DataCore Swarm vs Dell ECS vs SwiftStack comparison

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380 views|196 comparisons
100% willing to recommend
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6,620 views|5,634 comparisons
95% willing to recommend
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100% willing to recommend
Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between DataCore Swarm, Dell ECS, and SwiftStack based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about MinIO, Dell Technologies, Red Hat and others in File and Object Storage.
To learn more, read our detailed File and Object Storage Report (Updated: April 2024).
770,292 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"I find its flexibility valuable.""The ability for the solution to use any new hardware quickly and without administration is a great thing in the context of hosting.""The first feature is compatibility with the S3 protocol. DataCore SWARM allows you to quickly have an on-premise, robust and scalable environment that is natively compatible with the S3 protocol. The functionalities used are therefore derived from the S3 protocol, notably versioning and therefore the possibility of configuring immutability in governance or compliance mode. The object metada can be enriched with the addition of tags to subsequently enable filtering and searching. Configuring and using DataCore SWARM is simple and flexible. It is very easy to create domains, tenants and buckets for different use cases with various authentications. The cluster architecture also allows replication between different clusters at different configured levels (Cluster / Domains / ...) A web interface for browsing the content of existing buckets allows simple and rapid manipulation of certain objects such as sharing via a link or cropping a video. Finally, the physical architecture of the solution is based on an x86 server and its scale-up or scale-out evolution is very simple by adding disks or servers."

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"The scalability is good.""I have been satisfied with the stability.""It is 100% stable. It is also scalable.""The most valuable feature for me is off-site storage.""It's my understanding that the initial setup is straightforward.""The performance is good.""This product is very competitive.""Competitive object storage platform that's stable and scalable."

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

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Cons
"The pricing can definitely be better.""The solution needs simpler architecture.""The product currently requires a significant number of servers to start. There are also network prerequisites to be met in order to guarantee good security of the architecture, which means that the product is only available to large customers. Besides, the license starts at 100TB. An Appliance version is being developed with an architecture based on containers which will make it possible to offer DataCore SWARM to everyone. The product has been evolving since the acquisition by DataCore, but maintaining and updating the product is not always easy and needs to be improved. For now, we only use DataCore SWARM for a few use cases and therefore a small part of the existing functionalities. With use we will perhaps have more criticism of the product but not for the moment!"

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"The solution could be more cost-effective and secure.""Dell EMC ECS could improve by having Relational Database Services(RDS) to review progress. Additionally, if the training was provided it would be a benefit, it would be good for our engineers.""Its security can be improved.""The disaster recovery could be improved because there should be something in-built within the ECS. Search and recovery should be in-built. Right now, we have to use some external tools for performing the recovery itself. For example, we're using Atempo or deploying Golden Superna, so it has dependency on the external third party vendors.""They do not have complete documentation, which is very weak and could be improved.""The setup is very complex.""Dell ECS could improve the price of the solution. It is expensive.""Dell ECS needs to improve its performance."

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

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Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "You pay for what you use. For example, if you use one terabyte, you just pay for that one terabyte. But the pricing could always be better"
  • "The first installation brick is expensive but the upgrades are extremely simple and granular by adding disks or nodes."
  • More DataCore Swarm Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "Dell EMC ECS is too expensive."
  • "We are not paying for the license at this stage."
  • "The solution could be cheaper."
  • "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."
  • "We initially purchased all of the licenses at the same time."
  • "The price of Dell ECS should be reduced."
  • "The price of Dell ECS should be reduced."
  • "The charges for this solution are made in blocks of models, which are purchased depending on what features an organization requires."
  • More Dell ECS Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "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."
  • "One of their advantages of being a commercial open source platform is, for the scale that they offer, the pricing is pretty competitive."
  • "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."
  • "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.""
  • "We have had a 40 to 50 percent reduction in CAPEX on the acquisition of new hardware, which is probably conservative."
  • "COST_SAVING; We have had a 40 to 50 percent reduction in CAPEX on the acquisition of new hardware, which is probably conservative."
  • "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."
  • "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."
  • More SwiftStack Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:The first feature is compatibility with the S3 protocol. DataCore SWARM allows you to quickly have an on-premise, robust… more »
    Top Answer:The first installation brick is expensive but the upgrades are extremely simple and granular by adding disks or nodes
    Top Answer:The product currently requires a significant number of servers to start. There are also network prerequisites to be met… more »
    Top Answer:More features for remote management and administration could be included in the product. They could provide centralized… more »
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    Also Known As
    Caringo Swarm
    EMC ECS, Dell EMC Elastic Cloud Storage, EMC Elastic Cloud Storage
    Learn More
    Overview

    Swarm provides a platform for data protection, management, organization and search at massive scale. You no longer need to migrate data into disparate solutions for long-term preservation, delivery and analysis. Consolidate all files on Swarm, find the data you are looking for quickly, and reduce total cost of ownership by continuously evolving hardware and optimizing use of your resources.

