Scality RING vs SwiftStack [EOL] comparison

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

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Scality RING and SwiftStack [EOL] based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about MinIO, Red Hat, Nutanix and others in File and Object Storage.

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

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File and Object Storage

April 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

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.

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Sebastien Foucou

Infrastructure architect at a tech services company with 201-500 employees

Leverages seamless data access with efficient storage management

I would improve Scality RING by bundling the Operating System with RING and modernizing the graphical interfaces. As for areas for improvement—if I had to summarize—a technical aspect would be the Operating System part, which today isn't really covered by Scality RING, whereas it is with Artesca. It would be a real advantage for customers to have a bundle that includes both the Operating System and Scality RING, with an install and maintenance model handled by Scality. Secondly, perhaps a more cosmetic point—the graphical interfaces could be modernized a bit. There's been work done on Artesca; maybe it should be extended more to RING. I believe that should come with version 10, so I'm not too concerned. I find RING's cyber resilience against ransomware threats somewhat complicated to assess. The product itself offers sufficient protection, and the features provided via S3 allow you to protect against this kind of attack—provided you implement these features, such as object lock with retention and everything that goes with it. If I had to identify an area for improvement, it would be the OS part—but that doesn't necessarily concern RING, unlike Artesca, which comes bundled with an OS. There's been real work done by the Scality teams to secure the system layer in Artesca. It didn't influence us. We know the product and what needs to be implemented to protect data, and it's part of the best practices we also pass on to our clients.

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Scientif48eb

Scientific Information Officer at a pharma/biotech company with 10,001+ employees

It has helped us with the ability to distribute data to different data centers

* You can bring your own drives, which don't have to be certified. This usually means that they cost significantly more to insert a certified drive with the manufacturer who is selling you your solution. * It is platform independent, so you bring your own hardware. It doesn't matter if you get a Dell EMC, HPE, IBM, etc. Its hardware agnostic capabilities are great. Dell EMC, HPE, and Lenovo are obviously big players, but sometimes they don't have the best prices. You are not tied to any one particular vendor, and it gives you great flexibility as far as pricing is concerned. You can go out, and say, "Give me the most capacity in the smallest number of use spaces." Sometimes that's not the big vendors, it's the small vendors who provide this. * The forward thinking in their cloud solution creates a global namespace across the major public clouds. It allows you to go from on-premise to the cloud seamlessly. They have made it easier to move data between the different cloud vendors and move those flows from on-premise to the cloud, then from the cloud back to on-premise. That freedom that they facilitate is hard to put a price on, because it gives you flexibility. * The metadata search capabilities are something that we look forward to being able to use, though we haven't fully had a chance to get into them. However, in the life sciences area, it could be tremendously beneficial. * Ease of operation: We got it up and running, and it's been solid. We can upgrade the capacity of our drives at any point in time. * The flexibility that the solution provides, both for hardware and on-premise, then to the cloud. That flexibility is great.

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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 most valuable features of FlashBlade include its replication capabilities, reports, and easy allocation. Everything is user-friendly."

"FlashBlade offers low latency, high throughput, and seamless scalability."

"I would rate this solution an eight plus. It has has good flexibility and stability, it's easy to manage and the response time is good."

"The most valuable features are the Metro clustering, and disaster recovery."

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

"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."

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

"We have seen a reduction in the total cost of ownership by around 20%."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade pros

"The best features of Scality RING are its object storage solution, scalability, and durability."

"The most valuable feature of Scality RING8 is its performance and good interface."

"Another feature I like is the life cycle management that helps me with data storage efficiency."

"Scality RING is more stable and performs better than before; we don't experience issues from mechanical failures, only from human intervention."

"I think it's the economic factor. This solution has the lowest cost for storage systems."

"I would rate Scality RING 10 out of 10."

"I would give customer service and technical support a 10 on a scale from 1 to 10 based solely on my own experience."

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

"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 most valuable feature is its versatility. We use 1space and we can use it for almost anything: for our cloud service, for backups of VMs."

"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 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."

"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 performance is good. It is a secondary storage platform designed for archive and backup, so performance for the right use cases is very good. We have been pretty happy in that regard."

More SwiftStack [EOL] pros

Cons

"Its configuration should be easier."

"Recently, while upgrading the version code, one of the controllers failed. Replacing the controller took between 14 to 20 days."

"The documentational aspect of FlashBlade needs improvement."

"I would like to see more deduplication."

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

"I would like to see more monitoring capability included in the next release of this solution."

"The speed could be improved."

"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."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade cons

"I evaluate the simplicity of managing large volumes of data via Scality RING's user interface as limited because the user interface is mainly used for administration or monitoring purposes."

"When considering the initial setup of Scality RING in 2015, it was, at first, very complicated. Installation and documentation were still being finalized."

"I would like to see more possibilities in the UI for managing aspects of the RING as indicated in the roadmap for the next version of their product."

"Scality RING is not easy to learn for someone new. It is a little bit difficult. There are a lot of components to it, and you also need to understand them to work with it effectively."

"Scality RING8 could improve by having more features. We have to use two automation tools to meet our needs. We would prefer to use only one."

"When we used this solution in 2015, it was not scalable at all. I don't know if they have improved on that, but at the time, scalability was just horrible."

"I would like to see more possibilities in the UI for managing aspects of the RING as indicated in the roadmap for the next version of their product. Apart from the UI improvements, I would like to see more features implemented with S3 since not all features are implemented in Scality RING, particularly features such as the S3 select in AWS and the possibility to manage all RINGs with one portal."

"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."

"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."

"[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."

"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."

"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 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."

"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."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"The price is a little high."

