NetApp StorageGRID vs SwiftStack [EOL] comparison

NetApp and NVIDIA are both solutions in the File and Object Storage category. Additionally, 88% of NetApp users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of NVIDIA users who would recommend it.

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between NetApp StorageGRID and SwiftStack [EOL] based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Red Hat, Nutanix, Dell Technologies and others in File and Object Storage.

To learn more, read our detailed File and Object Storage Report (Updated: October 2025).

Buyer's Guide

File and Object Storage

October 2025

Download the complete report

Helped 872,706 peers since 2012

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

MikaelHellström

IT Manager at Regin Dalarna

Has handled backup storage needs reliably and supports seamless upgrades

In environments requiring high throughput and low latency, Pure Storage FlashBlade provides high throughput and normal latency, but we do not have any application that requires low latency right now, so the latency of three to five milliseconds is considered kind of high. Pure Storage FlashBlade's ability to integrate with enterprise applications is not important for us, as we only want to present an S3 bucket for our backup, which we have done, and it works very fast. We use the Purity software's data reduction techniques; we have a backup software that compresses everything before sending it to the S3 bucket, achieving a data reduction of 1.1 to one. I would recommend Pure Storage FlashBlade to other companies because it's a very fast and scalable solution for anyone who needs it. On a scale of 1-10, I rate this solution an 8.

Read full review

Michael Lopez

Sr Systems Engineer at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees

Has reduced storage costs and improved snapshot management for large data workloads

The advanced features of NetApp StorageGRID which our upper management wouldn't agree to use, include the S3 feature. We are heavy into AWS, and my thoughts were to develop a small dev environment or even a POC environment on-prem. That's still up in the air as we continue on. Currently, AI has taken over everything with a focus on AI. The upgrades of NetApp StorageGRID present a challenge. It's a rolling upgrade, node by node. At one point, one node would not upgrade. The positive aspect is that it didn't take down the entire environment. The environment remained functional on two different versions. The scalability of NetApp StorageGRID has been proven as we've expanded twice. We started with six or seven nodes and have grown to 15 nodes. It does take time for synchronization to complete. From what I've seen, it took a couple of months for it all to sync up once adding nodes. However, it was transparent. It captured the addition and performed effectively, all happening in the background, steadily and surely.

Read full review

reviewer1759539

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.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"FlashBlade offers low latency, high throughput, and seamless scalability."

"I would rate Pure Storage FlashBlade a ten out of ten."

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

"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."

"We have integrated it with VMware. The integration process is pretty good. Especially with VMware, it helps with the capacity of it."

"It has absolutely simplified our storage because the dashboards on the consoles show a clear understanding of where you are, and it is also very easy to provision. This been a big help for our teams."

"The initial setup is pretty quick."

"It uses the same platform for connectivity so integration is seamless."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade pros

"Duplication, interface and the manageability is good and simple."

"The scalability is very effective for our customers."

"Cost-effective and easy to deploy."

"The feature of NetApp StorageGRID that has significantly improved data storage management for my customers is the value of the S3 API because it allows developers who are not infrastructure-oriented to use it and write code against it."

"It has awesome scalability. We consume it with storage appliance nodes, then we just plug and play as we need more."

"The technical support is good."

"The feature of StorageGRID that I find most valuable for ensuring data durability and protection is its Information Lifecycle Management functionality."

"The backup features are valuable. I've heard from our backup and data protection people that our clients are very satisfied with the performance in junction with the backup, which they archive on this type of object storage."

More NetApp StorageGRID pros

"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."

"SwiftStack is also quite flexible when it comes to hardware. It depends, of course, on the use case and the kind of hardware you want to buy. But you have quite a bit of choice in hardware. The SwiftStack software itself does not impose anything on you."

"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 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."

"The scalability is phenomenal. It seems infinite, as long as you put enough storage in place, add enough nodes."

"The biggest feature, the biggest reason we went with SwiftStack, rather than deploying our own model with OpenStack Swift, was their deployment model. That was really the primary point in our purchase decision, back when we initially deployed. It took my installation time from days to hours, for deployment in our environment, versus deploying OpenStack Swift ourselves, manually."