    Enterprise-ready. Future-proof. Data-first.

    Dell EMC Elastic Cloud Storage (ECS) is a file and object storage solution from Dell EMC. ECS has been created to support both traditional and next-generation ecosystems equally. ECS boasts unrivaled economics, manageability, resilience, and scalability to satisfy the demands of today's next-gen, robust business enterprise ecosystems. ECS can easily be deployed in a software-defined model or as a turn-key appliance. ECS is software-defined and multi-layered for unlimited scalability. Every layer is abstracted and scalable with no single point of failure.

    • Data service layer: Provides S3 access along with access to SWIFT, CAZ, NFS, HDFS.
    • Storage service layer: Stores, retrieves and protects data.
    • Fabric layer: Provides clustering, configuration management, health monitoring.

    Everything is done within the software, which is containerized, using docker.

    ECS is currently deployed using basic commodity hardware, which can easily be federated across as many as eight different locations and managed as a single resource. Additionally, ECS can also protect data at the site level, locally, disk, node, and rack levels. The federation enables a single global namespace with everywhere access to content. Applications can quickly rewrite in an active/active or everywhere active manner.

    ECS is also able to be used as secondary storage or archival storage. This will free up valuable primary storage of data that is stale, redundant, or used infrequently, and the data will remain easily accessible. ECS uses policy-based tiering such as Data Domain, Cloud tiering, Isilon using cloud polls, and Geodrive, which give Windows systems direct access to ECS. Windows users can still use server message block (SMB) while leveraging the more expansive ECS storage.

    ECS is enterprise-grade and offers valuable features such as retention, multi-tenancy, metering, monitoring, quotas, and more. ECS builds in robust security from the ground up and encrypts data. ECS is compliant with STIG guidelines and adheres to SEC rule 17A-4F.

    ECS is an enterprise-ready solution that allows organizations to easily simplify object storage management and visualize information in intuitive new ways, and empowers your business to do even more with data. With ECS, enterprise organizations can deliver cloud-scale economics in-house that will lower total cost of ownership (TCO) and scale, creating greater levels of productivity and profitability.

    Reviews from Real Users

    One user, who is a deputy director at a tech service company, says ECS offers “good performance, reliability, and technical support”.

    Dell EMC ECS is “a stable solution which is easy to scale, install and manage”, relates another user, who is a senior buyer at a tech service company.

    "What I like best about this product is that it is a complete solution, both hardware, and software, by the same vendor," summarizes a system engineer at a tech services company. 














    SwiftStack enables you to do more with storage. Store more data, enable more applications and serve more users. We do this by delivering a proven object storage solution that's built on an open-source core and is fully enterprise ready. Our object storage software is an alternative to complex, expensive, on-premises hardware-based storage solutions. SwiftStack delivers the features and flexibility you need to easily manage and scale object storage behind your firewall. Customers are demanding storage where they can pay as they grow, find it is easier to consume, and can infinitely scale. Today, our customers use SwiftStack for archiving active data, serving web content, building private clouds, sharing documents and storing backups.
    Sample Customers
    iQ Media, NEP, Texas Tech University, Telefónica, City of Austin, Massive Media, Data Deposit Box, Premier Physician Services, Truliant Federal Credit Union
    Atos
    Pac-12 Networks, Georgia Institute of Technology, Budd Van Lines
    Top Industries
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company29%
    Comms Service Provider19%
    Financial Services Firm12%
    Real Estate/Law Firm7%
    REVIEWERS
    Computer Software Company30%
    Financial Services Firm30%
    Mining And Metals Company10%
    Government10%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Financial Services Firm21%
    Computer Software Company14%
    Manufacturing Company12%
    Government8%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company20%
    Manufacturing Company15%
    Financial Services Firm10%
    Government8%
    Company Size
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business40%
    Midsize Enterprise21%
    Large Enterprise40%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business36%
    Midsize Enterprise24%
    Large Enterprise40%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business20%
    Midsize Enterprise11%
    Large Enterprise70%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business43%
    Midsize Enterprise14%
    Large Enterprise43%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business19%
    Midsize Enterprise12%
    Large Enterprise69%
    Buyer's Guide
    File and Object Storage
    April 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about MinIO, Dell Technologies, Red Hat and others in File and Object Storage. Updated: April 2024.
    770,292 professionals have used our research since 2012.