Dell ObjectScale vs SwiftStack [EOL] comparison

Dell Technologies and NVIDIA are both solutions in the File and Object Storage category. Additionally, 96% of Dell Technologies users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of NVIDIA users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Aug 26, 2025

SwiftStack [EOL] and Dell ObjectScale are competing in the object storage solutions market. Dell ObjectScale seems to have the upper hand due to its robust feature set, offering superior value with advanced data management and strong data distribution capabilities.

Features: SwiftStack [EOL] is characterized by scalability, easy integration with existing infrastructure, and multi-cloud environment support. Dell ObjectScale provides advanced data management, seamless scalability, and robust data distribution.

Room for Improvement: SwiftStack [EOL] could benefit from enhanced advanced features. It lacks the comprehensive capabilities found in more modern solutions. Dell ObjectScale might improve upon its complexity in initial deployment and simplify its integration process.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: SwiftStack [EOL] is known for straightforward deployment and a focus on customer service aiding seamless integration. Dell ObjectScale offers a sophisticated deployment process with comprehensive documentation, appealing to larger, complex enterprise needs.

Pricing and ROI: SwiftStack [EOL] is appreciated for its attractive setup cost, providing fair ROI for those focusing on lowering initial expenses. Dell ObjectScale, while involving a higher setup investment, promises strong ROI through its advanced features, offering great value for long-term objectives.

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

Buyer's Guide

File and Object Storage

October 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

Parul-Patel

Senior Network Engineer at Holy Redeemer Health System, Inc.

High performance and throughput enhance IT backup management

The multi-dimensional scale-out design feature of Pure Storage FlashBlade is not in use in our environment. Regarding data reduction technologies, we don't get much deduplication because the data is already deduplicated from our FlashArray before we get to backup, so there is no benefit of deduplication. Regarding the integration with cloud-native ecosystem tools, we are not on cloud; we are strictly an on-premises solution. Pure Storage FlashBlade is not used by any end-user; it's used only for IT backup, with only about four people in our group managing it. I cannot recommend Pure Storage FlashBlade to other users depending upon their financial situation because it's an expensive solution, and the cost is very high, including licensing and renewal every year. I rate Pure Storage FlashBlade an eight out of ten.

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SamuelThomas

Consultant at Key Information Technology L.L.C.

Managing efficiently with user-friendly interfaces for monitoring and managing resources

We normally recommend Dell ECS to enterprise customers and government customers Dell ECS is very easy to handle, primarily because the web UI dashboard and everything is very easy to manage for every customer. They can monitor the DPS, access failures, bandwidth, failed requests, and latency.…

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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.

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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 initial setup was straightforward. If you know how to plug in power and network you're pretty much qualified. They were on site to configure the network, the box to fit into our network architecture. Other than that, we self-managed from there."

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

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

"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 main feature I have found to be product replication."

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

"We can capacity plan at a greater level than we used to."

"The most valuable features of this solution are the rewrite speed and the nonstop services."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade pros

"The impact of Dell ECS on my organization has been positive, improving user experience, security, and reliability."

"Some of the best features with Dell ECS are that it's scale-out storage with compatibility, which are the main drivers, along with very good support from Dell EMC that usually makes customers happy."

"We face very few hardware failures."

"It is 100% stable. It is also scalable."

"Competitive object storage platform that's stable and scalable."

"It is a stable platform."

"The technology is very good, it performs well."

"Dell ECS is very easy to handle, primarily because the web UI dashboard and everything is very easy to manage for every customer."

More Dell ObjectScale pros

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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 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."

More SwiftStack [EOL] pros

Cons

"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."

"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."

"I want efficiency. FlashBlade doesn't have efficiency now."

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

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

"The features provided for SMB customers are limited."

"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."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade cons

"The solution’s stability could be improved."

"The deployment is not easy, and some expertise is required to configure the virtual data center and replication groups."

"While there can be occasional issues with routing to the wrong region that lead to slight delays, it's typically business as usual."

"They do not have complete documentation, which is very weak and could be improved."

"There is room for improvement in the DPI reports, as they could be made more user-friendly."

"The graphical user interface should offer more options, and the documentation with respect to administration could be improved, as it is quite weak in this product."

"From an improvement perspective, Dell ECS should aim to offer a better pricing plan to its users."

"In Taiwan, they don't have professional technical support."

More Dell ObjectScale cons

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"They should provide a more concise hardware calculator when you're putting your capacity together."

"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."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product is very expensive."

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

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

"The price is a little high."

"The price could be cheaper."

"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."

