Scality RING vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance comparison

Scality and StarWind are both solutions in the Software Defined Storage (SDS) category. Scality is ranked #13 with an average rating of 7.0, while StarWind is ranked #9 with an average rating of 10.0. Additionally, 100% of Scality users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 98% of StarWind users who would recommend it.

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 5, 2024

Scality RING and StarWind HyperConverged Appliance are solutions in the data storage and management sector. Based on flexibility and scalability, Scality RING seems to be better suited for large enterprises, while StarWind's simplicity and ease of management give it an advantage for organizations seeking a turnkey solution.

Features: Scality RING offers powerful object storage, scalability to exabyte levels, and multi-cloud integration. StarWind provides an all-inclusive hyper-converged infrastructure, seamless backup and disaster recovery, alongside major hypervisor compatibility.

Room for Improvement: Scality RING could enhance deployment speed and reduce complexity in virtualization. It may also improve initial cost structures and simplify customer interfaces. StarWind could improve scalability to handle larger enterprise needs, advance customization options, and expand multi-cloud capability integrations.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Scality RING supports customizable deployments across diverse hardware configurations, backed by strong enterprise support packages. StarWind focuses on pre-configured appliances that ease deployment, reducing virtualization complexities with proactive support ensuring smooth operations.

Pricing and ROI: Scality RING’s initial costs are high but delivers long-term ROI through flexibility and reliability. StarWind offers a lower entry cost with ROI from reduced infrastructure complexity and operational efficiency, providing immediate cost benefits.

To learn more, read our detailed Scality RING vs. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance Report (Updated: February 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Scality RING vs. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

February 2025

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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

Pure Storage FlashBlade

Featured Reviews

Eric Black

Solutions Architect at Recovery Point Systems

The ability to leverage multi-tenancy along with immutability is a huge benefit for us

The only thing I feel FlashBlade is missing is the SOS API. If it had SOS API, that would put it well over the top. Veeam Backup specifically has started to streamline their API, and they are doing that with SOS API. They have optimized it. Any of the S3 devices out there that support this SOS API can have far more API calls at once. On our side, that translates to better restoration. With SOS API, it can leverage far more restorations at a single given time or read from the device in simple terms. That results in maximizing the output and throughput from the device itself.

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Guillaume Lapouge

Cloud Architect at Claranet France

Offers UTIPI (Unified Tiered Infrastructure Per IOPS) feature in billing but lacks extensive testing

It's a very good product, but for large-scale usage, it has limitations. Scality RING's lack of extensive testing and potential hidden limitations. While Scality provides precise architecture guidelines for sizing the storage infrastructure, Orange utilizes a different processor architecture for its Ovi servers, requiring additional optimization beyond what Scality offers. In essence, the product lacks third-party optimization capabilities.

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Russ Le Puill

IT Manager at St Peter's Church of England Aided School

Proactive support with improved speed and resilience

There was a long delay with shipping, which we weren't expecting, but we were kept updated throughout. It wasn't made clear to us that we needed to provide our own SFP modules to connect to our infrastructure, so that could have been a bit clearer. It would be amazing if there was, perhaps, a more automated process for updating the hosts themselves, although the maintenance mode works well. Our StarWind command center doesn't seem to have all the options available currently, which support is investigating for us.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable feature of this solution is performance."

"Pure Storage FlashBlade is user-friendly. It's replication feature is great because it has active replication and active DR. That's the beauty of the product. It's a perfect solution for block storage."

"The most valuable features are the Metro clustering, and disaster recovery."

"The onboarding and integrated monitoring tools are pretty good."

"I like its size. It is smaller than the other competitors. We can plug in many blades, and we can have data up to one terabyte."

"Among its most appealing features are its ease of handling and minimal maintenance requirements."

"Speed and ease of use are the two most valuable features."

"The most valuable feature is Safe Mode."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade pros

"I think it's the economic factor. This solution has the lowest cost for storage systems."

"Another feature I like is the life cycle management that helps me with data storage efficiency."

"The most valuable feature of Scality RING8 is its performance and good interface."

"The StarWind array has greatly improved our workflow internally as it is quite easy to use and provides robust features that allow us to provide anything our clients need quickly and efficiently."

"We were able to set it up via the documentation and only needed their support a handful of times."

"Customer service has been excellent. Any questions we have had have been answered quickly."

"The low cost of this solution has also made a big difference in our budget, which has been very helpful."

"How quickly the StarWind solution replicates also gives us the confidence to know that in the event of catastrophic failure of any piece of hardware, we won't be far behind before things went wrong."

