We performed a comparison between StarWind HyperConverged Appliance and SwiftStack based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Software Defined Storage (SDS) solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."The pricing and discounts given by Starwind on the hardware were unmatched."
"We also substantially reduced network complexity by eliminating that standalone SAN. That reduced complexity has allowed us to concentrate on improving other areas of our network."
"The solution has provided our company with a fully redundant virtual environment at half the cost of a traditional SAN implementation."
"With StarWind's Proactive monitoring we can go about our day helping our customers and not have to worry about our cluster's health."
"It did not hurt that the price for the hardware and three years of support cost less than the disparate hardware the cluster used to run on."
"The presence of built-in storage saved the company from having to purchase a separate storage array and related network equipment."
"We have the ProActive Premium Support and it has reduced our monitoring efforts. It has been very useful. They have been able to detect things such as when there's an issue with the cluster or they're getting some kind of weird reading that I have no idea about. They're really quick to let me know about it and even set up a schedule to address it. I've been very happy with their level of support on that."
"The hosts came preconfigured, and it was plug-and-play."
"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."
"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 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 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 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 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."
"At the moment, the initial configuration is very technical and error-prone. That is the reason Starwind does it for you as a service, which is a great thing. But it would be nice if we could change or rearrange storage assignments ourselves."
"The StarWind Command Center web portal could use some work."
"The monitoring and report software is a bit hit and miss."
"We'd like an easier setup for Windows updates on the Hyper-V servers so you don't have to use a script to ensure auto-updating is done."
"We need to be very cautious in following every step when updating the physical host. We must move over each VM and drain roles from the servers to ensure everything goes smoothly without interruptions. If this were a more automated process, this would be less taxing each time an upgrade is needed."
"The only area that the product could improve would be user training."
"Maybe they could have a support portal that you can have direct access to a current support representative."
"CSVs require the storage to be configured through iSCSI, even though the storage is local."
"[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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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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StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is ranked 5th in Software Defined Storage (SDS) with 65 reviews while SwiftStack is ranked 17th in File and Object Storage. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is rated 9.6, while SwiftStack is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of StarWind HyperConverged Appliance writes "Straightforward to use with good remote management and a simple GUI". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SwiftStack writes "It has helped us with the ability to distribute data to different data centers". StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is most compared with Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), VMware vSAN, Dell PowerFlex, VxRail and StorMagic SvSAN, whereas SwiftStack is most compared with MinIO, Dell ECS, Red Hat Ceph Storage, Cloudian HyperStore and Scality RING. See our StarWind HyperConverged Appliance vs. SwiftStack report.
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