We performed a comparison between NetApp StorageGRID and SwiftStack based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two File and Object Storage solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."The technical support is good."
"Cost-effective and easy to deploy."
"The backup features are valuable. I've heard from our backup and data protection people that our clients are very satisfied with the performance in junction with the backup, which they archive on this type of object storage."
"It improves our operational efficiency."
"It has enabled us to save money on storage costs. We removed our tape library."
"The speed of the disks removed the bottleneck from our storage."
"It has awesome scalability. We consume it with storage appliance nodes, then we just plug and play as we need more."
"Right now, we have an older StorageGRID. I like that we can grow it."
"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 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."
"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."
"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 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 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 only real issue that we have run into is, when we are cloning, we cannot do a thin provision clone, it has to be a full clone."
"The price is something that NetApp could improve, as with most companies. NetApp is known for not being the cheapest storage option, which is also valid for StorageGRID. There are other storage options on the market which we are aware of and have done proofs of concept for, but you cannot really compare the list prices because, as a big user of NetApp storages, we have totally different prices than some list prices. Still, the price information we got for other options are almost always less expensive than StorageGRID."
"There was a small amount of confusion when working with StorageGRID and Active Directory for access. We had to do things three to four times resulting in our engineer troubleshooting a couple of things. The location of the menu, along with what is inside the menu: configurations, settings, etc., is not straightforward to users. Most users are Windows-based. So, when make logical changes to the menu which are not similar to Windows, users and administrators get confused."
"The integration with more apps has room for improvement."
"It has its quirks here and there, but it is an older NetApp system."
"I would like to see them integrate more with the monitoring platforms. It is a bit difficult to get automated monitoring of the system."
"The processes around installation and upgrade need improvement."
"The redundancy and reliability are great, but I also see room for improvement there. I would like to see more efficiency in the storage and dedupe/compression solutions."
"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."
"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."
"[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."
"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."
"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."
Earn 20 points
NetApp StorageGRID is ranked 7th in File and Object Storage with 12 reviews while SwiftStack is ranked 18th in File and Object Storage. NetApp StorageGRID is rated 8.4, while SwiftStack is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of NetApp StorageGRID writes "Scalable object storage with robust data durability with efficient geo-distribution and comprehensive lifecycle management ensuring managing of large volumes of unstructured data". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SwiftStack writes "It has helped us with the ability to distribute data to different data centers". NetApp StorageGRID is most compared with MinIO, Dell ECS, Red Hat Ceph Storage, Scality RING and Cloudian HyperStore, whereas SwiftStack is most compared with MinIO, Red Hat Ceph Storage, Dell ECS and Cloudian HyperStore. See our NetApp StorageGRID vs. SwiftStack report.
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