Dell ECS vs SwiftStack comparison

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between 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: March 2024).
765,234 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
"The stability is the most valuable aspect of the solution.""We face very few hardware failures.""This solution is very easy to use, and is very reliable.""Dell ECS is a cost-effective solution that provides ease of use and availability.""It is a stable platform.""This product is very competitive.""Competitive object storage platform that's stable and scalable.""What I like best about Dell ECS is its stability. I also like that you can use it for large-scale data purposes. The solution works fine for me, and I haven't encountered any issues with it."

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"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.""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 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 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 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."

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Cons
"The solution needs to provide better integration between this solution and all other kinds of systems.""They could provide centralized reports.""In Taiwan, they don't have professional technical support.""Dell ECS could improve the price of the solution. It is expensive.""The troubleshooting feature of this solution needs to be improved, to allow organizations to fix issues without having to contact the support team.""They need to ensure that the system will work if a site goes down.""Dell EMC ECS should support segregation of duty, particularly for role-based access controls. Having a single pane of glass for smarter observation and better control mechanism would also make this solution better.""If Dell ECS would be available as standalone software, so you can use any hardware with it, would make the solution better. It would also be good if Dell ECS had more integrations with other products."

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

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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:More features for remote management and administration could be included in the product. They could provide centralized reports.
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    5th
    Views
    6,715
    Comparisons
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    8.1
    17th
    Views
    1,148
    Comparisons
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    Comparisons
    Dell PowerScale (Isilon) logo
    Compared 20% of the time.
    Amazon AWS logo
    Compared 17% of the time.
    NetApp StorageGRID logo
    Compared 10% of the time.
    MinIO logo
    Compared 9% of the time.
    Also Known As
    EMC ECS, Dell EMC Elastic Cloud Storage, EMC Elastic Cloud Storage
    Learn More
    NVIDIA
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    Overview

    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
    Atos
    Pac-12 Networks, Georgia Institute of Technology, Budd Van Lines
    Top Industries
    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 Company18%
    Manufacturing Company16%
    Financial Services Firm9%
    Government8%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business36%
    Midsize Enterprise24%
    Large Enterprise40%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business19%
    Midsize Enterprise11%
    Large Enterprise70%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business43%
    Midsize Enterprise14%
    Large Enterprise43%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business18%
    Midsize Enterprise13%
    Large Enterprise70%
    Buyer's Guide
    File and Object Storage
    March 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about MinIO, Dell Technologies, Red Hat and others in File and Object Storage. Updated: March 2024.
    765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Dell ECS is ranked 5th in File and Object Storage with 24 reviews while SwiftStack is ranked 17th in File and Object Storage. Dell ECS is rated 8.0, while SwiftStack is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Dell ECS writes "Scalable and stable object storage platform, with good storage group functionality". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SwiftStack writes "It has helped us with the ability to distribute data to different data centers". Dell ECS is most compared with Dell PowerScale (Isilon), Amazon AWS, NetApp StorageGRID, MinIO and IBM Cloud Object Storage, whereas SwiftStack is most compared with MinIO, Red Hat Ceph Storage, Cloudian HyperStore and Scality RING.

    See our list of best File and Object Storage vendors.

    We monitor all File and Object Storage reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.