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IBM Elastic Storage Server vs. Red Hat Gluster Storage

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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    IBM Elastic Storage Server

    Score8.3 out of 10
    N/AIBM Elastic Storage Server (IBM ESS) is a software-defined storage option.N/A

    Red Hat Gluster Storage

    Score6 out of 10
    N/ARed Hat Gluster Storage is a software-defined storage option; Red Hat acquired Gluster in 2011.N/A
    Pricing
    IBM Elastic Storage ServerRed Hat Gluster Storage
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    IBM Elastic Storage ServerRed Hat Gluster Storage
    Free Trial
    NoNo
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoNo
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    NoNo
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
    Additional Details
    More Pricing Information
    Best Alternatives
    IBM Elastic Storage ServerRed Hat Gluster Storage
    Small Businesses
    StarWind Virtual SAN
    Score9.5 out of 10
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    Score9.5 out of 10
    Medium-sized Companies
    StarWind Virtual SAN
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    StarWind Virtual SAN
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    Enterprises
    IBM Storage Scale
    Score9.9 out of 10
    IBM Storage Scale
    Score9.9 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    IBM Elastic Storage ServerRed Hat Gluster Storage
    Likelihood to Recommend
    8.3
    (3 ratings)
    8.0
    (1 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    IBM Elastic Storage ServerRed Hat Gluster Storage
    Likelihood to Recommend
    IBM
    Reliable data storage and access is a big challenge in AI applications and IBM ESS is a service you need to solve the problem. If you are building an AI service and you already use the IBM ecosystem for AI compute requirements, ESS can serve as an excellent software based storage solution. Integration with other platforms such as EMR/Databricks is still a challenge and should be improved.
    Incentivized
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    Red Hat
    GFS is well suited for DEVOPS type environments where organizations prefer to invest in servers and DAS (direct attached storage) versus purchasing storage solutions/appliances. GFS allows organizations to scale their storage capacity at a fraction of the price using DAS HDDs versus committing to purchase licenses and hardware from a dedicated storage manufacturer (e.g. NetApp, Dell/EMC, HP, etc.).
    Incentivized
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    Pros
    IBM
    • Powerful processing power, literally support unlimited scale out storage capabilities
    • well integrated and supported with multi flavor environment and file systems.
    • Huge capacity with in a very reduced form factor of disks/enclosures
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    Red Hat
    • Scales; bricks can be easily added to increase storage capacity
    • Performs; I/O is spread across multiple spindles (HDDs), thereby increasing read and write performance
    • Integrates well with RHEL/CentOS 7; if your organization is using RHEL 7, Gluster (GFS) integrates extremely well with that baseline, especially since it's come under the Red Hat portfolio of tools.
    Incentivized
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    Cons
    IBM
    • Integration and configuration need a bit more technical expertise which is I guess expected.
    • There can be some improvement in integration with Legacy applications.
    Incentivized
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    Red Hat
    • Documentation; using readthedocs demonstrates that the Gluster project isn't always kept up-to-date as far as documentation is concerned. Many of the guides are for previous versions of the product and can be cumbersome to follow at times.
    • Self-healing; our use of GFS required the administrator to trigger an auto-heal operation manually whenever bricks were added/removed from the pool. This would be a great feature to incorporate using autonomous self-healing whenever a brick is added/removed from the pool.
    • Performance metrics are scarce; our team received feedback that online RDBMS transactions did not perform well on distributed file systems (such as GFS), however this could not be substantiated via any online research or white papers.
    Incentivized
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    Alternatives Considered
    IBM
    IBM ESS is optimized for AI and Big Data usecases while S3 is a general purpose storage solutions. EMR and Databricks have lakehouse/data warehousing solutions for distributed computing but are more optimized for just the big data pipelining solutions and not essentially for AI usecases, especially for inference, when you need to load model artifacts really quickly.
    Incentivized
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    Red Hat
    Gluster is a lot lower cost than the storage industry leaders. However, NetApp and Dell/EMC's product documentation is (IMHO) more mature and hardened against usage in operational scenarios and environments. Using Gluster avoids "vendor lock-in" from the perspective on now having to purchase dedicated hardware and licenses to run it. Albeit, should an organization choose to pay for support for Gluster, they would be paying licensing costs to Red Hat instead of NetApp, Dell, EMC, HP, or VMware. It could be assumed, however, that if an organization wanted to use Gluster, that they were already a Linux shop and potentially already paying Red Hat or Canonical (Debian) for product support, thereby the use of GFS would be a nominal cost adder from a maintenance/training perspective.
    Incentivized
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    Return on Investment
    IBM
    • When the cost and price dynamics comes into account, we have replaced age old traditional arrays with almost negligible cost with ESS
    • able to extend the capabilities of global teams to work and share their experiences and knowledge with other teams.
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    Red Hat
    • Positive - Alignment with the open source community and being able to stay abreast of the latest trending products available.
    • Positive - Reduced procurement and maintenance costs.
    • Negative - Impacts user/system maintainer training in order to teach them how to utilize and troubleshoot the product.
    Incentivized
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