Red Hat Ceph Storage vs Zadara comparison

Red Hat and Zadara are both solutions in the Software Defined Storage (SDS) category. Red Hat is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.8, while Zadara is ranked #18 with an average rating of 7.5. Red Hat holds a 18.4% mindshare in SDS, compared to Zadara’s 2.0% mindshare. Additionally, 82% of Red Hat users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Zadara users who would recommend it.

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 4, 2024

Red Hat Ceph Storage and Zadara are competing products within the cloud storage ecosystem. Zadara seems to have the upper hand due to its comprehensive enterprise features and simpler deployment process, making it attractive for enterprises seeking advanced solutions and excellent customer support.

Features: Red Hat Ceph Storage provides scalable, software-defined storage with strong integration capabilities, delivering flexibility and adaptability. Zadara offers advanced cloud storage features, including comprehensive management tools, robust security options, and the ability to integrate with major cloud vendors, ensuring a complete enterprise solution.

Room for Improvement: Red Hat Ceph Storage's complex deployment model and cost management pose challenges in achieving expected ROI. Zadara could improve by diversifying its pricing model to be more accessible to smaller companies, enhancing cache logic to benefit more unique workloads, and increasing feature accessibility for varying levels of customer expertise.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Red Hat Ceph Storage requires expertise due to its complex deployment, though it offers flexibility across various environments. Zadara, on the other hand, provides an easier deployment process and excellent customer support, making it more accessible for organizations prioritizing seamless service.

Pricing and ROI: Red Hat Ceph Storage is cost-effective owing to its open-source nature but may incur additional deployment and management costs. Zadara's pricing model, while higher, reflects its enterprise features and offers strong ROI when its advanced features are leveraged fully, making it appealing for enterprises that need high-end functionalities.

To learn more, read our detailed Red Hat Ceph Storage vs. Zadara Report (Updated: September 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs. Zadara

September 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

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Software Defined Storage (SDS) category, the mindshare of Pure Storage FlashBlade is 4.1%, down from 4.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Red Hat Ceph Storage is 18.4%, down from 20.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Zadara is 2.0%, up from 1.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Software Defined Storage (SDS) Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Red Hat Ceph Storage	18.4%
Pure Storage FlashBlade	4.1%
Zadara	2.0%
Other	75.5%

Software Defined Storage (SDS)

Featured Reviews

Parul-Patel

Senior Network Engineer at Holy Redeemer Health System, Inc.

High performance and throughput enhance IT backup management

The multi-dimensional scale-out design feature of Pure Storage FlashBlade is not in use in our environment. Regarding data reduction technologies, we don't get much deduplication because the data is already deduplicated from our FlashArray before we get to backup, so there is no benefit of deduplication. Regarding the integration with cloud-native ecosystem tools, we are not on cloud; we are strictly an on-premises solution. Pure Storage FlashBlade is not used by any end-user; it's used only for IT backup, with only about four people in our group managing it. I cannot recommend Pure Storage FlashBlade to other users depending upon their financial situation because it's an expensive solution, and the cost is very high, including licensing and renewal every year. I rate Pure Storage FlashBlade an eight out of ten.

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Rifat Rahman

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.

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Kirubel Behailu

Cloud System Engineer at cloud251

Enhancing storage management efficiency with user-friendly experience

Our customers are using Zadara for their research and development environments. We provide infrastructure for government projects, but we are often not fully aware of their specific usage. I typically use it for our infrastructure and offer both Zadara and Microsoft Azure to our customers Zadara…

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

"The snapshots, replication, and the ability to have immutable blades are the most valuable features. You're putting data snapshots out in those blades, and they cannot be touched. Its performance is great."

"The most valuable features of FlashBlade include its replication capabilities, reports, and easy allocation. Everything is user-friendly."

"It has absolutely simplified our storage because the dashboards on the consoles show a clear understanding of where you are, and it is also very easy to provision. This been a big help for our teams."

"FlashBlade offers low latency, high throughput, and seamless scalability."

"The most valuable features include the ease of implementation, ease of use and the speed that you can do backup and recovery on."

"The initial setup is pretty easy and simple."

"The most valuable feature of this solution is performance."

"The solution provides many controllers."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade pros

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

"Ceph’s ability to adapt to varying types of commodity hardware affords us substantial flexibility and future-proofing."

"radosgw and librados provide a simple integration with clone, snapshots, and other functions that aid in data integrity."

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

"I can compare Red Hat Ceph Storage with products from other vendors; I explored quite a few, but I still find that Red Hat Ceph Storage is making the most disruption."

"Replicated and erasure coded pools have allowed for multiple copies to be kept, easy scale-out of additional nodes, and easy replacement of failed hard drives. The solution continues working even when there are errors."

"Red Hat Ceph Storage is a reliable solution, it works well."

"The configuration of the solution and the user interface are both quite good."

More Red Hat Ceph Storage pros

"One of the most valuable features is its integration with other cloud solutions. We have a presence within Amazon EC2 and we leverage compute instances in there. Being able to integrate with compute, both locally within Zadara, as well as with other cloud vendors such as Amazon, is very helpful, while also being able to maintain extremely low latency between those connections."

