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Amazon EFS (Elastic File System) vs Red Hat Ceph Storage comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jun 3, 2026

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

Everpure FlashArray
Sponsored
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
231
Ranking in other categories
All-Flash Storage (3rd)
Amazon EFS (Elastic File Sy...
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
18
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Storage (10th), File and Object Storage (12th)
Red Hat Ceph Storage
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
27
Ranking in other categories
Software Defined Storage (SDS) (3rd), File and Object Storage (2nd)
 

Featured Reviews

Sowjanya MV - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Lead at Wipro Limited
Has improved performance for mission-critical workloads and enabled seamless non-disruptive upgrades
The availability is 99.99%, which is the main factor any customer would need because their data should be available whenever they want to access it. This is one main critical thing. It is very easy to upgrade since Pure Storage FlashArray handles it well. Everything is non-disruptive now; previously, there were forklift shifts, but now that is not the case. Pure Storage FlashArray says no to forklift upgrades. Usually hardware requires downtime, but Pure Storage FlashArray has improved their footprint so that they are not asking for downtime; everything is just a non-disruptive activity, which is why customers are more inclined towards Pure Storage FlashArray. Customers want more of the models in their environment due to the performance they are giving, and everything is in one Pure1 Array console where we can view all the models on one page or just an orchestration tool. You don't miss anything; you have replication, notifications about replication, and details about which host groups replication is happening in and if that replication is successful or failed. On a daily basis, our purpose is to create volumes for infrastructure; our daily activities include creating volumes and mapping them to the host, doing any migrations from a VM, clearing the data stores, and carving the volumes to those VMs. One key factor is the data compression with a ratio of 5:1, focusing on space efficiency, inline deduplication, and the compression Pure Storage FlashArray works on; that is a major factor we can suggest to any customer. Analytical capabilities are crucial. Daily, we check the throughput and consumption, and Pure Storage FlashArray provides predictions for one year regarding usage. This prediction helps plan updates well ahead. For support, we just raise a case, and they follow up and get it done. There is also AI readiness, but with the model R2, we don't have much of that AI readiness. For others, we do have AI readiness that predicts capacity based on daily or monthly trends, enabling us to analyze how much space we need or if we need to expand the disk shelf. From an operational point of view, a good feature is that if you accidentally delete a volume, it will be retained in the destroyed state for the next twenty-four hours, which is not the same with any other vendor. I have worked in this storage domain for the past fifteen years, and this option is remarkable, benefiting any L1 or L2 engineer. Additionally, from a compliance perspective, Pure Storage FlashArray has REST APIs enabled. I have not explored automation much, but from a security standpoint, it is strong with encryption data. If you want to automate, you can easily integrate with all clouds and explore Pure Cloud for scheduling workloads, including volume creation. Customers find benefit in Pure Storage FlashArray's single management pane of glass due to the dual controller and active-active setup. If one of the controllers goes down, all workloads automatically shift to the other controller, ensuring their data is safe and accessible at all times. This is a highlighted feature that any customer desires because their data should always be accessible. For SAN workloads, we use Pure Storage FlashArray because for SAN FC fiber channel, we don't use it; we use NetApp for NAS activities. We have clearly split this, so SAN is for mission-critical applications, while network-attached storage handles file systems. This architecture helps us maximize the benefit from Pure Storage FlashArray due to the significant workloads from this giant retail client. From a footprint and energy consumption perspective, you can see energy consumption from the Pure1 storage portal on a daily basis, and it is very compact. The three models we use consume only three units, which is quite low. From a footprint and data center perspective, it doesn't occupy much space. As everything moves to cloud, there are requirements to avoid excess spending on data centers, and Pure Storage FlashArray is efficient in energy consumption and is environmentally friendly.
