Red Hat Ceph Storage vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance comparison

Red Hat and StarWind are both solutions in the Software Defined Storage (SDS) category. Red Hat is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.8, while StarWind is ranked #9 with an average rating of 10.0. Additionally, 81% of Red Hat users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 98% of StarWind users who would recommend it.

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 5, 2024

Red Hat Ceph Storage and StarWind HyperConverged Appliance are competing in the data storage and management category. StarWind seems to have the upper hand with its efficient storage management, ease of operation, and superior deployment model.

Features: Red Hat Ceph Storage provides integration with OpenStack services, high availability, and a single solution for managing the entire infrastructure. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance offers high availability in a small setup, ease of management through a single console, and flexibility to deploy without specific hardware requirements.

Room for Improvement: Red Hat Ceph Storage could enhance its deployment ease, reduce initial setup complexity, and streamline customer support responsiveness. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance might benefit from improving its integration capabilities with diverse platforms, expanding its feature flexibility beyond existing hardware, and refining its support documentation for broader audiences.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Red Hat Ceph Storage provides comprehensive documentation and training resources for deployment but may be seen as requiring more effort in initial setup. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance focuses on a streamlined process, offering personalized customer support which enhances the user experience throughout deployment.

Pricing and ROI: Red Hat Ceph Storage, while having a higher initial cost, offers substantial ROI through long-term scalability. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is noted for its cost-effectiveness, providing a fast ROI due to relatively lower setup costs and immediate operational efficiency.

To learn more, read our detailed Red Hat Ceph Storage vs. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance Report (Updated: February 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

February 2025

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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

Featured Reviews

Eric Black

Solutions Architect at Recovery Point Systems

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.

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ANDRE VINICIUS HAMERSKI

IT Private Cloud & Infrastructure Leader at Sicredi

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.

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Russ Le Puill

IT Manager at St Peter's Church of England Aided School

Proactive support with improved speed and resilience

There was a long delay with shipping, which we weren't expecting, but we were kept updated throughout. It wasn't made clear to us that we needed to provide our own SFP modules to connect to our infrastructure, so that could have been a bit clearer. It would be amazing if there was, perhaps, a more automated process for updating the hosts themselves, although the maintenance mode works well. Our StarWind command center doesn't seem to have all the options available currently, which support is investigating for us.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"We can capacity plan at a greater level than we used to."

"The most valuable feature is Safe Mode."

"The tool's most valuable feature is its fast performance, especially in handling snapshots. It helps during power outages when we need to quickly move data between different data centers. It ensures efficient replication and helps maintain our data centers' uptime."

"I would rate Pure Storage FlashBlade a ten out of ten."

"It has also helped to simplify storage for us in the way that it's easy to manage. Their automatic monitoring really helps when things break or are about to break. They see a problem coming and alert us even before our own system does."

"The solution is able to handle workloads and is easy to use. It allows us to actually manage the boxes in less time."

"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."

"Speed and ease of use are the two most valuable features."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade pros

"I would definitely recommend Red Hat Ceph Storage. It is a complete solution for cloud-native storage needs."

"The setup is very easy, deserving a ten out of ten."

"We have not encountered any stability issues for the product."

"The solution is pretty stable."

"Ceph Storage allows us to add value related to cost and offers a unique experience compared to traditional storage."

"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."

"I really like that Red Hat Ceph Storage can be used as a total solution without any storage area network components."

"The high availability of the solution is important to us."

More Red Hat Ceph Storage pros

"Being able to log on to the GUI to see specific data and usage statistics, executing clones, starting and stopping VMs, etc., is great."

"The most valuable feature is the high-availability. We have three nodes, and all data will be synched instantly through all the nodes. Even if we had a disaster where two nodes failed, containing dozens of critical machines, almost automatically, all the loads would be run on the remaining node."

"UI Options are simple and easy to find."

"It improved all services running on the new cluster and took up less space and less energy."

"We have the ProActive Premium Support and it has reduced our monitoring efforts. It has been very useful. They have been able to detect things such as when there's an issue with the cluster or they're getting some kind of weird reading that I have no idea about. They're really quick to let me know about it and even set up a schedule to address it. I've been very happy with their level of support on that."

