
What is your primary use case for StarWind Virtual SAN?
In production, I wanted to use StarWind Virtual SAN for shared storage. My main use case for StarWind Virtual SAN is ...
 

Also Known As

Pure Storage FlashArray
Red Hat Gluster, Red Hat Storage Server
StarWind SAN & NAS
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Nielsen, Lamar Advertising, LinkedIn, Betfair, UT-Dallas
NTT Plala, McMaster University, University of Basque Country, Goodtech ASA, Cox Automotive, Raidió Teilifís Éireann (RTÉ), SaskTel, Glashart Media, Casio
Baker Tilly BVI, CMS Internet, Board Harpeth Hall School
Find out what your peers are saying about Red Hat Gluster Storage vs. StarWind Virtual SAN and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
893,164 professionals have used our research since 2012.