StorPool Reviews

We are a hosting provider and use Storpool as our main storage solution. Our different platforms connect to the same storage system. We have connected it with OnApp, OpenNebula and Jelastic and have performed different integrations.

We currently have about five different Storpool clusters for our different zones which are shared within our multiple platforms. The integration has been seamless. Our clusters are spread in 2 data centers and allows us to offer different solutions to our customers with our platforms. 

Our previous storage system constantly caused us issues that resulted in losing customers due to outages. We would get at least 1 read-only scenario every week which may cause data corruption to our customers.

Storpool replaced our old storage system. It is extremely fast and reliable, which has translated to exceptional performance for our customers. This has helped to reduce the outages or impact caused by the storage solution.

Our support team can focus on fixing real customer issues instead of dealing with issues caused by the storage system.

The ability to transfer from one Storpool unit to another Storpool has been great. 

Creating snapshots within seconds for big disks has helped our different migration projects since it allows us to perform them in a short period of time. We are now evaluating disaster recovery strategies using Storpool units.

Cloning has been a great tool to create new servers within a few minutes. The integration with Open Nebula has been amazing and allows us to leverage our offerings and provide more options to our customers. 

As of now, the product has been working really well for us. They keep updating and launching new features. 

Their support has been great and have always been available.

I have personally met with multiple Storpool engineers and spoke about different options and features. There are too many features that we don't know or use yet. My recommendation would be to promote the new features and give users different examples of how they can be used and how we can benefit from them. This is a great product.

We have been using Storpool for five or more years.

We did use a different solution and we switched as it was not reliable.

You get what you pay for. Storpool would not be the cheapest option, however, what you get are great service and great support. 

I was not actively involved in the evaluation part. 

We initially started using StorPool at three locations with a capacity of 250+ TB.
By implementing StorPool, we managed to increase both our gross margins and performance, while decreasing the latency to 0.19-0.26 ms up to 125,000 IOPS.

We now deliver all-flash performance and improved uptime with an SSD-based shared storage system. The reliability was increased due to the resilience and quality of StorPool.

Managing StorPool is much simpler than our previous storage system, especially having a CLI option which our previous storage system was lacking. Monitoring a StorPool cluster is also simple with the built-in JSON API.

Support for VMware is with iSCSI at this point. This is fine, but we're waiting for the full VMware integration they are working on.

We have experienced no stability issues.

StorPool has seamless scalability. Add more hardware, and usable space grows seamlessly.

Тhe StorPool support team has been just great. They provided expert advice on all aspects of the hardware configuration, including recommendations on how to maximize performance, while reducing investments. Their responsiveness and technical proficiency were very impressive. This helped us to deploy the solution very quickly.

Before StorPool, we used a traditional redundant SAN with off the shelf hardware and commercial SAN soſtware. The previous system was not based on SSD, and the old SAN soſtware required a lot of overhead. Thus we went shopping for a new solution.

For us, StorPool offered scalable SSD based solution with high uptime and enterprise-grade support, at affordable prices.

After extensive research on software-defined storage options and thorough tests, we selected StorPool for its product quality and high resource utilization.

We would recommend StorPool without reservation, to anyone who needs what they offer. The StorPool solution has met or exceeded our expectations. StorPool’s staff has been highly responsive, competent, and has performed their duties in a professional manner.

We have 12 active locations around the world and a number of new locations in development, which makes our case more complex. We were looking for flexibility in the deployment model, allowing us to tailor the storage solution to the specific requirements of every location.

StorPool’s storage solution integrated seamlessly with the networking and computing pieces. For instance, in Zurich, our largest cloud, StorPool was deployed in a semi-converged setup which combines converged all-SSD nodes (running both applications and storage) with separate storage-only HDD nodes. In other locations where the power density is lower, the optimal setup is different and in that case a fully converged setup is used.

We are very happy and can finally say that the collaboration that we have had with StorPool has been excellent. We’ve been very happy with the reactions of the operational team both in terms of managing the solution and expanding it, but also in terms of dealing with issues and working together. We found StorPool to be a great partner in terms of our service delivery.

From a commercial perspective, aſter adopting StorPool we’ve been able to achieve a much more efficient fabric that’s allowing us to sell more services on the same hardware.

One of the attractions of StorPool was that it is a very technology-focused company and has highly talented individuals. We are confident, not only that the product was the right product, because of the design and the architectural aspects, but also that the team behind it was very engaged and had the skills and ability to support a service provider.