"The most valuable features of the solution are the redundancy and its cost. I used to have a SAN, a Dell EMC EqualLogic. Unfortunately, it was they call an "inverted pyramid of doom." It was two or three hosts, two switches, and one storage array at the very bottom. But the SAN, the storage array at the very bottom, is a single point of failure..."

"Their service is top-notch and if a node goes down they immediately are following up with us to make sure that everything is working smoothly."

"Product functionality and performance are wonderful."

More StarWind HyperConverged Appliance pros

Cons

"I would like to see the licensing fees improved as well as the price per terabytes."

"I would like to see better integration."

"The feature that we're waiting on is better integration with the cell services."

"The Pure Storage Orchestrator is our biggest pain point at the moment. If we can have more say in future developments of feature sets that we will need to support for our use case, that would be pretty beneficial to us."

"It usually comes down to just what you hit and the value you're getting when you spend the money and license the products. I would always go, "If you want to make things better, lower your price and make your licensing simpler." There's always an opportunity around that."

"We haven't been able to use much of the cloud area of Pure Storage. We have a storage server and it would be better if it could integrate with other cloud features of this solution."

"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."

"Commvault has mainly driven the Analytics, providing data and reports. However, the product has room for improvement, especially regarding storage analytics. Upgrading firmware has caused issues, requiring feature disabling to revert to traditional backups. The firmware upgrades sometimes affect Commvault backups."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade cons

"It would be nice to have a notification feature whenever an important action is completed."

"I have not identified any drawbacks, however, the response to public platform inquiries could be faster."

"In the deployment step, we need to create some config files to add Ceph functions in OpenStack modules (Nova, Cinder, Glance). It would be useful to have a tool that validates the format of the data in those files, before generating a deploy with failures."

"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."

"While the documentation for Ceph Storage is helpful, it could be improved."

"What could be improved in Red Hat Ceph Storage is its user interface or GUI."

"Please create a failback solution for OpenStack replication and maybe QoS to allow guaranteed IOPS."

More Red Hat Ceph Storage cons

"Product shipments did have a few bumps along the way, but that's to be expected when using any shipping company."

"At the moment, the initial configuration is very technical and error-prone. That is the reason Starwind does it for you as a service, which is a great thing. But it would be nice if we could change or rearrange storage assignments ourselves."

"I think that the pre-installation questionnaire was a little confusing and ambiguous."

"At times there has been a language barrier when communicating issues."

"The monitoring and report software is a bit hit and miss."

"An emphasis on security can be improved."

"Although the setup documentation was very complete and succinct, I found StarWind documentation to be a bit sparse."

"A possible thing is perhaps a customer portal to schedule a time with support online via a calendar."

More StarWind HyperConverged Appliance cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing for FlashBlade is between cheap and moderate."

"I understand that it is competitively priced compared to other brands."

"We used a reseller for the purchase."

"The price could be cheaper."

"I feel that the price could always be lowered."

"The price of this solution could be made more affordable."

"Pure Storage FlashBlade is a hardware appliance, and it's very expensive if you compare its price with other solutions. You can get the same features and benefits from its competitor, VAST Data, but for half the price of Pure Storage FlashBlade."

"Our customers have seen a reduction in TCO."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade pricing and cost advice

"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."

"There is no cost for software."

"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."

"We never used the paid support."

"I rate the product’s pricing an eight out of ten."

"The operational overhead is higher compared to Azure because we own the hardware."

More Red Hat Ceph Storage pricing and cost advice

"I honestly feel that there's no one else in the market doing what they're doing for the price point that they're doing it at. That's why I asked them about investing in their company. I think that the options they're providing and the software that they have is sort of revolutionary for the price point... The total cost was $24,400."

"We looked at Nutanix and found it did almost the same thing but for more money. In fact, StarWind was nearly one-third of the price; it cost us £36,000. That includes five years of monitoring... The Nutanix was near enough £110,000 for relatively the same amount of performance and storage."

"Its cost was reasonable."

"I was able to bring the price per year down by going out to a five-year plan."