"The most valuable feature of Zadara is its ease of use and safety. Overall the solution is a complete package, it has all the features needed."

"Zadara saves both time and money."

"A nice feature is the immutable object storage, which can be used in conjunction with Veeam."

"I find Zadara's user-friendliness from both the customer and engineering perspectives highly appreciated."

"It provides very satisfactory storage performance."

"It's very easy to expand and compared to other storage systems that we've used, it's a lot more expandable and a lot more flexible in how it's deployed."

"The most valuable features of Zadara are its visibility and simplicity to use."

More Zadara pros

Cons

"I would like to see more monitoring capability included in the next release of this solution."

"There is some room for new features related to authentication and integration with Kubernetes, and other solution using S3 Bucket."

"It would be nice if you could store file-based in the same box with the same technology."

"It's on the expensive side, as expected for a niche product."

"I want efficiency. FlashBlade doesn't have efficiency now."

"To improve FlashBlade, some analysts suggest enhancing its handling of relational database management systems and SQL queries."

"In terms of technical support, the experience has been mixed. The support is done through email and is not that great, making it a very problematic area I've been dealing with for over four years."

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

More Pure Storage FlashBlade cons

"An area for improvement would be that it's pretty difficult to manage synchronous replication over multiple regions."

"I've heard the integration with OpenShift is great, however, the licensing cost is excessively high."

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

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

"Routing around slow hardware."

"It needs a better UI for easier installation and management."

"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."

"This product uses a lot of CPU and network bandwidth. It needs some deduplication features and to use delta for rebalancing."

More Red Hat Ceph Storage cons

"The range of support of VMware could be better. It can support Windows, however, it cannot support other operating systems like IBM AIX. This needs to improve."

"Currently, when we do firmware upgrades, it sometimes causes issues and is not as nondisruptive as desired."

"There are still some storage features that they lack. For example, other vendors implemented the auto-tiering feature a long time ago, while Zadara Storage Cloud is just coming out with this feature today. So, they are a little bit late compared to the market."

"The cost is not favorable as Zadara does not provide competitive rates for regions like South Africa and Ethiopia."

"The initial installation was difficult because many steps required the command line interface (CLI). Maintenance can also be complicated, especially when deeper troubleshooting requires navigating the CLI and searching for logs."

"Having iSCSI over the internet using a VPN, the IPSec tunnel is really the only thing that I find missing from this product."

"There is room for improvement in pricing as it is currently quite expensive."

"The management interface is more geared towards end-users rather than a service partner like ourselves, and there are improvements that can be made around that."

More Zadara cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

"The price could be cheaper."

"I rate the tool's pricing a seven to eight out of ten."

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

"Support is a separate line item. Support is a different cost, but whatever your support is now, that's what you're going to pay forever. If your support's $100 today, six years from now it's $100. It doesn't fluctuate unless you upgrade it, or change it, etc."

"Our customers have seen a reduction in TCO."

"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."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade pricing and cost advice

"Most of time, you can get Ceph with the OpenStack solution in a subscription as a bundle."

"The price of Red Hat Ceph Storage is reasonable."

"There is no cost for software."

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

"The other big advantage is that Ceph is free software. Compared to traditional SAN based storage, it is very economical."

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

"The price of this product isn't high."

More Red Hat Ceph Storage pricing and cost advice

"The pricing is very competitive and the fact that they have very compelling discounts for multi-year commitments is great."

"The price of Zadara is very good and it covers everything. There is no subscription needed."

"If you just take the street price of Zadara Storage Cloud and look up the price or cost per hour, then you could think that Zadara Storage Cloud is extremely expensive or a solution only for enterprise use. That is not true. You need to compare the entire system. This means that you don't stop looking at just the street price, but you need to consider all the features, requirements, and costs of support as well as the extra cost that other vendors have. Other players just play with hidden, additional costs. Everything is included in Zadara Storage Cloud's licensing cost; what you get is what you pay for."

"One of the factors that ruled out several providers was cost. They were way too expensive for the volume of data that we needed and the speed at which we needed to be able to manage it. There aren't a lot of providers that can do that."

"The pricing and licensing are very simple and the cost is predictable, although, like everything that you pay for as you use, you have to be mindful of what you're using."

"For our use, it's appropriately priced and overall, it's proved to be very cost-effective against other tier-one vendors."

"It is a nice licensing model and it makes it quite simple because we just pay for what we use, and the bill that comes shows us exactly what customers are using what resources."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

12%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Government

Computer Software Company

17%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

Comms Service Provider

Computer Software Company

21%

Manufacturing Company

17%

Government

Comms Service Provider

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	11
Midsize Enterprise	11
Large Enterprise	20

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	13
Midsize Enterprise	4
Large Enterprise	15

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	12
Large Enterprise	3

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 of Pure Storage FlashBlade is expensive compared to other products I used from other companies in the pas...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashBlade?

I believe there is not much improvement needed because they have everything we need, but the interface is a little bi...

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 ...

