We performed a comparison between Red Hat Ceph Storage and StarWind HyperConverged Appliance 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."We are using Ceph internal inexpensive disk and data redundancy without spending extra money on external storage."
"Without any extra costs, I was able to provide a redundant environment."
"Ceph was chosen to maintain exact performance and capacity characteristics for customer cloud."
"We have some legacy servers that can be associated with this structure. With Ceph, we can rearrange these machines and reuse our investment."
"The configuration of the solution and the user interface are both quite good."
"We use the solution for cloud storage."
"It has helped to save money and scale the storage without limits."
"High reliability with commodity hardware."
"Their support team is extremely helpful, and they are pretty friendly and knowledgeable."
"The support is the most valuable feature. The support has been amazing. It's around the clock. One of our hard disks accidentally ejected without me knowing or being onsite. They called and told me about it before I had a chance to see it myself."
"With StarWind's Proactive monitoring we can go about our day helping our customers and not have to worry about our cluster's health."
"The software is great. It's very easy to understand. I've not delved into any of the command-line stuff, but there's no real need to script it. Since it went in, pretty much the only thing that I have needed to do is increase device image sizes and that process is very straightforward."
"The solution has provided our company with a fully redundant virtual environment at half the cost of a traditional SAN implementation."
"The most valuable features of the solution are the redundancy and its cost. I used to have a SAN, a Dell EMC EqualLogic. Unfortunately, it was they call an "inverted pyramid of doom." It was two or three hosts, two switches, and one storage array at the very bottom. But the SAN, the storage array at the very bottom, is a single point of failure..."
"The customer service has been the most valuable feature of the product to me."
"What makes it valuable is the high-availability. In the education field, when you've got students in classrooms, any loss of service disrupts the lessons to a point that the whole lesson is affected. For part of the business which isn't business-critical, to have a little bit of a hiccup wouldn't be such a big thing, but here, it's the high availability of service that is important."
"It takes some time to re-balance the storage in case of server failure."
"The management features are pretty good, but they still have room for improvement."
"If you use for any other solution like other Kubernetes solutions, it's not very suitable."
"This product uses a lot of CPU and network bandwidth. It needs some deduplication features and to use delta for rebalancing."
"It would be nice to have a notification feature whenever an important action is completed."
"Geo-replication needs improvement. It is a new feature, and not well supported yet."
"Routing around slow hardware."
"I have encountered issues with stability when replication factor was not 3, which is the default and recommended value. Go below 3 and problems will arise."
"Most meetings are done via Zoom, and I'm sure you could switch to a text based conversation if needed as they seem like a very accommodating team. It's not something I would worry about if you are a potential client."
"It would be nice to have some kind of GUI interface implemented to give you an overall view of the system's health at a glance."
"A possible thing is perhaps a customer portal to schedule a time with support online via a calendar."
"The only area that surprised me had to do with the fact that each host runs a StarWind virtual machine used to maintain the health of the vSAN, which individually uses 24GB of memory per host. You should keep this in mind when determining the resources you will need when selecting hardware and components for your specific setup. If I knew that, I would have chosen to add more memory per host to make up for the use."
"The StarWind Command Center web portal could use some work."
"Over the past three years, there were two instances where our cluster had an issue, yet StarWind proactively notified me of those issues and effortlessly guided me through the process of correcting the issue with minimal effort on my part."
"Maybe they could have a support portal that you can have direct access to a current support representative."
"I wish I understood what goes into the StarWind software a little bit better. To me, it's kind of magic the way some of it works. As an IT professional, you don't really want things to be magic. I do wish there was a little more "Here's how it works." There could be more documentation given to administrators..."
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Red Hat Ceph Storage is ranked 3rd in Software Defined Storage (SDS) with 22 reviews while StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is ranked 5th in Software Defined Storage (SDS) with 65 reviews. Red Hat Ceph Storage is rated 8.2, while StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is rated 9.6. The top reviewer of Red Hat Ceph Storage writes "Provides block storage and object storage from the same storage cluster". On the other hand, the top reviewer of StarWind HyperConverged Appliance writes "Straightforward to use with good remote management and a simple GUI". Red Hat Ceph Storage is most compared with MinIO, VMware vSAN, Portworx Enterprise, Pure Storage FlashBlade and NetApp StorageGRID, whereas StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is most compared with Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), VMware vSAN, Dell PowerFlex, VxRail and HPE SimpliVity. See our Red Hat Ceph Storage vs. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance report.
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