Parveen Garg - PeerSpot reviewer
Subject Matter Expert at Bureau veritas
Utilizing network data sharing effectively with cost considerations
What should be improved in Amazon EFS (Elastic File System) is the costing, as it should be reduced, but that depends on Amazon. To be frank, I don't have much comparison as we don't have a good volume. We have very little volume on the EFS (Elastic File System), which is why I couldn't do much cost comparison. Currently, I'm not aware of the exact costing, but previously I found that the costing was a bit high.
Rifat Rahman - PeerSpot reviewer
Infrastructure Architect & CEO at Tirzok Private Limited
Offers reliable performance and availability for large deployments
I would like to see improvements in Red Hat Ceph Storage not because I necessarily think it needs improvement, but because I generally prefer to do things manually rather than following the containerization part. Current deployments are based on containers, but I deploy manually with my scripts and controls. If there are no Kubernetes-like requirements, I often prefer to deploy a whole manual process. I don't ask for improvements in the deployment model because Red Hat has its own philosophy about making things, but it's my personal choice that I prefer things manually. Some features are available only in the containerization part, so if those are also available in manual deployment, that will help.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It has good stability for our company."
"The solution helps to simplify storage."
"Most of the problems that we had in the past with the performance in IOPS have disappeared. It has been a great improvement for our customers' services."
"This solution has improved the way our organization functions through its reliability and consistent platform for storage and has helped us to simplify storage because the management tools make everything a lot easier."
"This solution has helped my organization by cutting down on provisioning time. I used to have to provision a VM and it would take ten minutes. Now, it takes thirty seconds."
"It's easy to use, and the maintenance upgrades to get free controllers work really well."
"It's very fast and very easy to use. It performs well and is both flexible and compatible. We like it because it's easy to use."
"The most valuable feature of Pure Storage FlashArray is the all-flash storage performance, low latency, and efficiency of their de-duplication technology. Additionally, the ease of use is good compared to other storage systems. The features in data protection, snapshotting, and replication between data centers and sites are superior to other solutions."
"The initial setup was straightforward."
"Amazon EFS (Elastic File System) is an excellent service that provides a serverless solution with unlimited storage and easy configuration."
"The solution is quite stable."
"The first valuable thing is it is scalable."
"Elastic File Systems allow me to share data, provision, and manage capacity and performance in AWS."
"The solution is scalable."
"Amazon EFS is extremely stable, as it is managed by AWS."
"We need our storage to expand based on demand but storage is a bit costly, so we start with a smaller amount and, as we grow, we use EFS on demand and it manages our costs."
"The high availability of the solution is important to us."
"It's possible that we should have used the solution a long time ago as it appears to cost the business less money to run some of our data systems using it."
"Red Hat Ceph Storage is working exactly as it should be; it's running in the background, it's working, and it doesn't bother me."
"High reliability with commodity hardware There is no cost for software"
"It opens doors for completely open-source cloud."
"Ceph was chosen to maintain exact performance and capacity characteristics for customer cloud."
"We have some legacy servers that can be associated with this structure. With Ceph, we can rearrange these machines and reuse our investment."
"The scalability feature is used by all users and is critical for our operations."
 