"The product runs wonderfully and has already gone through several failure tests."

"The solution has provided our company with a fully redundant virtual environment at half the cost of a traditional SAN implementation."

"The most valuable aspect of StarWind is the all-in-one solution that they provide."

More StarWind HyperConverged Appliance pros

Cons

"We haven't been able to use much of the cloud area of Pure Storage. We have a storage server and it would be better if it could integrate with other cloud features of this solution."

"I would like to see the licensing fees improved as well as the price per terabytes."

"The feature that we're waiting on is better integration with the cell services."

"The only thing I feel FlashBlade is missing is the SOS API. If it had SOS API, that would put it well over the top."

"The Pure Storage Orchestrator is our biggest pain point at the moment. If we can have more say in future developments of feature sets that we will need to support for our use case, that would be pretty beneficial to us."

"File storage needs a lot of improvement. Mainframe connectivity also needs improvement because it requires additional components to be integrated with Pure Storage FlashBlade. If you want to keep your backup data, then this becomes an even more expensive solution because Pure Storage FlashBlade will not be able to meet your backup needs."

"I have not seen ROI."

"We initially encountered challenges with the assembly process due to issues with the documentation required during setup, an area where Pure Storage needs improvement."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade cons

"Scality RING8 could improve by having more features. We have to use two automation tools to meet our needs. We would prefer to use only one."

"Scality RING is not easy to learn for someone new. It is a little bit difficult. There are a lot of components to it, and you also need to understand them to work with it effectively."

"When we used this solution in 2015, it was not scalable at all. I don't know if they have improved on that, but at the time, scalability was just horrible."

"I would request that the terms and conditions be reviewed and made more acceptable to corporate security so that we could finally turn on the proactive support feature, as it is included with our support agreement."

"I think some performance metrics would be nice to see, especially on the storage side."

"Multi cluster support for their Command Console would be very beneficial. Currently, you can only work with a single cluster at a time. The console is new so I expect much growth in this area in the near future. The other area that could be improved is the tech support locale."

"The monitoring and reporting console can be improved in the sense that it can have more information on it."

"The truth is that the operation and support offered is good, but we consider that the product's usability could improve, as well as the data resynchronization time after an unexpected closure."

"That situation, where Dell EMC servers were going down, has been my only real difficulty... it ended up being something that the wider audience of Dell EMC was actually aware of as an issue. Neither the StarWind technicians nor the Dell EMC technicians were able to actually identify that problem sooner than a week or so... The communication between Dell EMC support and StarWind support, in that particular scenario, left something to be desired, for me. I did express those concerns to StarWind and they were very responsive to that."

"Although the setup documentation was very complete and succinct, I found StarWind documentation to be a bit sparse."

"I honestly cannot think of anything else to be improved, as I rarely have to interact with the Starwind product."

More StarWind HyperConverged Appliance cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It's a costly solution, but Pure Storage FlashBlade doesn't require additional licenses. All of the software is combined into one bundle."

"I have seen ROI. It has allowed me to increase the density of my VMs without having to purchase anything additional."

"The price could be cheaper."

"The pricing is relatively expensive due to the FlashBlade technology. However, for companies needing quick and reliable data access, the cost is justified."

"Our licensing is renewed annually."

"The product is very expensive."

"It is within reason for what you get. From what we have found comparing it to other vendors, it is in the same range as others. Given the choice, we would definitely redeploy it based on the cost."

"Our customers have seen a reduction in TCO."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade pricing and cost advice

"The cost of Scality RING8 could be less expensive. It is difficult for smaller businesses to afford it."

"The initial cost (CAPEX) to set up the infrastructure is expensive due to the specific hardware required."

"It's an all in one package, making it very easy."

"The other solutions we were looking at were priced much higher than this and they didn't necessarily have full redundancy... Nutanix and VxRail were in the final running... but it came down to our price point."

"In terms of cost, a storage array is more expensive... For half the cost of Compellent, I got two hosts, more storage, and redundancy."

"This was all completed at an affordable price point for an SMB, which was also a key element for an NPO."

"The HCA price is all-inclusive (setup, hardware, support, warranty), except for your standard Microsoft Server licensing."

"We looked at Nutanix and found it did almost the same thing but for more money. In fact, StarWind was nearly one-third of the price; it cost us £36,000. That includes five years of monitoring... The Nutanix was near enough £110,000 for relatively the same amount of performance and storage."

"The Nutanix piece was about $45,000, getting close to $50,000 with all the licensing involved, whereas the StarWind was less than half of that, after Microsoft licensing and such."

