No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

Red Hat Gluster Storage vs VMware vSAN comparison

Sponsored
 

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
7.2
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)
VMware vSAN
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.1
Number of Reviews
234
Ranking in other categories
HCI (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

Software Defined Storage (SDS) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Red Hat Gluster Storage2.7%
Red Hat Ceph Storage10.0%
DataCore SANsymphony6.7%
Other80.6%
Software Defined Storage (SDS)
HCI Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
VMware vSAN7.9%
VxRail9.9%
Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI)9.0%
Other73.2%
HCI
 

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…
ShyamikaThamel - PeerSpot reviewer
Associate Tech Specialists at Seatrium
Managing mixed RAID workloads has improved data protection and delivers strong performance
VMware vSAN can be improved in certain areas. In cases involving our large data stores with large VMs, we experience some latency, not during normal operation, but during database backup operations. We observed latency due to buffer issues from the top-of-the-rack switches. These issues are mostly network-related because all storage data traffic travels through the network. I have recently used Nutanix, and I observed that Nutanix provides better performance than VMware vSAN due to its data locality features. VMware vSAN is now providing data locality, but we did not use that option. If VMware vSAN provides additional features in the next release, such as the VM balancing feature called DRS on the cluster that VMware previously had, it would be beneficial. With DRS, VMs can move easily from one node to another within the same cluster. Nutanix does not provide that flexibility. When placing a VM on a cluster in Nutanix, the placement uses a balancing component. After that, the VM remains on the same host. If any contention occurs on the CPU or memory side, the VM stays in place until contention happens. If issues occur, the VM migrates to another host while transferring all objects to the same host. This is how their data locality is maintained. When a VM moves to any host, it moves with all VM objects. VMware vSAN does not currently offer this option. If a VM moves to another host, it accesses the disk object through the network, which increases latency. VMware vSAN now offers an option to select data locality, but it does not function like Nutanix. This is why some latency remains. If VMware vSAN can improve this feature, it would be very helpful and VMware would regain its top position.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable features of Pure Storage FlashArray are simplicity, ease of use, and dashboard management."
"If you factor in the ease in terms of operations, as well as the cost of the array compared to other solid state arrays, it becomes a clear positive for Pure Storage."
"The biggest return on investment for us is not having to do a swap out of the arrays every five years."
"We have seen savings in our storage, and the speed of deployment has gone from several days to a few minutes, reducing backup and restore times from 93 days to minutes and simplifying storage for us."
"The scalability options are very nice because you can scale it much better and faster. The scalability was there in the previous environment also, but this is far better than what we had before. It basically helps the user in case they are looking for more storage. We can scale it much faster."
"Their technical support is excellent. It's the best out of any of the vendors we work with."
"Pure Storage is seen as a visionary company with leading edge technology."
"It simplifies building out the storage."
"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."
"The technical support team is excellent."
"It's very easy to upgrade storage."
"The most valuable feature of the product is that it's very easy to upgrade storage."
"Notable features of Gluster FS include flexibility, scalability, stability, and ease of use."
"The most valuable features are the reduced rack space, reduced power consumption, reduced cooling, and reduced support costs."
"We gained fantastic performance with the benefit of simplifying the whole hardware stack requiring less sum of knowledge to run and maintain."
"vSAN has just one datastore. so customers do not need to think where to put their VMs, how to design the physical disk RAID, the LUN size, the LUN mapping, etc. when they use NetApp/EMC/HDS or other storage systems."
"The performance for us is very good."
"The migration of servers feature makes server rack maintenance easy."
"This is the best product that we've ever used."
"This solution is super stable."
"The most valuable feature is that it is software-defined storage. Also, being able to do maintenance on the fly is a real benefit: migrating off, updating, and then moving the guest back on to the nodes."
 