For a cloud provider, the storage is a system which cannot be taken down, even for maintenance, because it’s impossible to coordinate thousands of customers regarding downtime. With StorPool, however, we don’t have to worry about that.

Monitoring and statistics UI is a bit clumsy, although StorPool is currently working on a new version.

We started our cloud platform almost six years ago with OnApp. At that time, software defined storage was only a dream and we were forced to use traditional SAN. We were focused on performance, stability, and the possibility of expanding storage without changing hardware or buying new equipment. 

StorPool gave us all of these: unbeatable performance from our cloud service, low latency, and great support. Our customers are more than happy with the quality of our cloud platform and we are more than happy with StorPool storage.

We started our platform with ordinary storage solutions, but they led us to many problems that took a lot of time to debug and resolve. Since implementing StorPool we have not had any downtime. We have high-performance storage that we can expand if needed. We can also provide custom solutions, based on StorPool, that work for our clients.

StorPool software is also cost-effective and gives us a pricing advantage over our competitors.

When we first tested StorPool, we were impressed by the performance and the option to expand our storage almost without limit. In the beginning, we used several servers and expanded storage when needed. Doing so, we gave our clients stability and ensured their needs would always be met.

At times we need to check the disks and do some minor operations. A friendlier user interface would be useful in such cases.

We have never encountered any issues with stability. Even when some of our hypervisors went down, the data was protected and re-balanced over working servers.

We have upgraded disk space several times. It's easy and takes place without any interruptions.

Storpool support is top-notch. We can contact them at any time if we have problems or questions. We receive quick and detailed response.

We used a standard storage solution from QSAN, but we had issues with it at times. Also, it was impossible to scale without either buying a new one or requiring downtime.

All setup was done by Storpool, along with all necessary tests. They helped us a lot in upgrading the version of our platform to match their needs. Also, if there is a new version, they do full research into what we must do to update.

The licensing model is very flexible and is cost-effective.

If your choose Storpool, you will receive a very good product, stability, top support, and absolutely qualified technical staff who are always ready to help.

StorPool has a great team of professionals that we can always rely on. That is why we are sure that our service will be uninterrupted.

As we needed an all-SSD level of performance, StorPool implemented its SSD-Hybrid system, which keeps a full copy of data on SSD and redundant copies on HDDs to get the best of both - hundreds of thousands of IOPS and lower cost.

The two 10GE networks provide redundancy and increased performance as they serve as two separate networks doubling the throughput and doing multipathing and load balancing.

We now have a high performance shared storage system which enables us to run on private cloud. Our previous system used bare-metal hardware, which provided high performance but inflexible management. Now we have best of both worlds, SSD-class performance with flexibility of a private cloud system.

StorPool is a software-only solution with practically unlimited expansion capabilities. Its performance is very high. We were able to replace our SSD-only local storage systems without any performance penalty.

It would be good if, with next releases, StorPool provide a better GUI for monitoring and statistics. This would make our experience even better and complete.

When we need to grow capacity we simply upgrade to bigger drives or add more drives/servers to the StorPool cluster. 

We were running on bare-metal servers and using local RAID 10 BBWBC disk systems. We first started with SAS disks and later switched to all-SSD solutions. We had custom data migration and backup systems to manage this bare-metal configuration. However, as the number of servers grew, management and lack of flexibility became problems. Our initial experiments with building a private cloud were promising but we needed a shared storage system. In our experience, hardware storage solutions are expensive to build and run, so we started looking into software defined storage solutions.

Its performance to price ratio is very high.

We first tested open source solutions, Ceph and GlusterFS. GlusterFS is a good solution for file-based storage but it is slow for sync writing disk images. Ceph is also a good block storage solution but our test showed that on similar hardware StorPool outperformed Ceph by a large margin.

I rate it a 10 out of 10. We are very happy with StorPool. Performance is impressive and expansion is as simple as adding an additional node. Furthermore, all this is offered with a professional support team that advises you on all aspects, from hardware selection to private cloud software solutions.

We needed a distributed storage system to provide high-available solutions to our customers as well as to add a redundancy layer to our hosting infrastructure. Due to the high level of service we're offering and the high level of resource demands, we also needed the distributed storage system to be at least as fast as local SSD storage.

With StorPool we were able to build live failover on top of our LXC infrastructure. This allows us both to live-migrate containers between compute nodes without any downtime and, in case of an entire node suffering any type of failure, we can bring all containers back online within a minute on a spare compute node.

