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Red Hat Ceph Storage vs VMware vSAN comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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

Pure Storage FlashBlade
Sponsored
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.9
Number of Reviews
37
Ranking in other categories
All-Flash Storage (17th), File and Object Storage (6th)
Red Hat Ceph Storage
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
25
Ranking in other categories
Software Defined Storage (SDS) (2nd), File and Object Storage (2nd)
VMware vSAN
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
230
Ranking in other categories
HCI (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

Software Defined Storage (SDS)
HCI
 

Featured Reviews

Eric Black - PeerSpot reviewer
The ability to leverage multi-tenancy along with immutability is a huge benefit for us
The only thing I feel FlashBlade is missing is the SOS API. If it had SOS API, that would put it well over the top. Veeam Backup specifically has started to streamline their API, and they are doing that with SOS API. They have optimized it. Any of the S3 devices out there that support this SOS API can have far more API calls at once. On our side, that translates to better restoration. With SOS API, it can leverage far more restorations at a single given time or read from the device in simple terms. That results in maximizing the output and throughput from the device itself.
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.
Yves Sandfort - PeerSpot reviewer
Gives us a lot of advantages when we need to expand resources
Stability can be improved. Adding all these new features is nice, but we are now at the level where most of the features you need in production are there. The stability is not from a day-to-day operations perspective, but more from a supportability perspective, because currently some of the support scenarios require you to completely evacuate hosts or the complete cluster. That sometimes can be a stretch. This would clearly be an improvement if the support teams were given additional tools to make that easier. Upgradability could be a bit easier sometimes. We are now where vSAN can be updated without ESXi, but there is still enough dependency. So that would be good if that actually would be uncoupled even more. Dashboards are there, and we use vROps as well. So, we have all the beauty of capacity planning and everything over there. That's not really something where we need a lot of other things.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable features are the Metro clustering, and disaster recovery."
"The most valuable features of FlashBlade include its replication capabilities, reports, and easy allocation. Everything is user-friendly."
"The initial setup is pretty quick."
"The initial setup was straightforward. If you know how to plug in power and network you're pretty much qualified. They were on site to configure the network, the box to fit into our network architecture. Other than that, we self-managed from there."
"It has absolutely simplified our storage because the dashboards on the consoles show a clear understanding of where you are, and it is also very easy to provision. This been a big help for our teams."
"Speed and ease of use are the two most valuable features."
"The main feature I have found to be product replication."
"FlashBlade offers low latency, high throughput, and seamless scalability."
"The scalability feature is used by all users and is critical for our operations."
"Most valuable features include replication and compression."
"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 are using Ceph internal inexpensive disk and data redundancy without spending extra money on external storage."
"The high availability of the solution is important to us."
"Red Hat Ceph Storage is a reliable solution, it works well."
"Ceph Storage allows us to add value related to cost and offers a unique experience compared to traditional storage."
"I like the distributed and self-healing nature of the product."
"This product has very good performance when it comes to virtualization storage and works well with solutions such as SAP HANA, Exadata, Hadoop, and Big Data Analytics."
"Overall the solution is very good."
"We can scale it very easily for a test environment. We were able to segment our DMZ so it wasn't connected to anything, which we really liked."
"The high availability is very good."
"It's stable and scalable. Also, you can virtualize SAN so that you don't have to have a separate storage area network and can have your computer and storage on the same box or computer."
"Storage policies are used to perform operations in the VMs. This feature allows you to create storage policies for VMs to get performance, high availability, I/O policies, etc."
"The product's initial setup phase was very straightforward."
"The most important functionality is the ability to extend cluster storage and cluster computing power securely without loss of data."
 

