Red Hat Gluster Storage vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance comparison

Red Hat Gluster Storage vs. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

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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

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Software Defined Storage (SDS) category, the mindshare of Pure Storage FlashBlade is 4.2%, down from 4.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Red Hat Gluster Storage is 3.0%, up from 2.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is 2.0%, up from 1.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Software Defined Storage (SDS)

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.

Read full review

GiovanniRamirez

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…

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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.

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

"Using this solution has made our backups more reliable."

"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 most valuable feature of this solution is performance."

"It's very easy-to-use."

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

"The initial setup is pretty quick."

"It performs well and it is also very fast."

"The solution provides many controllers."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade pros

"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."

"The technical support team is excellent."

"However, StarWind HCA won us over in two areas: price and support. We were actually able to install an all-flash StarWind HCA for less than other vendors' spinning rust solutions! We were able to roll five years of warranty and support into the purchase price and still save thousands of dollars upfront."

"Repair efforts have been reduced to nearly nothing."

"The full suite of redundancy gives a nice sense of security for the whole environment."

"The hosts came preconfigured, and it was plug-and-play."

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

"UI Options are simple and easy to find."

"The customer service has been the most valuable feature of the product to me."

"We opted for 24-hour monitoring and support, which has already paid for itself."

More StarWind HyperConverged Appliance pros

Cons

"Pure Storage FlashBlade should improve on more cloud integration."

"Its configuration should be easier."

"In the realm of micro-services, I think that Pure Storage can do well if they start getting in there and making their arrays more micro-services ready."

"I would like to see more deduplication."

"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."

"I would like to have Snapshots and Snapmail in the next release. People who came from a NetApp background, especially expect these features."

"I would also like to see better support for CIFS workloads."

"It usually comes down to just what you hit and the value you're getting when you spend the money and license the products. I would always go, "If you want to make things better, lower your price and make your licensing simpler." There's always an opportunity around that."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade cons

"There is a feature in Red Hat’s commercial version that could be beneficial if integrated into the open-source version."

"The user interface could be simplified."

"The system should be more intuitive and easier to manage."

"The performance of the solution must be improved."

"What would have to be done urgently is the adaptation of the hardware to the configuration."

"CSVs require the storage to be configured through iSCSI, even though the storage is local."

"Product shipments did have a few bumps along the way, but that's to be expected when using any shipping company."

"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."

"Possible new features could be CSV-level snapshot capability, Veeam integration, and maybe a more straightforward setup. Granted, you don't have to worry about setups with the HCA, but if you want to implement StarWind vSAN in a lab to test it is a tedious setup process."

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

"The only thing that can use improvement is the StarWind Management Console and Command Center."

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

More StarWind HyperConverged Appliance cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price is a little high."

"In my opinion, we have paid the right price for the product. I don't think that it is too much or too little."

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

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

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

"Pure Storage FlashBlade is a hardware appliance, and it's very expensive if you compare its price with other solutions. You can get the same features and benefits from its competitor, VAST Data, but for half the price of Pure Storage FlashBlade."

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

"Our customers have seen a reduction in TCO."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade pricing and cost advice

"If you need cheap storage, but still need high availability, it's a good product to look at."

"I honestly feel that there's no one else in the market doing what they're doing for the price point that they're doing it at. That's why I asked them about investing in their company. I think that the options they're providing and the software that they have is sort of revolutionary for the price point... The total cost was $24,400."

"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."

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

"There is a bit of a start-up cost. Having never used HCAs before, I was reluctant to buy it. I would suggest that you jump in and do it, as I wish I hadn't wasted so much time."

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

"Our entire package was around $35,000 for everything, including three years of support."

"When I researched they came the most cost-effective."

"Its cost was reasonable."

More StarWind HyperConverged Appliance pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Software Defined Storage (SDS) solutions are best for your needs.

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850,028 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

28%

Computer Software Company

12%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

18%

Computer Software Company

10%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Comms Service Provider

Computer Software Company

17%

Educational Organization

14%

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...

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...

What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashBlade?

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

What do you like most about Red Hat Gluster Storage?

The technical support team is excellent.

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 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.

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...

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...

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Comparisons

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Compared 11% of the time

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Compared 11% of the time

Pure Storage FlashArray vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 8% of the time

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LizardFS vs Red Hat Gluster Storage

Compared 27% of the time

VMware vSAN vs Red Hat Gluster Storage

Compared 20% of the time

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs Red Hat Gluster Storage

Compared 18% of the time

StarWind Virtual SAN vs Red Hat Gluster Storage

Compared 15% of the time

IBM Spectrum Scale vs Red Hat Gluster Storage

Compared 12% of the time

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Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

Compared 31% of the time

StorMagic SvSAN vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

Compared 20% of the time

VxRail vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

Compared 13% of the time

Azure Stack HCI vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

Compared 12% of the time

Dell PowerFlex vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

Compared 9% of the time

More StarWind HyperConverged Appliance Competitors

Product Reports

Pure Storage FlashBlade

Download Pure Storage FlashBlade product report

Software Defined Storage (SDS)

Download Red Hat Gluster Storage product report

StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

Download StarWind HyperConverged Appliance product report

StarWind HyperConverged Appliance report

Also Known As

No data available

Red Hat Gluster, Red Hat Storage Server

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

Red Hat Gluster Storage (formerly known as Red Hat Storage Server) is a software-defined storage (SDS) platform designed to handle the requirements of traditional file storage—high-capacity tasks like backup and archival as well as high-performance tasks of analytics and virtualization. But unlike traditional storage systems, Red Hat Gluster Storage isn’t rigid and expensive. It easily scales across bare metal, virtual, container, and cloud deployments.

Red Hat

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

NTT Plala, McMaster University, University of Basque Country, Goodtech ASA, Cox Automotive, Raidió Teilifís Éireann (RTÉ), SaskTel, Glashart Media, Casio

Sears Home and Franchise Business

Red Hat Gluster Storage vs. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance