IBM Elastic Storage Server vs. IBM Storage Ceph

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
IBM Elastic Storage Server
Score 8.3 out of 10
N/A
IBM Elastic Storage Server (IBM ESS) is a software-defined storage option.N/A
IBM Storage Ceph
Score 8.0 out of 10
N/A
IBM® Storage Ceph® is a software-defined storage platform that consolidates block, file and object storage to help organizations eliminate data silos and deliver a cloud-like experience while retaining the cost benefits and data sovereignty advantages of on-premises IT.N/A
Pricing
IBM Elastic Storage ServerIBM Storage Ceph
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
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Offerings
Pricing Offerings
IBM Elastic Storage ServerIBM Storage Ceph
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
IBM Elastic Storage ServerIBM Storage Ceph
User Ratings
IBM Elastic Storage ServerIBM Storage Ceph
Likelihood to Recommend
8.3
(0 ratings)
8.7
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
IBM Elastic Storage ServerIBM Storage Ceph
Likelihood to Recommend
1. Perfect solution for geographically separated teams to work on sharing files/media. 2. Mainly suitable for CCTV/video recordings as the network speed and disk throughput is mammoth 3. Suites well for organizations looking for their own private cloud object storage solutions 4. primarily focused on hosting next-generation of applications centric to AI/IOT and ML.
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It is absolutely, hands down the best storage solution for Open Stack. I would even argue it is the only solution if a company is operating at petabyte scale and need resiliency. The storage solution allows any organization to scale their environment using commodity hardware from top to bottom. It has a battle tested track record where it is even being used as the data storage back end for the Large Hadron Collider at Cern
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Pros
  • Very High Availability and Scalability
  • Works particularly well for AI and Big Data usecases
  • Easily unifies all sorts and types of Data
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  • Highly resilient, almost every time we attempted to destroy the cluster it was able to recover from a failure. It struggled to when the nodes where down to about 30%(3 replicas on 10 nodes)
  • The cache tiering feature of Ceph is especially nice. We attached solid state disks and assigned them as the cache tier. Our sio benchmarks beat the our Netapp when we benchmarked it years ago (no traffic, clean disks) by a very wide margin.
  • Ceph effectively allows the admin to control the entire stack from top to bottom instead of being tied to any one storage vendor. The cluster can be decentralized and replicated across data centers if necessary although we didn't try that feature ourselves, it gave us some ideas for a disaster recovery solution. We really liked the idea that since we control the hardware and the software, we have infinite upgradability with off the shelf parts which is exactly what it was built for.
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Cons
  • The maintenance procedure is not straight forward, needs lots of steps/dependency on spectrum scale software
  • Should have an option to deliver as an bundled components under IBM, instead of individual components from different vendors
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  • Authorization on object level could be improved
  • Helper libraries to access Red Hat Ceph Storage from various languages could be improved
  • Ability to attach structured metadata to stored objects could be improved
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Alternatives Considered
IBM ESS is optimized for AI and Big Data usecases while S3 is a general purpose storage solutions. EMR and Databricks have lakehouse/data warehousing solutions for distributed computing but are more optimized for just the big data pipelining solutions and not essentially for AI usecases, especially for inference, when you need to load model artifacts really quickly.
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VSAN (Virtual SAN) and Ceph are both software-defined storage solutions, but they have some key differences in terms of their architecture and capabilities.VSAN is a software-defined storage solution that is built into the VMware vSphere hypervisor. It allows organizations to create a shared storage pool using locally attached storage on multiple ESXi hosts. VSAN is designed to be highly available, and it can automatically detect and recover from hardware failures.Ceph, on the other hand, is an open-source software-defined storage solution that can run on a variety of different hardware and virtualization platforms. It provides object, block, and file storage in a single platform, and is designed to be highly scalable and highly available. Ceph is also known for its ability to handle large amounts of data, and it can be integrated with a wide variety of different applications and services.In terms of functionality, VSAN is more suited for virtualized environments, as it is built into vSphere and it is designed to work well with vSphere's other features such as vMotion and DRS. Ceph on the other hand provides more flexibility as it can run on multiple platforms and it can handle more types of storage like object, block and file storage.I
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Return on Investment
  • On demand scalability helped us in better projection of storage requirement
  • With reduced human resource for operation and maintenance of storage, ROI has been increased a lot.
  • High performance of Big Data applications using IBM Elastic Storage Server has improved the business.
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  • Cost saving in terms of capex (you can reduce EMC & NetApp like dependency)
  • One time setup & then easy provisioning of storage
  • Requirement of competent engineers for maintenence
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ScreenShots