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Red Hat Gluster Storage vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance comparison

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 5, 2024

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
7.2
Number of Reviews
231
Ranking in other categories
All-Flash Storage (3rd)
Red Hat Gluster Storage
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
Software Defined Storage (SDS) (13th)
StarWind HyperConverged App...
Average Rating
9.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
67
Ranking in other categories
Software Defined Storage (SDS) (14th), HCI (14th)
 

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.
GiovanniRamirez - PeerSpot reviewer
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…
Russ Le Puill - PeerSpot reviewer
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"I am very satisfied with this solution and I would recommend it to others."
"With this program, all of our applications are able to perform faster and this enables us to provide faster platforms and services to our customers and employees."
"The most valuable features would be its performance, retrieval, recovery, and backup, and it meets the customer's expectations."
"As we needed to grow in capacity, we were able to do so without increasing footprint by replacing smaller devices with larger ones."
"The pricing of the product is very competitive to others in the market for Flash and NVMe storage, and from an ROI standpoint, if you consider compression and de-duplication and all that, you get a pretty good ratio."
"Its ease of use is a very big thing for our customers; it's easy to set up and easy to maintain, and the support is automated, which is very good."
"It's easy to use, and the maintenance upgrades to get free controllers work really well."
"We have perfect run through times and latency."
"It's very easy to upgrade storage."
"The technical support team is excellent."
"If it is designed correctly, it can be used for everything, it has high availability, and that is what we need it for, and the price tag is good compared to the amount of data and high availability provided."
"Notable features of Gluster FS include flexibility, scalability, stability, and ease of use."
"The most valuable feature of the product is that it's very easy to upgrade storage."
"Overall, it has helped to improve our system's performance greatly."
"It's trouble-free, it's very clear to use."
"I'm very happy, it's exactly the solution I wanted to the problem, then extra on top."
"It is a safe, fast, and cost-effective storage system that improved our systems to have zero downtime."
"The solution has easily deployed instances for multiple fast-paced projects."
"The solution provides hyper-converged storage for cluster virtualization hosts and is used alongside Hyper-V for a highly secure, robust, resilient storage solution, allowing me to expand my virtualization footprint while reducing my overall physical server footprint."
"How quickly the StarWind solution replicates also gives us the confidence to know that in the event of catastrophic failure of any piece of hardware, we won't be far behind before things went wrong."
"We managed to build a fault-tolerant and highly available IT environment with a reliable and cost-effective solution."
 

Cons

"The time-to-market could be better at times, but I think that's true for all vendors of hardware."
"Pure Storage will have issues with positioning in the near future since its a relatively new company. For now, customers need a PoC to trust using the solution, as it can't stand on its brand name alone. They need to improve Pure Storage's marketing."
"It was a little costly."
"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."
"Data reduction is an area that needs improvement. There is a garbage collection service that runs but during that time, system utilization increases."
"I would like to see a Nagios monitoring plugin which watches the health and performance of the system. The only one available just checks volume capacity."
"Some services could be inserted directly into the SAN, so Pure Storage could complete with the HyperFlex."
"What I dislike about Everpure FlashArray is that in the replication, if it is in the pod, we cannot directly add devices to the pod without breaking the relationship."
"The performance of the solution must be improved."
"In terms of improvement, my initial suggestion would be that the user interface could be simplified."
"There is a feature in Red Hat’s commercial version that could be beneficial if integrated into the open-source version."
"The system should be more intuitive and easier to manage."
"Perhaps the initial configuration and documentation could be a little clearer and simpler to follow."
"The proactive monitoring is nice. However, the response time is usually several hours after the issue occurred."
"The communication between Dell EMC support and StarWind support, in that particular scenario, left something to be desired, for me."
"At the moment, the initial configuration is very technical and error-prone. That is the reason Starwind does it for you as a service, which is a great thing. But it would be nice if we could change or rearrange storage assignments ourselves."
"The only area that the product could improve would be user training."
"I think that the pre-installation questionnaire was a little confusing and ambiguous."
"We ran into some issues with going from Hyper-V 2012 R2 to Hyper-V 2019."
"We would like more complete documentation to manage on your own without support - even though they are great to work with."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Once you purchase Pure Storage FlashArray it is all-inclusive, you receive all the licenses needed."
"You can pay extra for Evergreen support, which gives you free upgrades when new features are introduced."
"It is a more expensive solution, but it is worth it. You are getting what you paid for."
"We are finding the TCO of flash to be lower than SSD implementations."
"The Evergreen Storage subscription is a really cool concept. As long as we maintain our subscription, we will get new controllers every three years and really never have a forklift upgrade like we currently are doing. Just that future-proofing is an ease off of my mind to know that I won't have to do what I'm dong right now again."
"In comparison to the competitors, Pure is very price-competitive for the future functionality that it provides."
"Dell and Pure Storage offer competitive pricing, but Pure Storage might have a slight advantage."
"I don't know the exact cost but it's around $1,000."
"If you need cheap storage, but still need high availability, it's a good product to look at."
"The other solutions we were looking at were priced much higher than this and they didn't necessarily have full redundancy... Nutanix and VxRail were in the final running... but it came down to our price point."
"Its cost was reasonable."
"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."
"When I researched they came the most cost-effective."
"We didn't have any issue with pricing or any of the sales process."
"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."
"A desired feature or service would be the ability to have a hardware subscription plan that ensures routine hardware updates in conjunction with hyper-converged software."
"In terms of cost, a storage array is more expensive... For half the cost of Compellent, I got two hosts, more storage, and redundancy."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Construction Company
10%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Manufacturing Company
13%
Construction Company
12%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Healthcare Company
10%
Construction Company
20%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Educational Organization
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business71
Midsize Enterprise38
Large Enterprise159
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business51
Midsize Enterprise23
Large Enterprise8
 

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 find the pricing of Everpure FlashArray to be quite high compared to other storage solutions; however, the reliabil...
What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashArray?
I believe we have covered the most important features; the architecture of Pure Storage is essential, and features su...
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 advice do you have for others considering Red Hat Gluster Storage?
I would highly recommend Gluster FS to others considering it. The system is robust, flexible, and easy to use. I'd ra...
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?
I think nothing needs improvement in StarWind HyperConverged Appliance.
What is your primary use case for StarWind HyperConverged Appliance?
My main use case for StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is server failover. I use StarWind HyperConverged Appliance fo...
 

Also Known As

Pure Storage FlashArray
Red Hat Gluster, Red Hat Storage Server
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Nielsen, Lamar Advertising, LinkedIn, Betfair, UT-Dallas
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
Find out what your peers are saying about Red Hat Gluster Storage vs. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
908,858 professionals have used our research since 2012.