"The other solutions we were looking at were priced much higher than this and they didn't necessarily have full redundancy... Nutanix and VxRail were in the final running... but it came down to our price point."

"We didn't have any issue with pricing or any of the sales process."

"The HCA price is all-inclusive (setup, hardware, support, warranty), except for your standard Microsoft Server licensing."

"Our entire package was around $35,000 for everything, including three years of support."

More StarWind HyperConverged Appliance pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

37%

Computer Software Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

18%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Government

Computer Software Company

16%

Educational Organization

13%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Manufacturing Company

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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashBlade?

Its configuration should be easier. There should be easier language for the configuration.

See all answers

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 ...

See all answers

What do you like most about Red Hat Ceph Storage?

The high availability of the solution is important to us.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Red Hat Ceph Storage?

I have not identified any drawbacks, however, the response to public platform inquiries could be faster.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for StarWind HyperConverged Appliance?

It's not the cheapest, however, the solution works incredibly well and is so simple to licence and maintain.

See all answers

What needs improvement with StarWind HyperConverged Appliance?

There was a long delay with shipping, which we weren't expecting, but we were kept updated throughout. It wasn't made...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for StarWind HyperConverged Appliance?

We desperately needed to update yet downsize our data centre. We had six hosts for only approximately 14 or so Virtua...

See all answers

Comparisons

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 21% of the time

VAST Data vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 12% of the time

MinIO vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 11% of the time

Pure Storage FlashArray vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 8% of the time

Dell ECS vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 6% of the time

More Pure Storage FlashBlade Competitors

MinIO vs Red Hat Ceph Storage

Compared 42% of the time

VMware vSAN vs Red Hat Ceph Storage

Compared 6% of the time

NetApp StorageGRID vs Red Hat Ceph Storage

Compared 5% of the time

Dell PowerFlex vs Red Hat Ceph Storage

Compared 4% of the time

Portworx Enterprise vs Red Hat Ceph Storage

Compared 3% of the time

More Red Hat Ceph Storage Competitors

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

Compared 36% of the time

StorMagic SvSAN vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

Compared 21% of the time

VxRail vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

Compared 13% of the time

Azure Stack HCI vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

Compared 12% of the time

Dell PowerFlex vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

Compared 10% of the time

More StarWind HyperConverged Appliance Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Pure Storage FlashBlade

March 2025

Download Pure Storage FlashBlade product report

Buyer's Guide

Software Defined Storage (SDS)

March 2025

Download Red Hat Ceph Storage product report

Buyer's Guide

StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

March 2025

StarWind HyperConverged Appliance report

Download StarWind HyperConverged Appliance product report

Also Known As

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Ceph

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Overview

FlashBlade is the industry’s most advanced scale-out storage for unstructured data, powered by a modern, massively parallel architecture to consolidate complex data silos (like backup appliances and data lakes) and accelerate tomorrow’s discoveries and insights.

Pure Storage

Red Hat Ceph Storage is an enterprise open source platform that provides unified software-defined storage on standard, economical servers and disks. With block, object, and file storage combined into one platform, Red Hat Ceph Storage efficiently and automatically manages all your data.

Red Hat

For SMB, ROBO and Enterprises, who look to bring in quick deployment and operation simplicity to virtualization workloads and reduce related expenses, our solution is StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA). It unifies commodity servers, disks and flash, hypervisor of choice, StarWind Virtual SAN, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct or VMware Virtual SAN and associated software into a single manageable layer. The HCA supports scale-up by adding disks and flash, and scale-out by adding extra nodes.

StarWind HyperConverged Appliance consists of StarWind Virtual SAN, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct or VMware Virtual SAN “Ready Nodes”, targeting those, who are building their virtualization infrastructure from scratch. In case there is an existing set of servers, we offer a “software only version”, which is essentially our years proven StarWind Virtual SAN. Basically, it’s the fuel powering StarWind HCA.

StarWind

Sample Customers

ServiceNow, Mercedes-AMG Petronas Motorsport, Dominos, Man AHL

Dell, DreamHost

Sears Home and Franchise Business

Buyer's Guide

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

February 2025

Free Report: Red Hat Ceph Storage vs. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

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