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StorPool vs SwiftStack [EOL] comparison

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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
7.4
Number of Reviews
211
Ranking in other categories
All-Flash Storage (4th)
StorPool
Average Rating
10.0
Reviews Sentiment
8.0
Number of Reviews
11
Ranking in other categories
Software Defined Storage (SDS) (18th)
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.
it_user1721697 - PeerSpot reviewer
Managing Director at CloudScale365, Inc.
Great service and support with a constant addition of new features
As of now, the product has been working really well for us. They keep updating and launching new features. Their support has been great and have always been available. I have personally met with multiple Storpool engineers and spoke about different options and features. There are too many features that we don't know or use yet. My recommendation would be to promote the new features and give users different examples of how they can be used and how we can benefit from them. This is a great product.
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

"They are quite responsive and our local team was pretty good."
"It's very fast and very easy to use. It performs well and is both flexible and compatible. We like it because it's easy to use."
"Scalability is one of the best features. You can quickly add more. You can swap out the drives with larger sizes, you can add more shelves. All of that is perfect - the whole concept of keeping it modular..."
"They can provide a lot of performance, so there is not a lot of difference, but efficiency is something customers value because the compression can be up to twice of the second competitor."
"This solution has improved our organization in the way that we used to see latency but now with this solution we don't. It also has good performance. Latencies have come down for our performance in the SQL databases. We can put a lot more in a lot less in terms of space savings. We also save data center space have good deduplication."
"Pure Storage FlashArray provides immediate benefits to our customers with its easy setup process, allowing for instant use and rapid realization of advantages."
"The management is simple in Pure Storage FlashArray."
"Having an intuitive user interface to get things running is great."
"The team behind it was very engaged and had the skills and ability to support a service provider."
"StorPool is the solution to storage performance and scalability problems that we’ve been battling with for years."
"Using StorPool we had about 15% increase in our gross margin and that is huge for a service provider."
"The speed of the storage solution also allows us to provide service to applications that are ​very I/O ​intensive."
"We are very happy and can finally say that the collaboration that we have had with StorPool has been excellent."
"We are very happy with StorPool, performance is impressive and expansion is as simple as adding an additional node."
"Performance, redundancy, scalability and cost-effectiveness. StorPool delivers superbly in all of these areas."
"The two 10GE networks provide redundancy and increased performance as they serve as two separate networks doubling the throughput and doing multipathing and load balancing. We now have a high performance shared storage system which enables us to run on private cloud. Our previous system used bare-metal hardware, which provided high performance but inflexible management. Now we have best of both worlds, SSD-class performance with flexibility of a private cloud system."
"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."
"The SwiftStack Controller, which is the web UI, provides out of band management. This has been one of the best features of it. It allows us to be able to do upgrades and look at performance metrics. It is a top feature and reason to choose the product."
"Management of clusters is easy and it is simple to reduce the man hours needed for a deployment."
"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."
"It is a very well-done solution; I have no issues with it, it is well-explained, and configuration is easy with it."
"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."
"SwiftStack has decreased our cost for storing and utilizing data, definitely by half."
"The impact on our business was that we launched a new product which has allowed us to generate additional revenue for our business with it."
 

Cons

"I would like to see more detailed reporting on the data. However, it would be nice to know what are the exact VMs usage after deduplication and/or what that VMs actual latency and bandwidth is, outside of VMware."
"Pure Storage FlashArray could improve the recent file storage capabilities because it is lacking a lot of features."
"The file functionality could be better."
"The support for NFS protocols right out-of-the-box need improvement. I'm used to other storage vendors who have NFS support right out-of-the-box, and Pure Storage doesn't seem to have anything."
"We did have one hiccup with the integration of vCenter. When we were installing Pure Storage, we were using vCenter 6.7, which defaults to the HTML5 Web Client. The current plugin for Pure Storage doesn't show up in that client at all. You have to go and use the legacy FlexFlash client to see the Pure Storage plugin in vCenter."
"Pure Storage FlashArray has not helped decrease the total cost of ownership."
"I would like to see some improvements on the FlashBlade side around the CIFS space support. I am not super familiar with all the different NAS protocols that they run on their box, but there could be some improvements made on SMB CIFS side."
"Technical support needs improvement. With respect to them being able to respond, they're more marketing people, less technical."
"Monitoring and statistics UI is a bit clumsy, although StorPool is currently working on a new version."
"Although controlling the system from console has lots of capabilities, an interface to view the performance of the StorPool System and control some cases is a need."
"The only place we feel they could improve is the time it takes to bring new features to production."
"Monitoring and statistics UI is a bit clumsy."
"It would be good if, with next releases, StorPool provide a better GUI for monitoring and statistics. This would make our experience even better and complete."
"At times we need to check the disks and do some minor operations. A friendlier user interface would be useful in such cases."
"Live and historical performance statistics would be useful, though my understanding is that this is on the way in a future release."
"It would be good if, with next releases, StorPool provide a better GUI for monitoring and statistics. This would make our experience even better and complete."
"[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."
"They should provide a more concise hardware calculator when you're putting your capacity together."
"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."
"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."
"On the controller features, there needs to be a bit more clean up of the user interface."
"The biggest room for improvement is the maturity of the proxyFS solution."
"Don't use it because it will go off the market in three months. It won't be available."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is light years beyond anything else with the same price point."
"The guaranty that Pure Storage provides when you purchase it doesn't meet the overall capacity needs to provide extra storage, if needed. Thus, it is not meeting our expectations."
"The solution could be cheaper."
"The price, in general, is around $100,000, however, I know it costs more."
"Our Evergreen Storage subscription is supposed to be good when we go to upgrade."
"We have seen a reduction in TCO."
"The price of the solution is not expensive."
"The pricing is an issue. However, being all-flash, it will always be sort of expensive."
"It provides us with a significant reduction in TCO due to their pay-as-you-grow licensing model, which means we don’t have to pay upfront for hardware and licensing for capacity thStorPoolat we don’t yet need to use."
"StorPool software is cost-effective and gives us a pricing advantage over our competitors."
"StorPool's pricing and licensing model is very transparent. As always, one has to due his due diligence when choosing a product like distributed storage solutions."
"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."
"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."
"One of their advantages of being a commercial open source platform is, for the scale that they offer, the pricing is pretty competitive."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Government
6%
Performing Arts
16%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
14%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Computer Software Company
9%
Construction Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business63
Midsize Enterprise36
Large Enterprise143
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Large Enterprise1
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 is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pure Storage FlashArray?
I don't really know much about the pricing for Pure Storage FlashArray in terms of the absolute cost. Regarding Everg...
What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashArray?
Despite liking Pure Storage FlashArray, there is room for improvement in automation. Pure Storage FlashArray needs to...
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Also Known As

Pure Storage FlashArray
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Overview

 

Sample Customers

Nielsen, Lamar Advertising, LinkedIn, Betfair, UT-Dallas
CloudSigma, Kualo, Togglebox, Neterra, Serveo, Superhosting.bg, GroupOne, DRFortress, Metanet, Dia, Server Storage Solutions
Pac-12 Networks, Georgia Institute of Technology, Budd Van Lines
Find out what your peers are saying about StorPool vs. SwiftStack [EOL] and other solutions. Updated: September 2024.
884,976 professionals have used our research since 2012.