"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 general consensus on what we've done is that the restores coming back from it have been faster than they were from our prior vendor. Ingest speeds are fine. The restore speeds have improved."

More SwiftStack [EOL] pros

Cons

"In my opinion, one way Pure Storage FlashBlade can be improved is by having more compatibility between the FlashArray and FlashBlade, allowing for synchronized data between both platforms."

"An area for improvement in Pure Storage FlashBlade is its price. It could be reduced. The technical support for Pure Storage FlashBlade also needs improvement. It used to be good, with more experienced engineers. Nowadays, it isn't, and it takes longer for support to solve problems."

"There is some room for new features related to authentication and integration with Kubernetes, and other solution using S3 Bucket."

"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."

"Compared to, for example, Hitachi NAS, the solution is not mature at all. It's just in its infancy as far as technology goes."

"The technical support needs to improve. When we open a case, it is auto assigned to a support tech person. Nine out of ten times, we get an email right back saying that person is off until tomorrow. I cannot handle that. They just did this over the weekend to us, too. I had to call our rep and have them do something about it."

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

"I have not seen ROI."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade cons

"The processes around installation and upgrade need improvement."

"The user interface of NetApp StorageGRID might need some tweaks, and configuration is maybe a little bit confusing for those who are not so experienced."

"The only real issue that we have run into is, when we are cloning, we cannot do a thin provision clone, it has to be a full clone."

"The integration with more apps has room for improvement."

"The product's continual innovation and enhancement in integration capabilities with other NetApp solutions could be better."

"The user interface of NetApp StorageGRID might need some tweaks, and configuration is maybe a little bit confusing for those who are not so experienced."

"It has its quirks here and there, but it is an older NetApp system."

"They can enhance the deduplication and compression features, which are crucial for saving more disk space. It's not at the same level as the NetApp filer or the real NetApp cluster that runs itself on its architecture, as StorageGRID is a software solution that emulates a RAID level."

More NetApp StorageGRID cons

"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."

"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."

"[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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I rate the tool's pricing a seven to eight out of ten."

"We used a reseller for the purchase."

"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."

"The price is a little high."

"I understand that it is competitively priced compared to other brands."

"Our licensing is renewed annually."

"The price could be cheaper."

"The price of this solution could be made more affordable."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade pricing and cost advice

"We pay for a license annually."

"Creating your own data stores, backups, or storage grids, helps eliminate all these costs of downloading all the data back after you downloaded to the cloud."

"The price is attractive."

"The licensing that the S3 service provides them from a FabricPool standpoint is more attractive than the licensing from AWS or Azure."

"The pricing of StorageGRID falls within the typical range for enterprise-grade solutions and is comparable to other vendors such as Dell, NetApp, and Pure Storage."

"We save money on storage costs from this solution since it allows us to have a source of revenue from customers consuming the service."

"Buying the solution is expensive, but it saves you money down the line when you factor in the logistics of not having to buy tapes."

"Our licensing is in INR it was around 25 lakhs, which is roughly two million."

More NetApp StorageGRID pricing and cost advice

"One of their advantages of being a commercial open source platform is, for the scale that they offer, the pricing is pretty 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."

"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."

"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 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."

"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."

"COST_SAVING; 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."

More SwiftStack [EOL] pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which File and Object Storage solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

872,706 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

12%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Government

Financial Services Firm

20%

Manufacturing Company

17%

Computer Software Company

14%

University

Computer Software Company

16%

Manufacturing Company

13%

Performing Arts

Educational Organization

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	11
Midsize Enterprise	11
Large Enterprise	21

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	5
Midsize Enterprise	4
Large Enterprise	11

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	3
Midsize Enterprise	2
Large Enterprise	3

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...

See all answers

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

The pricing of Pure Storage FlashBlade is expensive compared to other products I used from other companies in the pas...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashBlade?

I believe there is not much improvement needed because they have everything we need, but the interface is a little bi...

See all answers

What do you like most about NetApp StorageGRID?

The management portals have most significantly improved our data retrieval times. They've made it much easier to rest...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for NetApp StorageGRID?

As an administrator, I was not involved in the pricing of NetApp StorageGRID. From what I understood, it was cheaper ...

See all answers

What needs improvement with NetApp StorageGRID?

The upgrades of NetApp StorageGRID present challenges. It's a rolling upgrade, node by node. At one point, one node w...

See all answers

Ask a question

Earn 20 points

Comparisons

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 19% of the time

MinIO vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 11% of the time

Pure Storage FlashArray vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 10% of the time

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 9% of the time

NetApp AFF vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 3% of the time

More Pure Storage FlashBlade Competitors

MinIO vs NetApp StorageGRID

Compared 27% of the time

Dell ObjectScale vs NetApp StorageGRID

Compared 22% of the time

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs NetApp StorageGRID

Compared 21% of the time

Scality RING vs NetApp StorageGRID

Compared 6% of the time

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs NetApp StorageGRID

Compared 3% of the time

More NetApp StorageGRID Competitors

Dell ObjectScale vs SwiftStack [EOL]

Compared 53% of the time

Peaxy vs SwiftStack [EOL]

Compared 47% of the time

More SwiftStack [EOL] Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Pure Storage FlashBlade

October 2025

Download Pure Storage FlashBlade product report

Buyer's Guide

NetApp StorageGRID

October 2025

Download NetApp StorageGRID product report

Buyer's Guide

SwiftStack [EOL]

October 2025

Download SwiftStack [EOL] product report

Also Known As

No data available

Storage GRID

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

Store and manage unstructured data at scale using NetApp StorageGRID for secure, durable object storage. Place content in the right location, at the right time, and on the right storage tier, optimizing workflows and reducing overall costs for globally distributed rich media.

NetApp

SwiftStack [EOL] offers robust cloud integration, rapid deployment, and hardware-agnostic capabilities, making it a preferred choice for organizations needing scalable and flexible storage solutions. It supports a variety of storage needs from object storage to enterprise-grade backup systems.

SwiftStack [EOL] is recognized for its seamless cloud integration and platform independence, enabling rapid deployment and superior scalability. Its metadata search, proxyFS, and 1space feature enhance versatility and backup efficiency. SwiftStack Controller provides an enhanced management experience with easy system upgrades and performance monitoring. While the management UI and ProxyFS maturity have room for improvement, users seek more organized interfaces and better REST API support. Enhancements in erasure coding configurations and data archiving, along with improved client library integrations, are highlighted needs. The demand for NFS integration improvements and options for data movement between storage policies is noted.

What are the key features of SwiftStack?

Rapid Deployment: Fast and efficient system setup.
Scalability: Easily adapts to growing storage needs.
Flexibility: Hardware-agnostic and platform independent.
Resiliency: Robust data protection mechanisms.
Cloud Integration: Seamlessly integrates with cloud services.
Metadata Search: Facilitates efficient data retrieval.
ProxyFS Capability: Offers versatile storage solutions.
1space Feature: Enhances backup efficiency.

What benefits and ROI should be expected in reviews?

Cost Efficiency: Reduces deployment and operational costs.
Performance: Fast data ingestion and access speed.
Enhanced Management: Simplifies system management with advanced tools.
Versatility: Supports diverse storage needs from backups to cloud services.

SwiftStack [EOL] is implemented in industries as a backup platform for Commvault and Veeam, cloud storage similar to Amazon S3 or Azure Blob. It's essential for SaaS platforms, data sharing in research, preproduction object storage, data center operations, and archival management for OpenStack Swift servers in educational and research institutions.

NVIDIA

Sample Customers

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

ASE, DARZ GmbH

Pac-12 Networks, Georgia Institute of Technology, Budd Van Lines

Buyer's Guide

File and Object Storage

October 2025

Download Free Report

Find out what your peers are saying about Red Hat, Nutanix, Dell Technologies and others in File and Object Storage. Updated: October 2025.

DOWNLOAD NOW

872,706 professionals have used our research since 2012.

See our list of best File and Object Storage vendors.

We monitor all File and Object Storage reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.