Storpool or Red Hat Ceph: Which Do You Recommend?

We have been using StorPool for over 3 years now and we are extremely happy with it. Since then we have witnessed an increase in the performance, whilst the downtime simply disappeared. When choosing a storage vendor, we also tried out Ceph, because it is believed to be good for block storage, but when we ran tests on similar hardware with both Ceph and StorPool, StorPool outperformed Ceph by an order of magnitude

From a mate of mine who’s closer these technologies - pasted verbatim:

“Ceph is an open source solution and part of the industry acknowledged OpenStack solution championed by Red Hat. StorPool is a startup out of Bulgaria with ties to Google and a couple of other industry darlings via alumni. It would all depend on the use case and the benefits of each solution against that, but I’d probably back Ceph as being more widely adopted and therefore widely tested, and with an army of Red Hatters behind it to remedy any issues and Red Hat support I doubt it will run out of funding like so many other niche players do without a benefactor.

That being said if StorPool proves itself then I imagine it will be snapped up by someone fairly quickly ala Nimble/HP. Possibly one to watch but in a crowded market it would be hard to differentiate.”

We are a customer of StorPool and are very pleased with their solution. With the help of StorPool we offer our customers a high performance SSD based storage system. Also the support is great. StorPool’s staff has been highly responsive and competent. We strongly recommend StorPool.

I don’t know Storpool and than I can recommend to you Ceph only.

Hi,

While I have not used Storpool and my knowledge is only academic, I am definitely familiar with Red Hat Inktank Ceph. With any storage solution, there are a subset of questions that need to be answered including the planned use cases, application type, IO type and latency required (performance characteristics) as well as what other capabilities are you looking for (just block or unified or object, need replication, encryption, cloud integration etc). These will help paint the picture in terms of what an ideal storage for you would be. On that note, Ceph is an extremely mature product and has been around for ages and field tested and proven. While Ceph can be used for block, file object etc, the underlying RADOS structure is object based. It is particularly popular for OpenStack use cases for example. Ceph offers a scale-out architecture and includes the whole works in terms of functionality. However, my only point would be around performance in that, while it can deliver good performance it is probably not your number one option when extreme performance is desired. Coming to Storpool, it is pretty new (startup) which means it is susceptible to all the problems associated with startups (funding, viability, market differentiation, acquisition, support!!!). If you are convinced that SDS is your cup of tea then there are other alternatives as well (Nexenta as an example). Again my 2cents would be to request you to look closely at your use case and then make a choice. Hope that helps.

Both are fine, though I have a small preference for Storpool, I would advise that they do a trial first to measure the latency.

I shall choose "Red Hat Ceph" . the reason is easy to use.

Hi
I suggest Red Hat cause it’s easy to use, consume fewer resources, it's more customize and powerful.

First I've heard of StorPool, honestly. It looks like proprietary software, even if it does run on commodity servers. Community (vs RHCS) Ceph releases are available, so that's one thing. But really this question can't legitimately be answered without more context as to the use-case.

Functionally both are very similar. For SMEs I recommend RHC and for Enterprise I recommend SP. RHC requires additional setup and configuration.

I’d go with Red Hat Ceph. Ceph has been around for a while and has been leading the way when it comes to SDS and open-source solutions. It’s no wonder why Red Hat continues to invest in them.

Plus, you’ll get a bit more functionality with Ceph and how it integrates with on-premise as well as cloud architectures.

StorPool - we work closely with the StorPool team and sell their SDS software alongside Dell servers for high speed and perfoming All flash systems. Great software and technology built from the ground up

I have no knowledge of both. I only know some others like VSAN or S2D.