We performed a comparison between IBM Spectrum Virtualize, Red Hat Ceph Storage, and StorPool based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about StarWind, Nutanix, Red Hat and others in Software Defined Storage (SDS)."The ability to have a feature-rich software set which extends the capabilities of the back-end storage arrays."
"It has the ability to seamlessly move hardware in and out as we refresh technology."
"There are many benefits to this solution. Storage virtualization and the ability to migrate massive amounts of data to other systems without impacting your client are the most valuable. It is non-disruptive for my users. We migrated 350 terabytes of data in one night to a new machine without a small system going down and a single user complaining about the performance. You have to fine-tune a lot of storage machines constantly for performance and for making sure that they are optimal, but IBM Spectrum Virtualize does this by itself. It does the adjustment on its own, and it does it right. That's what makes it different. I had a huge VSP from Hitachi, which is also a type of virtualization-based engine but with a decent size. It was a continuous performance-tuning exercise. I never had that issue with IBM Spectrum Virtualize."
"I like all the features, but the most impressive recently has been the introduction of IBM's Flash Core Modules. They are a form of a flash drive, but they have many more features."
"Compared to other storage vendors, the solution is quite convenient to use."
"The scalability is very good. It can handle anywhere from very small to large enterprise class."
"When we add storage behind it, the product is good for the customers because their customers do not notice that anything is happening due to the virtualization."
"The ability to add the virtual machine on the Spectrum environment to sort out the data movers(DMs) and their schedules is a valuable feature. You are able to have, for example, four data movers to balance them so you do not have too much work on one data mover."
"The ability to provide block storage and object storage from the same storage cluster is very valuable for us."
"We use the solution for cloud storage."
"It's a very performance-intensive, brilliant storage system, and I always recommend it to customers based on its benefits, performance, and scalability."
"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."
"The community support is very good."
"radosgw and librados provide a simple integration with clone, snapshots, and other functions that aid in data integrity."
"Ceph’s ability to adapt to varying types of commodity hardware affords us substantial flexibility and future-proofing."
"Creating snapshots within seconds for big disks has helped our different migration projects since it allows us to perform them in a short period of time."
"The team behind it was very engaged and had the skills and ability to support a service provider."
"With StorPool we were able to build live failover on top of our LXC infrastructure. This allows us both to live-migrate containers between compute nodes without any downtime and, in case of an entire node suffering any type of failure, we can bring all containers back online within a minute on a spare compute node."
"Performance, redundancy, scalability and cost-effectiveness. StorPool delivers superbly in all of these areas."
"The speed of the storage solution also allows us to provide service to applications that are very I/O intensive."
"The two 10GE networks provide redundancy and increased performance as they serve as two separate networks doubling the throughput and doing multipathing and load balancing. We now have a high performance shared storage system which enables us to run on private cloud. Our previous system used bare-metal hardware, which provided high performance but inflexible management. Now we have best of both worlds, SSD-class performance with flexibility of a private cloud system."
"The disk reliability is not that good."
"The only errors I find sometimes is the solution tells me I cannot operate it because a service has turned off, you can just go back to the VM, go to services, and turn back the services. However, this should improve."
"They are actually working on one bug we found, which was with flash restore. This was the user interface design for virtual environments."
"I hate I/O groups. If you start swapping I/O groups, they can be potentially risky. If they could get rid of the whole I/O group principle, the risk is not there anymore. I understand the fundamental thing about I/O groups, but they are risky."
"The solution could have a better built-in performance monitor."
"GUI should be developed in HTML5 as opposed to Java."
"I already discussed possible improvements with some of the guys from Hearnsley. One of our frustrations is when you go to expand volumes in a global mirror environment, you have to stop everything in order to expand. So that's one of the things."
"Adding features for data deduplication is one area of improvement."
"Please create a failback solution for OpenStack replication and maybe QoS to allow guaranteed IOPS."
"Routing around slow hardware."
"What could be improved in Red Hat Ceph Storage is its user interface or GUI."
"It takes some time to re-balance the storage in case of server failure."
"The product lacks RDMA support for inter-OSD communication."
"An area for improvement would be that it's pretty difficult to manage synchronous replication over multiple regions."
"The management features are pretty good, but they still have room for improvement."
"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."
"Monitoring and statistics UI is a bit clumsy."
"At times we need to check the disks and do some minor operations. A friendlier user interface would be useful in such cases."
"It would be good if, with next releases, StorPool provide a better GUI for monitoring and statistics. This would make our experience even better and complete."
"I have personally met with multiple Storpool engineers and spoke about different options and features. There are too many features that we don't know or use yet. My recommendation would be to promote the new features and give users different examples of how they can be used and how we can benefit from them."
"he only place we feel they could improve is the time it takes to bring new features to production."
"Live and historical performance statistics would be useful, though my understanding is that this is on the way in a future release."
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