"Its cost was reasonable."

More StarWind HyperConverged Appliance pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

34%

Computer Software Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

18%

Financial Services Firm

13%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Energy/Utilities Company

Computer Software Company

17%

Educational Organization

13%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Pure Storage FlashBlade?

The tool's most valuable feature is its fast performance, especially in handling snapshots. It helps during power out...

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pure Storage FlashBlade?

The pricing for FlashBlade is between cheap and moderate. FlashBlade is worth the money due to the experience and per...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashBlade?

Its configuration should be easier. There should be easier language for the configuration.

See all answers

What do you like most about Scality RING8?

Another feature I like is the life cycle management that helps me with data storage efficiency.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Scality RING8?

It's a very good product, but for large-scale usage, it has limitations. Scality RING's lack of extensive testing and...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Scality RING8?

I work with Scality RING for storage, and we have a concrete strategy to offer it to business customers. Many custome...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for StarWind HyperConverged Appliance?

It's not the cheapest, however, the solution works incredibly well and is so simple to licence and maintain.

See all answers

What needs improvement with StarWind HyperConverged Appliance?

There was a long delay with shipping, which we weren't expecting, but we were kept updated throughout. It wasn't made...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for StarWind HyperConverged Appliance?

We desperately needed to update yet downsize our data centre. We had six hosts for only approximately 14 or so Virtua...

See all answers

Comparisons

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 21% of the time

VAST Data vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 11% of the time

MinIO vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 11% of the time

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 11% of the time

NetApp AFF vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 2% of the time

More Pure Storage FlashBlade Competitors

MinIO vs Scality RING

Compared 16% of the time

Cloudian HyperStore vs Scality RING

Compared 16% of the time

Dell ECS vs Scality RING

Compared 16% of the time

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs Scality RING

Compared 14% of the time

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs Scality RING

Compared 3% of the time

More Scality RING Competitors

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

Compared 35% of the time

StorMagic SvSAN vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

Compared 21% of the time

VxRail vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

Compared 12% of the time

Azure Stack HCI vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

Compared 12% of the time

Dell PowerFlex vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

Compared 11% of the time

More StarWind HyperConverged Appliance Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Pure Storage FlashBlade

March 2025

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Buyer's Guide

Software Defined Storage (SDS)

March 2025

Download Scality RING product report

Buyer's Guide

StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

March 2025

StarWind HyperConverged Appliance report

Download StarWind HyperConverged Appliance product report

Also Known As

No data available

Scality RING, RING8

No data available

Overview

FlashBlade is the industry’s most advanced scale-out storage for unstructured data, powered by a modern, massively parallel architecture to consolidate complex data silos (like backup appliances and data lakes) and accelerate tomorrow’s discoveries and insights.

Pure Storage

Scality RING object storage enables enterprises and cloud service providers to run petabyte-scale, data-rich services like web applications, VOD, active archives, compliance archives, and private storage clouds. The RING is software, so you can deploy it on standard x86 servers of your choice, taking advantage of server and media innovation over time. Acting as a single, distributed system, the RING can scale linearly across thousands of servers, multiple sites, and an unlimited number of objects. Data is protected with policy-based replication, erasure coding, and geo-distribution, achieving up to 14 9s of durability and 100% availability.

Scality

For SMB, ROBO and Enterprises, who look to bring in quick deployment and operation simplicity to virtualization workloads and reduce related expenses, our solution is StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA). It unifies commodity servers, disks and flash, hypervisor of choice, StarWind Virtual SAN, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct or VMware Virtual SAN and associated software into a single manageable layer. The HCA supports scale-up by adding disks and flash, and scale-out by adding extra nodes.

StarWind HyperConverged Appliance consists of StarWind Virtual SAN, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct or VMware Virtual SAN “Ready Nodes”, targeting those, who are building their virtualization infrastructure from scratch. In case there is an existing set of servers, we offer a “software only version”, which is essentially our years proven StarWind Virtual SAN. Basically, it’s the fuel powering StarWind HCA.

StarWind

Sample Customers

ServiceNow, Mercedes-AMG Petronas Motorsport, Dominos, Man AHL

Comcast, TimeWarner Cable, EuroSport, Orange, Deluxe, DailtMotion, SFR, RTL, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Telstra

Sears Home and Franchise Business

Buyer's Guide

Scality RING vs. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

February 2025

Free Report: Scality RING vs. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

Find out what your peers are saying about Scality RING vs. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance and other solutions. Updated: February 2025.

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