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

Scality RING 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
227
Ranking in other categories
All-Flash Storage (3rd)
Scality RING
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.4
Number of Reviews
15
Ranking in other categories
Software Defined Storage (SDS) (7th), File and Object Storage (5th)
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.
reviewer2713596 - PeerSpot reviewer
Storage Engineering Manager at a insurance company with 10,001+ employees
Provides a cost-effective solution for our tremendous amount of data while meeting the performance thresholds
There are too many changes because it's software-defined storage and host-based. They should reduce the number of patches and enhance product reliability and stability. When releasing new versions, they should perform thorough quality checks instead of flooding us with patches. They should prioritize quality over timeliness to minimize customer disruptions and not force customers into a cycle of fixes that interfere with daily work. The quality of releases and version control has to be improved tremendously. You don't release a version just because it's time to release a version, and then let the customers find out all the bugs in it. They have to reduce the amount of work customers have to do because of repeated fixes. I would rather have them take some extra time, do their due diligence, do their testing thoroughly, and make sure there are very few customer disruptions. The quality of the release should be very high.
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

"The cost of Pure FlashArray is a bit high compared to peers, but its sustainability and features justify the price."
"You can even review the devices from your phone. You don't need to be connected to your company's website or VPN to access alerts and reports. While you can't manage the devices using your phone, you can review all the important details about the machine."
"We noticed a dramatic increase in application performance when moving it from NetApp to Pure Storage."
"We have seen savings in our storage, and the speed of deployment has gone from several days to a few minutes, reducing backup and restore times from 93 days to minutes and simplifying storage for us."
"For VMware, it has been a humongous savings."
"It has a small footprint, as the current system is only four units per rack, it's got good speed for the price as it uses eMLC, an advanced type of SSD, and it's very scalable, and we're not paying for capacity as we get free controllers every three years."
"If you need a high-performance storage appliance that is easy to install and maintain, you pretty much can't go wrong."
"The predictive performance analytics are good."
"The improvement with Scality RING is the ability to manage huge volumes and the easy scalability when dealing with capacity growth and management."
"Scality RING has influenced our approach to scaling in different dimensions by providing a cost-effective solution for the tremendous amount of data we generate every day for each customer. It allows us to store, sort, and analyze data effectively while meeting our performance thresholds."
"Another feature I like is the life cycle management that helps me with data storage efficiency."
"I would rate Scality RING 10 out of 10."
"Scality RING's capacity and performance scaling across sites and clouds have positively affected our operational efficiency."
"We have virtually zero data loss thanks to this resilience."
"I think it's the economic factor. This solution has the lowest cost for storage systems."
"The best functionality of Scality RING is its ease of administration; it is out of the box and was set up for us in collaboration with Scality and HP."
"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 scalability is phenomenal. It seems infinite, as long as you put enough storage in place, add enough nodes."
"It is a very well-done solution; I have no issues with it, it is well-explained, and configuration is easy with it."
"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 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."
"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."
"We have had three years of 100 percent uptime on the system."
 

Cons

"The one major gripe I have is that there is no snapshotting enabled by default on the SAN."
"I would like to have an easy way to determine the cost per VM so that I can present a solution to our customers."
"One improvement area is the eradication time delay."
"The 3PAR SSD arrays that we have are still failing a lot so even though we're under warranty, we still have to get someone out and usually have someone troubleshoot so that usually adds onto the cost. With Pure, we've had a disc fail and we pop it out and you pop it in and it's good to go."
"It would be nice to have a better view of the allocated capacity on their Platform as a Service solution because we have to do some manual calculations to understand how much we are going to pay every month to use the storage that is allocated."
"The price is too high."
"I would rate this solution an eight because we have had outages. The commit times went very high in the database. The whole array went down so our customers were down for around eight hours. This was a very big outage which could have been our fault because we didn't do the upgrade in time."
"Its price needs improvement. Its price is almost double than any other flash storage solution."
"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."
"What we are currently missing and will be demanding in the new tender is an additional external backup of all data, ideally on a simple system, to safeguard against any severe local incidents so that we still have the data protected elsewhere."
"We do see some areas where we have much higher operations or much higher queries, Scality sometimes chokes up."
"They should prioritize quality over timeliness to minimize customer disruptions and not force customers into a cycle of fixes that interfere with daily work."
"Sometimes we need to restart components, including metadata, so it is not just plug and play; day-to-day attention is necessary, but we can leverage vendor-provided monitoring tools, including dashboards to identify potential issues, allowing us to help manage overhead as much as possible."
"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."
"Encryption today is not up to date. Encryption and data security need improvement. We don't have a solution for customers who need confidentiality."
"When considering the initial setup of Scality RING in 2015, it was, at first, very complicated. Installation and documentation were still being finalized."
"We find the pricing rather steep."
"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."
"[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. Something where you would have a metadata tagging policy engine and a data mover all built into a single system that would automatically be able to take your data off your primary and put it into an object store in a non-proprietary way - which is key."
"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."
"Management UI can be improved and have more functionalities."
"They should provide a more concise hardware calculator when you're putting your capacity together."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We are finding the TCO of flash to be lower than SSD implementations."
"The price was slightly higher than others, but competitive, if you consider all the other features that you get from it."
"Because the price is a bit higher than other products, the data reduction equalizes the price with amount of the data reduction."
"The price of Pure Storage FlashArray is expensive."
"We implemented Pure Storage FlashArray nine years ago when it was new to the market and obtained it at a preferential price."
"No storage device is cheap, but Pure Storage is fairly priced and offers what you pay for. You get all the licenses in the future when you purchase a license."
"We do not incur additional costs beyond the licensing fee."
"I would rate the pricing of Pure Storage FlashArray a five out of ten. It is expensive but not too much."
"The initial cost (CAPEX) to set up the infrastructure is expensive due to the specific hardware required."
"The cost of Scality RING8 could be less expensive. It is difficult for smaller businesses to afford it."
"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.""
"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."
"We have had a 40 to 50 percent reduction in CAPEX on the acquisition of new hardware, which is probably conservative."
"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."
"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."
"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."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which File and Object Storage solutions are best for your needs.
896,942 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Construction Company
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Computer Software Company
11%
Government
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Construction Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
15%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Construction Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business69
Midsize Enterprise37
Large Enterprise157
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise12
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 needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashArray?
I do not have any improvements at the moment; I like how it is. I have nothing to add about needed improvements.
What needs improvement with Scality RING8?
Scality RING has room for improvement, particularly in having a supervisor external to Scality RING, which is key for...
What is your primary use case for Scality RING8?
Scality RING is used exclusively for S3 object storage. Scality RING is an alternative to Amazon S3, allowing custome...
What advice do you have for others considering Scality RING8?
I assess the simplicity of managing large volumes of data with Scality RING's interface as feasible, but it requires ...
Ask a question
Earn 20 points
 

Also Known As

Pure Storage FlashArray
Scality RING, RING8
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Nielsen, Lamar Advertising, LinkedIn, Betfair, UT-Dallas
Comcast, TimeWarner Cable, EuroSport, Orange, Deluxe, DailtMotion, SFR, RTL, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Telstra
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: May 2026.
896,942 professionals have used our research since 2012.