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Red Hat Ceph Storage vs StarWind Virtual SAN comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 5, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Red Hat Ceph Storage
Ranking in Software Defined Storage (SDS)
2nd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
23
Ranking in other categories
File and Object Storage (2nd)
StarWind Virtual SAN
Ranking in Software Defined Storage (SDS)
1st
Average Rating
9.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.7
Number of Reviews
189
Ranking in other categories
HCI (4th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2025, in the Software Defined Storage (SDS) category, the mindshare of Red Hat Ceph Storage is 20.2%, up from 20.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of StarWind Virtual SAN is 9.0%, up from 7.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Software Defined Storage (SDS)
 

Featured Reviews

ANDRE VINICIUS HAMERSKI - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers cost-effective scalability through open-source storage integration
Ceph Storage allows us to add value related to cost and offers a unique experience compared to traditional storage. We appreciate the scalability of the open-source solution, allowing us to address our growing data needs without encountering major issues. Having used it as a pilot system in Brazil, we gained significant knowledge and the ability to manage our infrastructure as code.
MIT - PeerSpot reviewer
Easy to set up and maintain with good performance capabilities
Feature-wise we are only waiting for the release of a "planned disaster" feature that would allow us to patch a hypervisor node without having to take the full storage offline. ATM (20220609) is still necessary, since taking a node offline without properly activating the maintenance mode on the vSAN would trigger a full sync of the vSAN nodes. This is fine and a good thing since it ensures data integrity. However, there is something in the making that would ensure integrity without a full sync after a node goes down, which, as stated above, one could "abuse" to patch (and boot = take down) the hypervisors during business hours 😁 Other than that, the thing is rock stable and chugging along without issues. We are an SMB so we "only" have around 50 VMs on our FO cluster, which is a medium load for SSDs. If you plan to go more to the "max" side of performance use, do proper testing!

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"It has helped to save money and scale the storage without limits."
"Ceph’s ability to adapt to varying types of commodity hardware affords us substantial flexibility and future-proofing."
"We use the solution for cloud storage."
"The configuration of the solution and the user interface are both quite good."
"The ability to provide block storage and object storage from the same storage cluster is very valuable for us."
"Without any extra costs, I was able to provide a redundant environment."
"Ceph Storage allows us to add value related to cost and offers a unique experience compared to traditional storage."
"Ceph Storage allows us to add value related to cost and offers a unique experience compared to traditional storage."
"StarWind vSAN has allowed us to leverage our server infrastructure more completely without the need to add more hardware."
"I like the asynchronous replication and failover features. They are what I'm primarily using it for. The asynchronous replication is helpful because our servers are backed up continuously throughout the day. If anything goes wrong we just fail over immediately. That is a very nice feature to have."
"They offer top-tier support."
"Integration with Microsoft clustering has been perfect, allowing us to leverage our investment in MS server licensing to the fullest."
"I like StarWind's high availability. The failover is almost immediate, so the end users have no idea the guest VM moved at all. We can failover all guest VMs onto a single hypervisor, place it into maintenance mode, install updates, and reboot a hypervisor all during the daytime and remotely, with confidence the process will be successful."
"The most valuable feature is the reliable storage replication, which enables me to create a robust infrastructure to run our business."
"It has allowed us to save a lot of time and money by letting us create a vSAN within a Windows VM on the environment it controls."
"The management was very easy and I was able to find all that I need in the software dashboard."
 

Cons

"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."
"Ceph does not deal very well with, or takes a long time to recover from, certain kinds of network failures and individual storage node failures."
"Rebalancing and recovery are a bit slow."
"While the documentation for Ceph Storage is helpful, it could be improved."
"An area for improvement would be that it's pretty difficult to manage synchronous replication over multiple regions."
"Some documentation is very hard to find."
"The product lacks RDMA support for inter-OSD communication."
"While the documentation for Ceph Storage is helpful, it could be improved."
"It could have a dashboard so that you can check all servers' SAN health and performance."
"They need to invest more in the support documents for real issues happening when integrating the solution with the hypervisor."
"Our company was hoping for deduplication and encryption across HCI. That is currently not supported."
"It would help us if the vendor continues to release software updates for earlier versions of the Windows operating systems."
"Currently, the StarWind management console is a bit clunky to navigate and isn't the most user-intuitive interface."
"The StarWind Management Console is available only for Microsoft Windows/Windows Server, and should also be available for Linux and macOS, as it would reduce implementation costs."
"I wish they would improve the documentation for the beginner level as it's not very clear on the web page."
"This is a great product."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price of Red Hat Ceph Storage is reasonable."
"We never used the paid support."
"The other big advantage is that Ceph is free software. Compared to traditional SAN based storage, it is very economical."
"Most of time, you can get Ceph with the OpenStack solution in a subscription​​ as a bundle.​"
"The operational overhead is higher compared to Azure because we own the hardware."
"The price of this product isn't high."
"I rate the product’s pricing an eight out of ten."
"There is no cost for software."
"The cost takes into account the number of nodes, so the size of the storage is not important."
"Cost is affordable and licensing is smooth."
"The pricing is more than reasonable."
"The free version is great to use for labs or test environments."
"I would suggest that you download the free version, deploy in your lab, and play with it."
"The pricing is excellent. It will run on anything. You don't have to buy a $100,000 server, with hardware you don't need. You just pay for the license and you're good to go."
"Their pricing seems pretty good, and their licensing structure is pretty straightforward."
"It's priced fairly. It was definitely cheaper than the competition. The licensing terms are straightforward and reasonable."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
18%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Government
7%
Computer Software Company
17%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Government
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

How does Red Hat Ceph Storage compare with MiniO?
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, ea...
What do you like most about Red Hat Ceph Storage?
The high availability of the solution is important to us.
What needs improvement with Red Hat Ceph Storage?
While the documentation for Ceph Storage is helpful, it could be improved. There are instances where we needed to consult additional online forums and communities for solutions to particular issues.
What do you like most about StarWind Virtual SAN?
It is easy to use and can monitor system synchronization and check Storage status. StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN) combines flash and disks of the cluster and forms a virtual shared storage “pool” acce...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for StarWind Virtual SAN?
Choose StarWind Virtual SAN, it is the most flexible, reliable and cheap solution.
What needs improvement with StarWind Virtual SAN?
While using StarWind Virtual SAN so far, I have not found anything missing. It is true that we are using it in a very strict project in which we were looking for a solution that would satisfy a str...
 

Also Known As

Ceph
StarWind SAN & NAS
 

Learn More

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Dell, DreamHost
Baker Tilly BVI, CMS Internet, Board Harpeth Hall School
Find out what your peers are saying about Red Hat Ceph Storage vs. StarWind Virtual SAN and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
831,158 professionals have used our research since 2012.