Cons

"They should work on their upgrades, they're not smooth."
"I like what they're doing, but some of my customers complain that they do not have all the bells and whistles and knobs to fine-tune workloads that some of the competitors have. In my opinion, that's good. All customers don't have dedicated storage gurus, and they can get themselves into trouble if they fine-tune too many of those high-performance knobs, but they do get knocked down. Pure Storage takes a hit in the minds and opinions of some of the customers because they cannot customize things as much as compared to a legacy storage provider's appliance such as NetApp, Dell EMC, or even HPE. I personally think 95% of my customers are better off letting the system fine-tune itself. That was something that you needed to do 12 or 15 years ago, but now with all-flash, the technology can handle what it needs to handle. Customers just end up shooting themselves in the foot if they are tweaking too many default settings."
"I would like to have support available in Spanish."
"Price is about the only thing that's wrong with it."
"A year ago they promised that they would be able to read through the database encryption with more metric and they have not delivered on that patch, which is significant because it gives us back so much more storage room. We want to be able to read through the encryption."
"With scalability, I have run into a little problem with our last upgrade. There were some undocumented limitations to the number of drives that our controller could run on. So, instead of putting in a new data pack as we had anticipated, we had to keep adding and removing to get up to the capacity that we needed to be. What should have been a one day process (or a few hours) turned into a month and a half process."
"It doesn’t provide enough information on performance analytics. For example, Nimble Storage has Infosight, which provides data; Pure Storage doesn’t have an equivalent."
"I would like some performance analytics which go deeper than today. It should be specific to some hosts and applications. This would be good."
"Specifically, when it comes to the file system for the learning system, we encountered performance issues with both Azure and AWS."
"There are challenges related to AWS, such as ensuring proper security measures with IMS code and encryption."
"The product's stability has some shortcomings where improvements are required."
"It should be simplified. There are people who don't have cloud experience. It should be storage that we are able to just connect to."
"A notable limitation of Amazon EFS (Elastic File System) is that it does not support Windows."
"The deployment is definitely not an easy process."
"I don't have notes on improvements."
"The user activity needs to be more connected and not required to connect to a PC or a device."
"This product uses a lot of CPU and network bandwidth. It needs some deduplication features and to use delta for rebalancing."
"Routing around slow hardware."
"It needs a better UI for easier installation and management."
"When it comes to the capabilities of Red Hat Ceph Storage such as object, block, and file storage, I am not fully satisfied."
"It would be nice to have a notification feature whenever an important action is completed."
"It takes some time to re-balance the storage in case of server failure."
"Ceph Storage lacks RDMA support for inter-OSD communication. That is a huge loss in terms of performance."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"There should be quite a bit of reduction of TCO with just licensing (and stuff) because we run the VM environment off it."
"Pure is not a cheap product. It is not something that is inexpensive. But, the total cost of ownership tends to be lower than with other solutions, because you don't need a lot of expertise, you don't need a lot of training or very expensive engineers or very expensive consultants."
"In the beginning, we saw that the price is not very good. When we made some compilations about the deduplication and the compression and what the equipment does, including the differentiation of upper management of the storage, the price was not so bad. However, in the beginning, the price was very difficult to justify."
"Our Evergreen Storage subscription is supposed to be good when we go to upgrade."
"We consume it as a service, and that's actually something we really like, or at least I really like from the technical perspective. That's because it means there is no hassle when we need to upgrade arrays to add capacity. We just interact directly with technical counterparts, and we say, "Hey, we're filling up," and they say, "All right, here's another data pack." They ship it in, and we install it. So, the as-a-service model has worked very well. Given the outstanding data reduction rates, it has improved our profitability because we're selling allocated volumes as part of the cloud service or recovering those costs from our tenants. It is very efficient, but that has offset the premium price. It started out that way, but over time, as we've added capacity, the price per gig has gone down a lot because we have a lot of it."
"In comparison to the competitors, Pure is very price-competitive for the future functionality that it provides."
"For us, as the customer, it reduced the price of the management."
"Pure Storage has not helped us to reduce our licensing costs."
"The product charges are based on the amount of data stored."
"It has flexible pricing. You are charged based on your storage."
"Amazon EFS (Elastic File System) offers a pay-as-you-go model, so whenever you use its services, you need to pay."
"I would rate the pricing 7 out of 10."
"The main challenge with EFS is its cost, which is slightly higher compared to EBS or S3. For one GB or ten GB of data, S3 is much cheaper. EFS could cost around $30 to $50 per month for similar usage."
"The solution's price is mid-ranged."
"The product's price depends on the services and the size and capacity at which it is used in a business environment."
"There is no cost for software."
"The operational overhead is higher compared to Azure because we own the hardware."
"The price of this product isn't high."
"The other big advantage is that Ceph is free software. Compared to traditional SAN based storage, it is very economical."
"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 price of Red Hat Ceph Storage is reasonable."
"Most of time, you can get Ceph with the OpenStack solution in a subscription​​ as a bundle.​"
"We never used the paid support."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Construction Company
10%
Computer Software Company
7%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Computer Software Company
9%
Government
7%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Comms Service Provider
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business71
Midsize Enterprise38
Large Enterprise159
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise8
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business13
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise15
 

Questions from the Community

Which should I choose: HPE 3PAR StoreServ or Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform F Series?
Both are great platforms, but if you are considering all flash solutions, I would recommend you to consider Pure Stor...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pure Storage FlashArray?
I have knowledge about the licensing part, which we obtained for around 10 years from the time of deployment, but I d...
What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashArray?
When it comes to Everpure FlashArray ports shown in the GUI, it would be better if, when one of the Pure array ports ...
Which file storage system is better - Amazon EFS (elastic file storage) or Azure File Storage?
Amazon EFS is easy to set up: you can use the AWS management console, API, or command-line. Amazon EFS can grow to pe...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon EFS (Elastic File System)?
We don't need to purchase it; we are just using it and paying Amazon as per the utilization. We make direct payments ...
What needs improvement with Amazon EFS (Elastic File System)?
When I started working with Amazon EFS (Elastic File System), I faced a few issues. One issue was around the number o...
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 needs improvement with Red Hat Ceph Storage?
Areas of Red Hat Ceph Storage that have room for improvement include more promotion. Many people do not know about th...
What advice do you have for others considering Red Hat Ceph Storage?
I do not have experience working with solutions such as Red Hat Ceph Storage and StorPool. I have plenty of experienc...
 

Also Known As

Pure Storage FlashArray
No data available
Ceph
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Nielsen, Lamar Advertising, LinkedIn, Betfair, UT-Dallas
Arcesium, Atlassian, Seeking Alpha, Zend
Dell, DreamHost
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon EFS (Elastic File System) vs. Red Hat Ceph Storage and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
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