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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?

Areas of Red Hat Ceph Storage that have room for improvement include more promotion. Many people do not know about th...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Zadara?

The initial installation was difficult because many steps required the command line interface (CLI). Maintenance can ...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Zadara?

I use this product as storage. Specifically, I use it as big storage. That's the main use case for Zadara ( /products...

See all answers

What advice do you have for others considering Zadara?

As for the pros and cons, the main concerns are the complexity of the initial installation and the complicated mainte...

See all answers

Comparisons

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 20% of the time

Pure Storage FlashArray vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 11% of the time

MinIO vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 10% of the time

VAST Data vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 8% of the time

Dell ObjectScale vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 5% of the time

More Pure Storage FlashBlade Competitors

MinIO vs Red Hat Ceph Storage

Compared 41% of the time

NetApp StorageGRID vs Red Hat Ceph Storage

Compared 5% of the time

VMware vSAN vs Red Hat Ceph Storage

Compared 5% of the time

Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct vs Red Hat Ceph Storage

Compared 4% of the time

Dell PowerFlex vs Red Hat Ceph Storage

Compared 3% of the time

More Red Hat Ceph Storage Competitors

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs Zadara

Compared 20% of the time

Amazon S3 vs Zadara

Compared 20% of the time

MinIO vs Zadara

Compared 17% of the time

Amazon EC2 vs Zadara

Compared 13% of the time

Google Cloud Storage vs Zadara

Compared 12% of the time

More Zadara Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Pure Storage FlashBlade

September 2025

Download Pure Storage FlashBlade product report

Buyer's Guide

Red Hat Ceph Storage

September 2025

Download Red Hat Ceph Storage product report

Buyer's Guide

Zadara

September 2025

Download Zadara product report

Also Known As

No data available

Ceph

No data available

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

Zadara is a powerful enterprise-level storage solution whose design enables it to handle every aspect of a user’s data storage needs. It can be deployed in any location, using any protocol, and storing any data type that an organization requires. With Zadara, organizations can do everything that they were able to do with more traditional systems in a cheaper and more efficient way.

Zadara Benefits

Some of the ways that organizations can benefit by choosing to deploy Zadara include:

Security. Zadara is built with data security in mind. All of a user’s data is heavily encrypted by Zadara’s software so that it is safe both while it is in storage and while it is being transferred somewhere else. It comes with role-based access controls that prevent a user’s data from being seen by those who lack the proper level of authorization. It also comes with dual-factor authentication and other similar methods of identity management.

Reduced costs. While Zadara offers enterprise-level storage capabilities, the costs associated with utilizing it are far less than those of similar solutions. Some of the resources that it offers are totally free of cost. The model that it utilizes is a pay-as-you-go model. Organizations only pay for the resources that they use and nothing more. Users are not required to sign up for any particular period of time. They are in complete and total control of what they spend on the solution.

Storage efficiency. Zadara ensures that users are able to store their data in the most efficient way possible. It takes a number of approaches that prevent insufficient data storage. These approaches are:

1. Thin-provision volumes. This method only allows actually written data to be counted toward the storage capacity that is consumed.

2. Pattern removal. Zadara searches a user’s stored data for repetitive binary sequences. Once it identifies the repetitive binary sequences, it deletes them.

3. Inline deduplication (all-flash only). This method ensures that Zadara only stores unique data blocks in its system.

4. Inline compression. Zadara takes data that is stored in its system and compresses it. This keeps larger blocks of data from taking up too much room.

Zadara Features

Centralized management. Zadara comes with a centralized dashboard that enables organizations to monitor and control their storage operations from a single location.

File analytics. Organizations can leverage a powerful analytics package that can provide them with critical insights. These tools can help users sort through their data and make more informed data management decisions.

Remote mirroring. This feature enables users to replicate data in two remote locations at the same time. This makes it easy for data to be recovered in the event of an unexpected loss. It also aids remote teams in their collaboration efforts by giving them access to the same data at the same time.

Reviews from Real Users

Zadara is a highly effective solution that stands out when compared to many of its competitors. Two major advantages it offers are its extensive suite of cloud solution integrations and its object storage capability.

Steve H., the chief technology officer at Pratum, writes, “One of the most valuable features is its integration with other cloud solutions. We have a presence within Amazon EC2 and we leverage computer instances there. Being able to integrate with computing, both locally within Zadara, as well as with other cloud vendors such as Amazon, is very helpful, while also being able to maintain extremely low latency between those connections.”

Mauro R., the CEO of Momit SRL, says, “The object storage feature is wonderful. With traditional storage, you have a cost per gigabyte that is extremely high or related to the number of disks. With Zadara Storage Cloud, you have a cost per gigabyte that you can cut and tailor to your needs independent of the number or size of the disks.”

Zadara

Sample Customers

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

Dell, DreamHost

Time, Inc. A&E Network, The Washington Post, News UK, McGraw Hill, Gilt, Toshiba, Deloitte, VMware

Buyer's Guide

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs. Zadara

September 2025

Free Report: Red Hat Ceph Storage vs. Zadara

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