IBM Storage Ceph vs. Pure Storage FlashBlade

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

Incentivized

Pure Storage FlashBlade is best for companies that want their data stored and secure. The big storage capacity and cloud integration secure our data and ensure no third-party access without authorization. It provides us a secure data storage services for our objects. Fast and easy to install and easy to use.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Speed. We are seeing large transactions take very little time.
• Upgrades- In-place upgrades of both hardware and software are extremely easy.
• Ease of use- I have several engineers working on this and from setup to day to day operations it is extremely easy to maintain.

Incentivized

• 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

Incentivized

• When reporting out a user has exceeded there quote, it only references the UID. It would certainly be nice it calls out the UID name that is clearly present in the Dashboard.
• The ability to determine a snapshot total size would be helpful.
• Proactive reachout to discuss new versions and assist in planning the upgrade would be a key win.

Incentivized

Good API, multi-protocol support is great.

Without exception, the contacts with support have been quick and extremely knowledgeable. I do not fear getting an underqualified engineer to assess or work on my arrays. In addition to this support structure, the sales engineers are top notch as well.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

Pure Storage FlashBlade is in our experience far faster, performance-wise, compared to its close competitors. However, if you factor in any packages you currently have with IBM or AWS for example, you can get more value for money for your data requirements. However, if performance is a must, the increased cost is not an issue.

Incentivized

• 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

Incentivized

• Pure has greatly narrowed the performance gap between file storage and fiber channel block storage with FlashBlade. Exotic file systems and costly FC fabrics are no longer needed to run performant storage.
• Training is not required for a storage admin who has never touched a Pure array. Everything is where you would expect to find it.

Incentivized