"It is within reason for what you get. From what we have found comparing it to other vendors, it is in the same range as others. Given the choice, we would definitely redeploy it based on the cost."

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

"We used a reseller for the purchase."

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

"Our licensing is renewed annually."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade pricing and cost advice

"The cost of Scality RING8 could be less expensive. It is difficult for smaller businesses to afford it."

"The initial cost (CAPEX) to set up the infrastructure is expensive due to the specific hardware required."

"COST_SAVING; We have had a 40 to 50 percent reduction in CAPEX on the acquisition of new hardware, which is probably conservative."

"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."

"One of their advantages of being a commercial open source platform is, for the scale that they offer, the pricing is pretty 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.""

"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."

"We have had a 40 to 50 percent reduction in CAPEX on the acquisition of new hardware, which is probably conservative."

"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."

More SwiftStack [EOL] pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

25%

Computer Software Company

12%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

18%

Financial Services Firm

13%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Computer Software Company

18%

Manufacturing Company

16%

Financial Services Firm

Educational Organization

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

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 for FlashBlade is between cheap and moderate. FlashBlade is worth the money due to the experience and per...

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What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashBlade?

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

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What do you like most about Scality RING8?

Another feature I like is the life cycle management that helps me with data storage efficiency.

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What needs improvement with Scality RING8?

It's a very good product, but for large-scale usage, it has limitations. Scality RING's lack of extensive testing and...

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What is your primary use case for Scality RING8?

I work with Scality RING for storage, and we have a concrete strategy to offer it to business customers. Many custome...

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Comparisons

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 21% of the time

VAST Data vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 11% of the time

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 11% of the time

MinIO vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 10% of the time

Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 2% of the time

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MinIO vs Scality RING

Compared 16% of the time

Dell ECS vs Scality RING

Compared 15% of the time

Cloudian HyperStore vs Scality RING

Compared 15% of the time

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs Scality RING

Compared 14% of the time

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs Scality RING

Compared 3% of the time

More Scality RING Competitors

MinIO vs SwiftStack [EOL]

Compared 55% of the time

Dell ECS vs SwiftStack [EOL]

Compared 23% of the time

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs SwiftStack [EOL]

Compared 12% of the time

Peaxy vs SwiftStack [EOL]

Compared 10% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Pure Storage FlashBlade

May 2025

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Buyer's Guide

Software Defined Storage (SDS)

April 2025

Download Scality RING product report

Buyer's Guide

SwiftStack [EOL]

April 2025

Download SwiftStack [EOL] product report

Also Known As

No data available

Scality RING, RING8

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

Scality RING is the scalable and resilient object storage solution designed for modern workloads, providing seamless data protection against evolving cyber threats.

Scality RING leverages S3 object storage to meet unpredictable demands with a patented MultiScale Architecture that offers limitless scalability across capacity, performance, and more. It delivers end-to-end cyber resilience with CORE5 for ransomware protection, while its cloud-style economics and intuitive management empower enterprises to accelerate AI initiatives and optimize cloud deployments. Its flexibility is ideal for service providers managing extensive data needs.

What are the key features of Scality RING?

S3 and CDMI Support: Ensures compatibility for application needs.
Erasure Coding: Provides cost-efficient, durable storage.
Unified Tiered Infrastructure: Aids billing per IOPS.
Lifecycle Management: Optimizes storage utilization.
Unlimited Scalability: Ideal for large enterprise demands.
Data/Metadata Ring Deployment: Ensures robust performance and tailored SLAs.

What benefits or ROI should users expect?

Economic Value: Offers cost-effective storage solutions.
Effective Support: Enhances collaboration through responsive assistance.
Improved Flexibility: Adaptable deployment models for complex needs.

Scality RING is extensively implemented in backup solutions across industries, supporting platforms like Veeam and CommVault. It aids in storage expansion and management of large data volumes alongside multi-site architectures. While not leading in AI spaces due to performance constraints, there's potential with faster disk support. It's also used in archives, binary lakes, multimedia services, and AI data lakes.

Scality

SwiftStack focuses on handling large-scale unstructured data, providing software-defined storage, and boosting data scalability and durability.

SwiftStack is known for its proficiency in object storage, seamless workflow integration, and robust support for multi-cloud environments. Its architecture ensures high-performance data access, making it ideal for big data analytics, media asset management, and backup tasks. Users value its flexibility, ease of integration, and strong performance. The solution's high availability and efficient storage capabilities contribute to its strengths. However, areas needing improvement include customer support response time, initial setup guidance, and enhanced scalability during high-demand periods.

What are SwiftStack's Most Important Features?

Robust Scalability: Easily manages growing data volumes
Multi-cloud Support: Seamless integration across cloud environments
Seamless Data Management: Efficiently handles large datasets
High Availability: Ensures data is accessible whenever needed
Open-Source: Customizable and flexible with extensive API support

What Benefits Should Users Look For?

Enhanced Performance: Handles demanding workloads efficiently
Easy Integration: Adapts well with existing systems and workflows
High Durability: Ensures long-term data storage and protection
Cost-Effectiveness: Reduces overall storage costs
Scalability: Grows with organizational needs

In industries like media management and big data analytics, SwiftStack’s capabilities in high-performance data access and multi-cloud support facilitate efficient data handling. Backup and archival solutions also benefit from its robust storage and high availability features.

NVIDIA

Sample Customers

ServiceNow, Mercedes-AMG Petronas Motorsport, Dominos, Man AHL

Comcast, TimeWarner Cable, EuroSport, Orange, Deluxe, DailtMotion, SFR, RTL, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Telstra

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

Buyer's Guide

File and Object Storage

April 2025

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