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 #3 with an average rating of 9.3, while Zadara is ranked #17 with an average rating of 7.5. Red Hat holds a 14.3% mindshare in SDS, compared to Zadara’s 2.1% mindshare. Additionally, 82% of Red Hat users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Zadara users who would recommend it.

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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: January 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs. Zadara

January 2026

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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 January 2026, in the Software Defined Storage (SDS) category, the mindshare of Pure Storage FlashBlade is 3.3%, down from 4.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Red Hat Ceph Storage is 14.3%, down from 21.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Zadara is 2.1%, up from 1.5% 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	14.3%
Pure Storage FlashBlade	3.3%
Zadara	2.1%
Other	80.3%

Software Defined Storage (SDS)

Featured Reviews

MikaelHellström

IT Manager at Regin Dalarna

Has handled backup storage needs reliably and supports seamless upgrades

In environments requiring high throughput and low latency, Pure Storage FlashBlade provides high throughput and normal latency, but we do not have any application that requires low latency right now, so the latency of three to five milliseconds is considered kind of high. Pure Storage FlashBlade's ability to integrate with enterprise applications is not important for us, as we only want to present an S3 bucket for our backup, which we have done, and it works very fast. We use the Purity software's data reduction techniques; we have a backup software that compresses everything before sending it to the S3 bucket, achieving a data reduction of 1.1 to one. I would recommend Pure Storage FlashBlade to other companies because it's a very fast and scalable solution for anyone who needs it. On a scale of 1-10, I rate this solution an 8.

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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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KirillKolesnikov

IT Technical Architect at AVALIS

Troubleshooting becomes more accessible and management improves over time

I use this product as storage. Specifically, I use it as big storage. That's the main use case for Zadara Zadara's troubleshooting feature is very valuable for me. After the last update, managing the product became easier. Management is more straightforward and useful. These improvements are…

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It performs well and it is also very fast."

"We have integrated it with VMware. The integration process is pretty good. Especially with VMware, it helps with the capacity of it."

"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."

"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 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."

"The performance of FlashBlade is excellent. It does not necessarily leverage the SOS API that some of the newer products leverage, but I found its speed pretty much on par and comparable. It is fast, and it does what it is supposed to do."

"We have seen a reduction in the total cost of ownership by around 20%."

"What I like best about Pure Storage FlashBlade is its object storage functionality, plus it has fast underlying hardware. Pure Storage FlashBlade is also very stable. I find its stability one of its valuable features."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade pros

"We are using Ceph internal inexpensive disk and data redundancy without spending extra money on external storage."

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

"The community support is very good."

"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."

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

"Stratus allows more reliability than all the other types of computers available."

"We have some legacy servers that can be associated with this structure. With Ceph, we can rearrange these machines and reuse our investment."

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

More Red Hat Ceph Storage pros

"The most valuable feature is the flexibility in terms of deployment options."

"Zadara Storage Cloud having 24/7 management saves me support and engineering costs because the storage and computing are managed by a third-party. We are able to focus more attention on the customer, which is truly our core business. Even at 1:00 AM or 2:00 AM at night, someone will answer, which is important."

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

"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."

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

"Zadara is a fully-fledged platform, and our customers are happy with its use."

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

More Zadara pros

Cons

"Pure Storage FlashBlade should improve on more cloud integration."

"It would be beneficial if the layer could support the S3 protocol and be container ready in the next release."

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

"I would like to see better integration."

"The features provided for SMB customers are limited."

"On our dedupe during our initial buy, we were expecting a number a little higher like 4x. However, we are getting about 3.6. While it is close enough, it doesn't quite hit the numbers. So, this has been a challenge."

"They need better integration with public clouds along with a better hybrid solution."

"In the realm of micro-services, I think that Pure Storage can do well if they start getting in there and making their arrays more micro-services ready."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade cons

"I have encountered issues with stability when replication factor was not 3, which is the default and recommended value. Go below 3 and problems will arise."

"Some documentation is very hard to find."

"When it comes to the capabilities of Red Hat Ceph Storage such as object, block, and file storage, I am not fully satisfied."

"The licensing cost is excessively high. This is a significant issue from my perspective."

"If you use for any other solution like other Kubernetes solutions, it's not very suitable."

"The storage capacity of the solution can be improved."

"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."

"Routing around slow hardware."

More Red Hat Ceph Storage cons

"Some of the features are a little bit slow to come to market."

"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."

"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."

"The initial setup of the solution is complex."

"I would like to see them be a little bit more proactive in terms of the patches and updates that are available. I would like to see more disclosure and information around what fixes or what enhancements are available within a patch, and help in coordinating and scheduling that. Right now, it's driven more by the customer in reaching out via a support ticket."

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

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

"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."

More Zadara cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Our licensing is renewed annually."

"The price is a little high."

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

"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."

"The pricing is relatively expensive due to the FlashBlade technology. However, for companies needing quick and reliable data access, the cost is justified."

"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."

"The product is very expensive."

"We used a reseller for the purchase."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade pricing and cost advice

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

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

"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."

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

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

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

"We never used the paid support."

More Red Hat Ceph Storage pricing and cost advice

"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."

"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."

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

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

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

"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."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

12%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Computer Software Company

10%

Government

Computer Software Company

15%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

Comms Service Provider

Computer Software Company

19%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Comms Service Provider

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	11
Midsize Enterprise	11
Large Enterprise	21

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

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	12
Large Enterprise	4

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...

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pure Storage FlashBlade?

Regarding pricing, it is okay; we needed exactly this in size, and the price was a lot lower than competitors, making...

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What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashBlade?

In my opinion, one way Pure Storage FlashBlade can be improved is by having more compatibility between the FlashArray...

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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 18% of the time

MinIO vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 9% of the time

Pure Storage FlashArray vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 9% of the time

VAST Data vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 7% of the time

Dell ObjectScale vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 6% of the time

More Pure Storage FlashBlade Competitors

MinIO vs Red Hat Ceph Storage

Compared 48% of the time

VMware vSAN vs Red Hat Ceph Storage

Compared 3% of the time

NetApp StorageGRID vs Red Hat Ceph Storage

Compared 3% of the time

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs Red Hat Ceph Storage

Compared 3% of the time

Dell PowerFlex vs Red Hat Ceph Storage

Compared 2% of the time

More Red Hat Ceph Storage Competitors

Amazon S3 vs Zadara

Compared 11% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs Zadara

Compared 9% of the time

Amazon EC2 vs Zadara

Compared 8% of the time

DataCore SANsymphony vs Zadara

Compared 6% of the time

MinIO vs Zadara

Compared 5% of the time

More Zadara Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Pure Storage FlashBlade

January 2026

Download Pure Storage FlashBlade product report

Buyer's Guide

Red Hat Ceph Storage

January 2026

Download Red Hat Ceph Storage product report

Buyer's Guide

Zadara

January 2026

Download Zadara product report

Also Known As

No data available

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

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

January 2026

Free Report: Red Hat Ceph Storage vs. Zadara

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