Built-in redundancy for both storage nodes and network gives us peace of mind in case of a hardware failure, be it a storage node or a network component. The speed of the storage solution also allows us to provide service to applications that are very I/O intensive.

We have generally been happy with StorPool's product. As previously mentioned we haven't had any issues since deploying their solution. The only place we feel they could improve is the time it takes to bring new features to production.

We haven't had any stability issues since deploying StorPool.

We haven't scaled our production cluster yet, but we have previously tested adding more storage nodes and that worked without any issues.

We have received timely and knowledgeable support from StorPool on the rare occasions we've contacted their support.

We hadn't really used any enterprise grade storage solution prior to StorPool.

The initial process was very straightforward. We provided the hardware to StorPool and had a working cluster in a couple of days. Joining new members in the cluster is also a very straightforward process.

StorPool's pricing and licensing model is very transparent. As always, one has to due his due diligence when choosing a product like distributed storage solutions.

We have tested several storage network solutions that our service providers had at the time: a Dell distributed storage used by SoftLayer (not sure on the exact platform/name but it was discontinued after if tailed spectacularly several times) and EMC (before it was acquired by Dell).

I would give StorPool a solid nine out of 10. We haven't had any issues since we've deployed the solution. StorPool offers a great product at a very affordable pricing, given the capabilities of the solution.

Since deploying StorPool, we have experienced no unplanned outages or performance issues. Our technical and engineering teams no longer live in a permanent state of high alert due to storage outages or throughput degradation due to ‘hot spots’ and as a result have more time to devote to other endeavours.

Our sales team is now confident to design solutions involving our cloud product because we're confident with the stability of the storage which underpins everything on the platform.

Performance, redundancy, scalability and cost-effectiveness. StorPool delivers superbly in all of these areas - something no other product we have either tested or deployed has been able to do consistently.

Live and historical performance statistics would be useful, though my understanding is that this is on the way in a future release. This could likely be combined with general health monitoring via some sort of dashboard.

No, on the contrary. StorPool has ‘just worked’ for us – it has handled everything that we’ve thrown at it over the past two years with ease.

StorPool has allowed us to resume actively marketing and selling our cloud product – we’d stopped doing so prior to StorPool as we didn’t have full confidence in the underlying storage.

We’re very pleased with the way in which we can scale our StorPool deployments as our storage requirements grow. One tremendous benefit of scaling with StorPool is that it also results in increased performance due to the fact it automatically re-balances existing data in the background across the additional drives to proactively prevent hot spots. As we grow the cluster, it just gets faster and faster.

Customer Service:

The assistance we’ve received from our first contact to date has been remarkable - markedly higher than elsewhere. Their team have really gone the extra mile for us in all areas of deployment, including making recommendations for other areas of our virtualisation infrastructure. Everyone in their team seems to be committed to providing great customer service.

Technical Support:

StorPool’s technical team has been incredible from day one. They always go out of their way to provide fantastic support, and frequently step outside of what would be their 'official' remit to provide advice and insight into how we can improve other areas of our infrastructure to make the most of their solution. Their team are highly competent, and we consider them partners who truly want the best for us.

Since our first AppLogic based cloud deployments in 2009, storage speed and capacity limitations have been a reoccurring headache. Enterprise solutions had the potential to solve these problems, but were not financially viable for the client base we serve.

StorPool’s team facilitated our initial deployment and went above and beyond to assist us. The process was handled smoothly and we were able to easily transition our existing clients to it with most not even noticing.

StorPool’s team helped us with the implementation. Unlike other vendors, they took full care of the implementation and the ongoing smooth running of the deployment. They also continue to assist with system design for other areas of our platform to ensure we could get the most out of the StorPool deployment.

This isn’t easy to calculate largely because we were able to re-use existing equipment so we don’t have precise costs to base this on. The ability to use commodity hardware is of course a massive advantage in itself.

StorPool provides us with a significant reduction in TCO due to their pay-as-you-grow licensing model, which means we don’t have to pay upfront for hardware and licensing for capacity that we don’t yet need to use. The result is that we can scale our storage incrementally as we require it.

It also enables us to deploy in a converged fashion, whereby the same servers can be used for both storage and compute.

Over the years we have deployed numerous soſtware solutions including Nexenta, FreeNAS and OpenFiler, but in all cases we rapidly encountered scalability issues, performance problems or both.

