StorPool Reviews

StorPool is a software-only solution with practically unlimited expansion capabilities. Its performance is very high. We were able to replace our SSD-only local storage systems without any performance penalty. Its price/performance is very high!

As the number of servers grew, management and lack of flexibility became a problem. Our initial experiments with private clouds were promising but we needed a shared storage system.

We now have a high-performance shared storage system which enables us to run on a private cloud. Our previous system used bare-metal hardware, which provided high performance but inflexible management. Now we have the best of both worlds, SSD-class performance with the flexibility of a private cloud system.

Although controlling the system from console has lots of capabilities, an interface to view the performance of the StorPool System and control some cases is a need.

StorPool has no native support of VMware & Hyper-V yet. StorPool does it through a standard protocol (iSCSI), like a regular SAN.

I have used it for a year and a half.

We have not encountered any deployment issues. StorPool’s team took care for everything.

We have not encountered any stability issues; everything was as expected.

Expansion is as simple as adding additional converged nodes. We know the price of a possible expansion; we can use whatever hardware is suitable for the job.

StorPool’s engineers helped us during every step: demonstration, hardware selection, switch and NIC advice, installation, configuration and even open-source cloud management software selection. They were very helpful and advised us wisely.

Technical support is excellent; always with the correct answer.

We first tested open-source solutions, Ceph and GlusterFS. GlusterFS is a good solution for file-based storage but it is slow for sync writing disk images. Ceph again is a good block storage solution but our test showed that on similar hardware, StorPool outperforms Ceph by a large margin.

Initial setup was straightforward.

StorPool’s team took care for the implementation, initial setup and fine tuning.

TCO decreased substantially.

It is worth the investment and you will decrease your infrastructure costs.

Before choosing this product, we also evaluated Ceph and GlusterFS.

We are very happy with StorPool. Performance is impressive and expansion is as simple as adding an additional node. Furthermore, all this is offered with a professional support team who also advise you, from hardware selection to private cloud software solutions.

CloudSigma has 10 locations around the world and a number of new locations in the pipeline, which makes it more complex. We were looking for flexibility in the deployment model allowing us to tailor the storage solution to the specific requirements of every location. This should be the biggest advantage.

Using StorPool we had about 15% increase in our gross margin and that is huge for a service provider. At the same time we increased the performance significantly. That’s really a major change.

We have increased our gross margin, we’ve increased the performance, we’ve reduced the customer churn!

2 years

No, we noticed an improvement from the first deployment and it went fast and easy.

The system has been running stable, performing very well, we haven’t hit really major issues and the product road map is coming in with different thing that’s going to have commercial benefit like compression, back-ups, and other features that would be really useful to us on the line.

StorPool is deployed in all six operating CloudSigma locations and is being rolled-out in more locations under development worldwide. We are more than convinced that the solution is fully scalable.

Exceptional.

Extremely good!

CloudSigma used to run three storage solutions in parallel: an internally developed solution, based on ZFS, an all-flash array and several scale-out magnetic deployments with a commercial vendor.

It was easy and fast.

In-house.

According to our calculation we increased the gross margin with approx. 15%, so it is good.

Not the cheapest solution on the market, but it worth's the investment.

Yes, but we had bad experience with other vendors.

We increased our gross margin, we’ve increased performance, we’ve reduced customer churn. We are very happy and finally we can say – the liaison we have had with StorPool has been excellent. We’ve been very happy with the reactions of the operational team both in terms of managing the solution and expanding it but also in terms of dealing with issues and working together. We found StorPool to be a great partner in terms of our service deliver.

We have 12 active locations around the world and a number of new locations in development, which makes our case more complex. We were looking for flexibility in the deployment model, allowing us to tailor the storage solution to the specific requirements of every location.

StorPool’s storage solution integrated seamlessly with the networking and computing pieces. For instance, in Zurich, our largest cloud, StorPool was deployed in a semi-converged setup which combines converged all-SSD nodes (running both applications and storage) with separate storage-only HDD nodes. In other locations where the power density is lower, the optimal setup is different and in that case a fully converged setup is used.

We are very happy and can finally say that the collaboration that we have had with StorPool has been excellent. We’ve been very happy with the reactions of the operational team both in terms of managing the solution and expanding it, but also in terms of dealing with issues and working together. We found StorPool to be a great partner in terms of our service delivery.

From a commercial perspective, aſter adopting StorPool we’ve been able to achieve a much more efficient fabric that’s allowing us to sell more services on the same hardware.

One of the attractions of StorPool was that it is a very technology-focused company and has highly talented individuals. We are confident, not only that the product was the right product, because of the design and the architectural aspects, but also that the team behind it was very engaged and had the skills and ability to support a service provider.

For a cloud provider, the storage is a system which cannot be taken down, even for maintenance, because it’s impossible to coordinate thousands of customers regarding downtime. With StorPool, however, we don’t have to worry about that.

Monitoring and statistics UI is a bit clumsy, although StorPool is currently working on a new version.