Cons

"I would rate this solution an eight because we have had outages. The commit times went very high in the database. The whole array went down so our customers were down for around eight hours. This was a very big outage which could have been our fault because we didn't do the upgrade in time."
"The time-to-market could be better at times, but I think that's true for all vendors of hardware."
"A noticeable area for improvement is the support for object storage. The FlashArray does not natively support object storage like S3 or Swift, which pushes customers needing these features towards the more expensive FlashBlade."
"There is not a great need for improvement, but better pricing could be beneficial."
"They could improve the price."
"Pure Storage takes a hit in the minds and opinions of some of the customers because they cannot customize things as much as compared to a legacy storage provider's appliance such as NetApp, Dell EMC, or even HPE."
"I would like FlashArray to add reports that help us forecast our predicted resource needs based on current usage."
"The internal garbage collection process has been fixed recently in some OS updates so it is more efficient but that could be just a little better."
"There is a feature in Red Hat’s commercial version that could be beneficial if integrated into the open-source version."
"In terms of improvement, my initial suggestion would be that the user interface could be simplified."
"The system should be more intuitive and easier to manage."
"The performance of the solution must be improved."
"I would like to see better integration between the cloud and our VMware virtual environment. We only have one virtual environment, which is VMware vSAN. Right now, there is little interoperability with the cloud solution at the moment."
"The price is expensive. This solution is not an option for SBM customers because of the price."
"Integration could be better. It should be easier to integrate vSAN with the dashboard you have, with Google, and the others."
"So, my criticism is aimed towards the current Flash-based client, which is utterly slow, and Flash itself being deprecated technology."
"The solution functions as the marketing says, as long as you follow certain rules."
"I would like to see lowered cost. vSAN is very expensive."
"While VMware vSAN is quite comprehensive, if we are running multiple infrastructures, applications, databases, and other elements, having a diagnostic tool to identify the actual problem area, whether application-side or infrastructure-side, would be beneficial."
"It would be ideal if clients didn't need to monitor the solution on a daily basis."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"Pricing is very competitive, and it's better than other competitors."
"The price of Pure Storage FlashArray is expensive."
"Pure Storage has not helped to reduce our HANA licensing costs."
"The pricing of Pure Storage is all-inclusive. It is very fair, and very easy. In comparison, Dell EMC has licensing that needs to be added if you wan to work in a complex environment or in specific functionalities."
"The licensing is $100,000."
"Its price is almost double than any other flash storage solution."
"The price is reasonable."
"If you need cheap storage, but still need high availability, it's a good product to look at."
"The price is expensive."
"It is not a subscription model. It is a purchase model, but it is very important that you also buy technical support from VMware. This is probably the only disadvantage of vSAN. It depends on the use case, but it can be very expensive."
"There is a license required for this solution, it is a one-time payment. However, if they want support for the solution, it can be paid annually or for three years."
"The product's price has been increasing lately...VMware vSAN is expensive."
"The product’s pricing is a bit higher than other solutions."
"I'd love for this product to be cheaper."
"We pay for a license to use the solution through our company CapEx and then we continue to pay annually."
"vSAN has many versions with standard and advanced including Enterprise and Enterprise Plus. Regarding the Enterprise and the Advanced, it could be lower."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Software Defined Storage (SDS) solutions are best for your needs.
908,834 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

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%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Construction Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Computer Software Company
8%
 

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 Business101
Midsize Enterprise58
Large Enterprise135
 

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 The Biggest Difference Between vSAN And VxRail?
While both run on the vSAN technology from VMware, vSAN needs to be deployed on vSAN ready nodes while VxRail is an e...
How does HPE Simplivity compare with VMware vSAN?
HPE SimpliVity is a hyper-converged infrastructure solution that is primarily geared to mid-sized companies. We resea...
How does VMware vSAN compare with Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct?
We found VMware’s vSAN was easy to set up, configure, and manage compared to other solutions we considered. It is bes...
 

Also Known As

Pure Storage FlashArray
Red Hat Gluster, Red Hat Storage Server
vSAN
 

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
Read Some Case Studies At Home Cloud CaribCINgroupDiscovery Check out the Rest of our Customer Stories Here
Find out what your peers are saying about StarWind, Nutanix, Red Hat and others in Software Defined Storage (SDS). Updated: July 2026.
908,834 professionals have used our research since 2012.