StorPool is the solution to storage performance and scalability problems that we’ve been battling with for years. It has delivered the performance and reliability our clients require at a viable cost, virtually eliminated the time our engineering team spends dealing with storage related problems and it provides us with access to a fantastic team who excel at what they do and always go the extra mile to exceed our expectations. StorPool’s technical team have been exceptional from day one. They facilitated our initial test deployment and went above and beyond to assist us with benchmarking. They are relentless in their quest to get the best possible performance from our deployments and frequently make optimisation suggestions to further improve our data throughput.

CloudSigma has 10 locations around the world and a number of new locations in the pipeline, which makes it more complex. We were looking for flexibility in the deployment model allowing us to tailor the storage solution to the specific requirements of every location. This should be the biggest advantage.

Using StorPool we had about 15% increase in our gross margin and that is huge for a service provider. At the same time we increased the performance significantly. That’s really a major change.

We have increased our gross margin, we’ve increased the performance, we’ve reduced the customer churn!

2 years

No, we noticed an improvement from the first deployment and it went fast and easy.

The system has been running stable, performing very well, we haven’t hit really major issues and the product road map is coming in with different thing that’s going to have commercial benefit like compression, back-ups, and other features that would be really useful to us on the line.

StorPool is deployed in all six operating CloudSigma locations and is being rolled-out in more locations under development worldwide. We are more than convinced that the solution is fully scalable.

Exceptional.

Extremely good!

CloudSigma used to run three storage solutions in parallel: an internally developed solution, based on ZFS, an all-flash array and several scale-out magnetic deployments with a commercial vendor.

It was easy and fast.

In-house.

According to our calculation we increased the gross margin with approx. 15%, so it is good.

Not the cheapest solution on the market, but it worth's the investment.

Yes, but we had bad experience with other vendors.

We increased our gross margin, we’ve increased performance, we’ve reduced customer churn. We are very happy and finally we can say – the liaison we have had with StorPool has been excellent. We’ve been very happy with the reactions of the operational team both in terms of managing the solution and expanding it but also in terms of dealing with issues and working together. We found StorPool to be a great partner in terms of our service deliver.

StorPool’s team has deep understanding about technology and help us:

- Tune our system or consult for further vHost.vn growth

- Coach our System Engineering to higher level with more information about tech in this industry.

In the past, if the server had problems, our system administrators had to go to the datacenter to fix and repair the hardware, the downtime increased even more. Nowadays, the whole sys admin team can work remotely and just start VPS on another spare dedicated server in datacenter with less downtime to our traditional VPS services.

1. Decreased TCO

2. Scalability

3. Increased revenue

4. Time saving

5. Downtime reduction

6. Save more time and concentrate on other tasks.

Almost one year.

No, everything went smoothly.

No.

No, everything is good.

Great, and fast response.

Excellent support team with deep understanding about technique.

We used OnApp IS and all VPS always had errors due to OnApp Integrated Storage backend. OnApp IS made our VPS go down daily.

It was fast and easy, and StorPool’s team helped us a lot with deep knowledge and know-how.

No, it was not through a vendor.

We have not calculated the cost per IOPS but our cost per GB is very good.

It was a good investment. Now automates our vMotions, so it has helped us keep congestion on our hosts way down, and has been more effective than DRS.

We are testing many software from open source to commercial solution for our distribution storage to host all our VPS like: Ceph Block Device, ZFS, Virtuozzo Storage, OnApp Integrated Storage, vSAN (VMware).

I would absolutely recommend StorPool. Commercial solution is better than open source, especially in support.

Managing StorPool is much simpler than our previous storage system, especially having a CLI option which our previous storage system was lacking.

Due to the reliability of StorPool and the high level of support by StorPool staff, we expect to spend less system admin time to run and operate the solution. This will allow our technical staff to focus on other duties and projects.

In terms of areas for improvements, honestly there is nothing we dislike. We have provided feedback on some desired features in the future but we like the system just as it is.

Less than a year.

No.

No.

No. A StorPool cluster is very easy to expand, we will be adding additional servers in the future to grow our usable space in the cluster.

StorPool’s staff has been highly responsive, competent, and has performed their duties in a professional manner.

Very good and extremely competent.

Yes, we are replacing a traditional redundant SAN using off-the-shelf hardware and StarWind SAN software.

It was straightforward.

StorPool’s team did the implementation.

You'll receive an enterprise solution at an affordable price.

Yes, compared to the storage system we used previously, StorPool is almost twice as fast.

We would recommend StorPool without reservation. The StorPool solution has met or exceeded our expectations.