Cons

"Recently, while upgrading the version code, one of the controllers failed. Replacing the controller took between 14 to 20 days."
"An area for improvement in Pure Storage FlashBlade is its price. It could be reduced. The technical support for Pure Storage FlashBlade also needs improvement. It used to be good, with more experienced engineers. Nowadays, it isn't, and it takes longer for support to solve problems."
"They need better integration with public clouds along with a better hybrid solution."
"In terms of scalability, it doesn't expand out quite as robustly as some of the others, but it covers 90% of the market in what it does."
"Its configuration should be easier."
"It would be beneficial if the layer could support the S3 protocol and be container ready in the next release."
"I would like to see more monitoring capability included in the next release of this solution."
"I would like to see better integration."
"Please create a failback solution for OpenStack replication and maybe QoS to allow guaranteed IOPS."
"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."
"Geo-replication needs improvement. It is a new feature, and not well supported yet."
"I have not identified any drawbacks, however, the response to public platform inquiries could be faster."
"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."
"The management features are pretty good, but they still have room for improvement."
"The integration could be improved. I would like to see integration with other platforms."
"There is room for improvement in vSAN's ability to debug. When it's not working well, debugging becomes quite challenging. Identifying issues when it's lagging or not functioning properly can be difficult."
"The UI could certainly be better. The inside into what's actually going on with vSAN would be nice to know."
"I would like more integration with the hardware when it comes to disc types and supporting the newer types of storage."
"The usability is pretty good but it could use a little tweaking on the UI, with a clearer definition of exactly what some of the things do."
"The only negative point relates to the licensing. If you want multiple, different servers, it costs money, but you have all the capacity for vSAN. You do not reach the data, but the processor arrays and the current architecture."
"Dedupe in non flash drives can be improved."
"I would like a better Hardware Certification List (HCL). The HCL should a little easier to deal with."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price could be cheaper."
"The price is a little high."
"The product is very expensive."
"The pricing is relatively expensive due to the FlashBlade technology. However, for companies needing quick and reliable data access, the cost is justified."
"It's a costly solution, but Pure Storage FlashBlade doesn't require additional licenses. All of the software is combined into one bundle."
"Our customers have seen a reduction in TCO."
"The price of this solution could be made more affordable."
"It is within reason for what you get. From what we have found comparing it to other vendors, it is in the same range as others. Given the choice, we would definitely redeploy it based on the cost."
"The operational overhead is higher compared to Azure because we own the hardware."
"We never used the paid support."
"I rate the product’s pricing an eight out of ten."
"The price of this product isn't high."
"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 other big advantage is that Ceph is free software. Compared to traditional SAN based storage, it is very economical."
"The price of Red Hat Ceph Storage is reasonable."
"There is no cost for software."
"It is not a subscription model. It is a purchase model, but it is very important that you also buy technical support from VMware. This is probably the only disadvantage of vSAN. It depends on the use case, but it can be very expensive."
"Perhaps a bundle, like Essentials, would allow more businesses to make the leap to the product."
"If they could reduce the cost, it would be better. Licensing costs are something that they could take care of. If you are a smaller and strong IT team, then VMware vSAN is a very good product. If you want to expand in the service provider space, then you will have to go for an open-source solution like OpenStack. We are now looking at OpenStack because we sell licensing costs. We are a service provider, so the IT component data is a substantial component in our overall costing. We feel that OpenStack might help us to cut down the licensing cost. Therefore, we are looking at SAS storage instead of vSAN. SAS is open source, but it is not wise to have open source without having the backend support. We are using RedHat SAS, and it is an open-source solution. You can also have a free version, but we are using it with support from RedHat so that we have somebody to back us up in case we have a problem. If you do normal business, then IT expense is 1% or 2% of the total turnover. The higher licensing costs sometimes don't make difference to the big companies who are not service providers and are using it only for their internal use. For them, the IT cost is 1% or 2%, but for an IT service provider, the IT costs will go up to 15% to 16% of the total cost of the operations. This is where the licensing costs become irrelevant. For example, the licensing cost of using VMware, VC, and vSAN is 8% of my monthly revenue. Every month, I pay about $35,000, and, with the revised plan, it will be something like $50,000 or revenue of 600k per month, which means almost 8% of the revenue is going into VMware licensing. In a very competitive world, 8% as a cost element is huge. So, if I can bring it down to 2%, I save 6% in revenue expenditure. In terms of profit, 6% of 30% is something like another 25% increase in my profit. My profit can be almost 25%. It would be 20% to 25% in case I am able to handle the licensing costs and bring them to a very low level. Because these IT costs are substantial for us, that is why we are going with OpenStack. OpenStack has a limitation that it requires more hardware. There will be some increase in the hardware cost, but overall we will save 5% to 6% of our licensing cost by using OpenStack."
"We are using the VMware vSAN ROBO which allows us to have a maximum of 25 virtual machines. The approximate cost is €10,000 for a perpetual license."
"The solution is relatively expensive compared to similar products."
"We pay a yearly licensing fee."
"The price is okay."
"What made us go with this solution was price point. When you can utilize existing storage infrastructure, and not have to continually purchase new SAN products out there that are going up in price as time goes by, then it's a wonderful thing."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
37%
Computer Software Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
18%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Government
7%
Educational Organization
53%
Computer Software Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
5%
Financial Services Firm
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Pure Storage FlashBlade?
The tool's most valuable feature is its fast performance, especially in handling snapshots. It helps during power out...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pure Storage FlashBlade?
The pricing for FlashBlade is between cheap and moderate. FlashBlade is worth the money due to the experience and per...
What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashBlade?
Its configuration should be easier. There should be easier language for the configuration.
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 ...
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?
I have not identified any drawbacks, however, the response to public platform inquiries could be faster.
What Is The Biggest Difference Between vSAN And VxRail?
While both run on the vSAN technology from VMware, vSAN needs to be deployed on vSAN ready nodes while VxRail is an e...
Which would you choose - Nutanix Acropolis AOS or VMware vSAN?
We found the reduced power consumption with Nutanix Acropolis AOS a very attractive feature. We also like the interfa...
How does HPE Simplivity compare with VMware vSAN?
HPE SimpliVity is a hyper-converged infrastructure solution that is primarily geared to mid-sized companies. We resea...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Ceph
vSAN
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

ServiceNow, Mercedes-AMG Petronas Motorsport, Dominos, Man AHL
Dell, DreamHost
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Find out what your peers are saying about Red Hat Ceph Storage vs. VMware vSAN and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
845,040 professionals have used our research since 2012.