Red Hat Gluster Storage vs. VMware vSAN

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Red Hat Gluster Storage
Score 6.0 out of 10
N/A
Red Hat Gluster Storage is a software-defined storage option; Red Hat acquired Gluster in 2011.N/A
VMware vSAN
Score 8.8 out of 10
N/A
VMware vSAN is an enterprise-class storage virtualization software that provides a simple path to hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) and multi cloud. VMware vSAN is no longer sold as a standalone product and is now available as a part of VMware Cloud Foundation.N/A
Pricing
Red Hat Gluster StorageVMware vSAN
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Red Hat Gluster StorageVMware vSAN
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
Community Pulse
Red Hat Gluster StorageVMware vSAN
Considered Both Products
Red Hat Gluster Storage
Chose Red Hat Gluster Storage
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 …
VMware vSAN
Chose VMware vSAN
VMWare stand out compared to all the products. However, it is worthwhile mentioning the following products can be used to achive similar results. Hitachi Virtual Storage Systems Nutanix Cloud Infrastrucure. In case if we are using Nuatinux at the Hypervisor level then it …
Top Pros
Top Cons
Best Alternatives
Red Hat Gluster StorageVMware vSAN
Small Businesses
StarWind Virtual SAN
StarWind Virtual SAN
Score 9.3 out of 10
StarWind HCA
StarWind HCA
Score 9.6 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
StarWind Virtual SAN
StarWind Virtual SAN
Score 9.3 out of 10
StarWind HCA
StarWind HCA
Score 9.6 out of 10
Enterprises
IBM Spectrum Scale
IBM Spectrum Scale
Score 9.8 out of 10
Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure
Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure
Score 9.0 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Red Hat Gluster StorageVMware vSAN
Likelihood to Recommend
8.0
(1 ratings)
8.8
(17 ratings)
Usability
-
(0 ratings)
9.2
(4 ratings)
Support Rating
-
(0 ratings)
7.5
(5 ratings)
User Testimonials
Red Hat Gluster StorageVMware vSAN
Likelihood to Recommend
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.).
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VMware by Broadcom
The product is a must for enterprise & SMB segments as this gives a good value for money and the licensing policy is very well defined and cost effective for the feature set it provides. This is very well suited for organization which have multiple brand storage systems and would like to consolidate them all together, thus providing a huge storage capacity for the organizations data growth. The product becomes less appropriate in organization where they have single storage platform as the service provider would have the ability to consilidate all the storage systems. Hence this products may be under utilized.
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Pros
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.
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VMware by Broadcom
  • VMware runs VSAN certification programs to make sure the OEM sells validated nodes. It helps customers to select appropriate certified ready nodes like Lenovo ThinkAgile VX which comes factory configured and easy to set up.
  • Hyperconverged solutions reduce real estate space and networking costs when compare with shared storage. The host overhead also less.
  • Supports All-Flash (SATA and NVMe SSDs) and Hybrid vSAN with HDD and SSD. So customers can choose cost-effective solutions appropriate to their workloads.
  • Supports different storage policies, RAID and duplication, and compression features and it makes a complete storage solution.
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Cons
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.
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VMware by Broadcom
  • We were a fairly early adopter of VMware vSAN and as such experienced several growing pains.
  • We experienced a few bugs that took a few software versions upgrades to go mostly away.
  • The biggest issue we had overall was with host drivers. Even with vSAN ready node compatible hosts, you have to be very careful that the drivers for NIC and RAID controllers are right.
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Usability
Red Hat
No answers on this topic
VMware by Broadcom
Deploying and configuring VSAN is a relatively simple process for people that are already used to working in virtual environments, primarily for those that are familiar with vSphere. The compatibility of those two products is amazing. You shouldn't really encounter any issues and if you do, you surely did something wrong.
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Support Rating
Red Hat
No answers on this topic
VMware by Broadcom
Support is (as always forVMware) top notch and easy to work with. The majority of computer companies are outsourcing their tech staff, and it seems they do as well. But their guys know the product well and are quick to respond to your ticket (if the severity is right!).
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Alternatives Considered
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.
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VMware by Broadcom
Our VMware solution is built in-house for the organization's private application, we don't want to put our data on cloud premises. Also, vSAN is a cost-effective solution for our environment. We have done the POC with both products to understand the Flexibility, Management, and cost. After the successful POC, we have chosen the VMware vSAN.
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Return on Investment
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.
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VMware by Broadcom
  • we have realized savings in the licensing compared to traditional storage (over $500,000 over the last 5 years)
  • we have realized ROI through efficiencies in our staff of approx $1MM (over the last 5 years)
  • also, positive impact on the time to value/speed of implementation allowed us to realize business objectives (Over $1MM of ROI)
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