Red Hat Ceph Storage vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance comparison

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4,181 views|3,525 comparisons
80% willing to recommend
StarWind Logo
1,057 views|316 comparisons
98% willing to recommend
Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary

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.
To learn more, read our detailed Red Hat Ceph Storage vs. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance Report (Updated: May 2024).
771,170 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 community support is very good.""Data redundancy is a key feature, since it can survive failures (disks/servers). We didn’t lose our data or have a service interruption during server/disk failures.""We are using Ceph internal inexpensive disk and data redundancy without spending extra money on external storage.""What I found most valuable from Red Hat Ceph Storage is integration because if you are talking about a solution that consists purely of Red Hat products, this is where integration benefits come in. In particular, Red Hat Ceph Storage becomes a single solution for managing the entire environment in terms of the container or the infrastructure, or the worker nodes because it all comes from a single plug.""We have not encountered any stability issues for the product.""The most valuable feature is the stability of the product.""Ceph was chosen to maintain exact performance and capacity characteristics for customer cloud.""Ceph’s ability to adapt to varying types of commodity hardware affords us substantial flexibility and future-proofing."

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"The hosts came preconfigured, and it was plug-and-play.""Reliability and overall uptime are key as we're also hosting client environments in addition to our own.""The initial setup seems to be very straightforward.""The most valuable feature is the high-availability. We have three nodes, and all data will be synched instantly through all the nodes. Even if we had a disaster where two nodes failed, containing dozens of critical machines, almost automatically, all the loads would be run on the remaining node.""The redundancy of two identical nodes that can run alone allows us to have truly "no single point of failure" in our computing and primary storage infrastructure.""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...""Their service is top-notch and if a node goes down they immediately are following up with us to make sure that everything is working smoothly.""This solution came preconfigured. All we needed to do was plug it in and move our VMs."

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Cons
"We have encountered slight integration issues.""It needs a better UI for easier installation and management.""Ceph is not a mature product at this time. Guides are misleading and incomplete. You will meet all kind of bugs and errors trying to install the system for the first time. It requires very experienced personnel to support and keep the system in working condition, and install all necessary packets.""It takes some time to re-balance the storage in case of server failure.""It took me a long time to get the storage drivers for the communication with Kubernetes up and running. The documentation could improve it is lacking information. I'm not sure if this is a Ceph problem or if Ceph should address this, but it was something I ran into. Additionally, there is a performance issue I am having that I am looking into, but overall I am satisfied with the performance.""Routing around slow hardware.""If you use for any other solution like other Kubernetes solutions, it's not very suitable.""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."

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"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 overall product documentation and knowledgebase articles could use some rewriting and clarification.""We struggle a little with capacity management with the StarWind Hyperconverged appliance.""I think that the pre-installation questionnaire was a little confusing and ambiguous.""An emphasis on security can be improved.""Although the setup documentation was very complete and succinct, I found StarWind documentation to be a bit sparse.""A desired feature or service is the ability to have a hardware subscription plan that ensures routine hardware updates in conjunction with the hyper-converged software."