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

"Support is a separate line item. Support is a different cost, but whatever your support is now, that's what you're going to pay forever. If your support's $100 today, six years from now it's $100. It doesn't fluctuate unless you upgrade it, or change it, etc."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade pricing and cost advice

"The solution could be cheaper."

"Dell EMC ECS is too expensive."

"The solution's cost is quite reasonable."

"If I remember correctly, Dell ECS is an appliance, so if you buy Dell ECS, you also have to buy the hardware, while IBM is standalone software, so you can buy IBM as software only without needing to buy the hardware. On a scale of one to five, I'm rating the pricing for Dell ECS a four."

"It is an expensive solution. There is a need to make yearly payments towards the licensing costs attached to the product."

"It's a lease-based model, so it's capacity-based. We already negotiated the price a lot, but we're still doing that with Dell because somehow the product was not installed successfully, so there was a lot of struggle in the distributor territory between Dell and the environment itself. I would give the solution a 6 out of 10 for the pricing. There's a little room for improvement."

"The charges for this solution are made in blocks of models, which are purchased depending on what features an organization requires."

"We are not paying for the license at this stage."

More Dell ObjectScale pricing and cost advice

"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."

"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 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."

"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."

"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."

"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.""

More SwiftStack [EOL] pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

12%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Government

Financial Services Firm

21%

Manufacturing Company

12%

Computer Software Company

11%

Government

Computer Software Company

18%

Manufacturing Company

14%

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	20

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	12
Midsize Enterprise	12
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...

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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...

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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...

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What do you like most about Dell EMC ECS?

The tool is easy to use.

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Dell EMC ECS?

The pricing is moderate and at par with the market. As a service provider, we receive good margins, indicating a favo...

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What needs improvement with Dell EMC ECS?

There are some limitations with integration with certain cloud providers, particularly with Google Cloud Platform in ...

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Comparisons

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 19% of the time

Pure Storage FlashArray vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 11% of the time

MinIO vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 10% of the time

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 9% of the time

NetApp StorageGRID vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 4% of the time

More Pure Storage FlashBlade Competitors

NetApp StorageGRID vs Dell ObjectScale

Compared 14% of the time

Amazon AWS vs Dell ObjectScale

Compared 14% of the time

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs Dell ObjectScale

Compared 13% of the time

MinIO vs Dell ObjectScale

Compared 10% of the time

Cloudian HyperStore vs Dell ObjectScale

Compared 3% of the time

More Dell ObjectScale Competitors

Peaxy vs SwiftStack [EOL]

Compared 50% of the time

More SwiftStack [EOL] Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Pure Storage FlashBlade

September 2025

Download Pure Storage FlashBlade product report

Buyer's Guide

Dell ObjectScale

October 2025

Download Dell ObjectScale product report

Buyer's Guide

SwiftStack [EOL]

September 2025

Download SwiftStack [EOL] product report

Also Known As

No data available

EMC ECS, Dell EMC Elastic Cloud Storage (ECS)

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

Dell ObjectScale is a next-generation S3 object storage platform known for scalability, performance, and efficiency. It integrates with Dell EMC products, combining hardware and software for seamless user experience in the AI era.

Dell ObjectScale implements the S3 protocol, integrating smoothly with Dell EMC solutions like ISILON. Its architecture supports data compression and interoperates with multiple protocols for enhanced performance. Enterprise features include immutability, geo-replication, and user-friendly management. However, it needs better integration with other systems, enhanced security, and disaster recovery. Write performance and scalability improvements, competitive pricing, and documentation enhancements are key areas for progress. The interface could be more straightforward, with more remote management features and native analytics.

What features does Dell ObjectScale offer?

S3 Protocol Implementation: Brings industry-standard access with wide application compatibility
Seamless Dell EMC Integration: Ensures stability and ease of use with existing systems
Data Compression and Protocol Interoperability: Enhances performance and storage efficiency
Immutability and Geo-Replication: Provides enterprise-level data protection
Optimized Pricing: Balances cost with comprehensive support

What benefits should users look for in reviews?

Scalability: Supports expanding data requirements effectively
Integration Flexibility: Works with many existing systems for better interoperability
Ease of Management: Streamlines hardware and software operations
Enterprise-Level Features: Delivers advanced protection and efficiency

Industries leverage Dell ObjectScale for cloud-based object storage, archiving, and backups. It's favored for unstructured data management, CCTV integration, and document archiving. Strong in data analytics, it integrates well with high-capacity applications, enhancing data retention strategies across fields.

Dell Technologies

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

Atos

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

Buyer's Guide

File and Object Storage

October 2025

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