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Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "The other big advantage is that Ceph is free software. Compared to traditional SAN based storage, it is very economical."
  • "There is no cost for software."
  • "Most of time, you can get Ceph with the OpenStack solution in a subscription​​ as a bundle.​"
  • "We never used the paid support."
  • "If you can afford a product like Red Hat Ceph Storage then go for it. If you cannot, then you need to test Ceph and get your hands dirty."
  • "The price of this product isn't high."
  • "The price of Red Hat Ceph Storage is reasonable."
  • "The operational overhead is higher compared to Azure because we own the hardware."
  • More Red Hat Ceph Storage Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "A desired feature or service would be the ability to have a hardware subscription plan that ensures routine hardware updates in conjunction with hyper-converged software."
  • "Its cost was reasonable."
  • "This was all completed at an affordable price point for an SMB, which was also a key element for an NPO."
  • "When I researched they came the most cost-effective."
  • "The other solutions we were looking at were priced much higher than this and they didn't necessarily have full redundancy... Nutanix and VxRail were in the final running... but it came down to our price point."
  • "I honestly feel that there's no one else in the market doing what they're doing for the price point that they're doing it at. That's why I asked them about investing in their company. I think that the options they're providing and the software that they have is sort of revolutionary for the price point... The total cost was $24,400."
  • "The Nutanix piece was about $45,000, getting close to $50,000 with all the licensing involved, whereas the StarWind was less than half of that, after Microsoft licensing and such."
  • "We looked at Nutanix and found it did almost the same thing but for more money. In fact, StarWind was nearly one-third of the price; it cost us £36,000. That includes five years of monitoring... The Nutanix was near enough £110,000 for relatively the same amount of performance and storage."
  • More StarWind HyperConverged Appliance Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:Red Hat Ceph does well in simplifying storage integration by replacing the need for numerous storage solutions. This solution allows for multiple copies of replicated and coded pools to be kept, easy… more »
    Top Answer:The high availability of the solution is important to us.
    Top Answer:Some documentation is very hard to find. The documentation must be quickly available.
    Top Answer:StarWind's proactive support is my favorite feature.
    Top Answer:Keep in mind that StarWind VMs for the vSAN will take up 24GB of memory per host. If you do decide to go with StarWind, adjust your hardware configuration appropriately if you need those memory… more »
    Top Answer:I honestly don't have anything to complain about. Nothing is perfect, though, over the past three years, there were two instances where our cluster had an issue, yet StarWind proactively notified me… more »
    Ranking
    Views
    4,181
    Comparisons
    3,525
    Reviews
    9
    Average Words per Review
    330
    Rating
    7.7
    Views
    1,057
    Comparisons
    316
    Reviews
    24
    Average Words per Review
    657
    Rating
    9.7
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    Ceph
    Learn More
    Overview
    Red Hat Ceph Storage is an enterprise open source platform that provides unified software-defined storage on standard, economical servers and disks. With block, object, and file storage combined into one platform, Red Hat Ceph Storage efficiently and automatically manages all your data.

    For SMB, ROBO and Enterprises, who look to bring in quick deployment and operation simplicity to virtualization workloads and reduce related expenses, our solution is StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA). It unifies commodity servers, disks and flash, hypervisor of choice, StarWind Virtual SAN, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct or VMware Virtual SAN and associated software into a single manageable layer. The HCA supports scale-up by adding disks and flash, and scale-out by adding extra nodes.

    StarWind HyperConverged Appliance consists of StarWind Virtual SAN, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct or VMware Virtual SAN “Ready Nodes”, targeting those, who are building their virtualization infrastructure from scratch. In case there is an existing set of servers, we offer a “software only version”, which is essentially our years proven StarWind Virtual SAN. Basically, it’s the fuel powering StarWind HCA. 

    Sample Customers
    Dell, DreamHost
    Sears Home and Franchise Business
    Top Industries
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company18%
    Manufacturing Company10%
    Financial Services Firm9%
    Government7%
    REVIEWERS
    Construction Company12%
    Computer Software Company10%
    Transportation Company8%
    Healthcare Company7%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company20%
    Manufacturing Company8%
    Financial Services Firm8%
    Educational Organization7%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business37%
    Midsize Enterprise15%
    Large Enterprise48%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business25%
    Midsize Enterprise15%
    Large Enterprise60%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business64%
    Midsize Enterprise28%
    Large Enterprise8%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business36%
    Midsize Enterprise14%
    Large Enterprise50%
    Buyer's Guide
    Red Hat Ceph Storage vs. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance
    May 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about Red Hat Ceph Storage vs. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance and other solutions. Updated: May 2024.
    771,170 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    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.

    See our list of best Software Defined Storage (SDS) vendors.

    We monitor all Software Defined Storage (SDS) 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.