Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) vs. FalconStor StorSafe (FalconStor VTL) vs. IBM Storage Ceph

EBS is well-suited for use as a storage option for databases, including relational databases, NoSQL databases, and big data analytics databases. EBS can provide high IOPS (Input/Output Operations per Second) and low latency. EBS provides a high-availability storage solution, which ensures that your data is always available and accessible even in case of a single or multiple availability zone failures. EBS can also be replicated across multiple availability zones to ensure data durability. The scenario where I find it less appropriate is in terms of cost; EBS can be more expensive than other storage options, such as Amazon S3, especially for large amounts of data or for infrequently accessed data.

Incentivized

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

• Raw storage capacity attached to your instance operative system
• Frequent data rewriting (mission critical for reporting)
• Low latency connectivity (14 reporting subsidiaries in different time zones)
• Videly spreaded for implementation
• Fast accessible drive
• Block storage are core for Java, Net mobile applications

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

• EBS volume can be attached to only one EC2 instance at a time
• The volumes are limited to the Availability zones of the instance they are attached to
• The maximum size is 64TB. We have had usecases where we needed larger volume
• The backup snapshots are stored on S3 and that's an additional cost.

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

Amazon EBS is a great tool and fairly easy to use as long as you are familiar with the Amazon Web Service ecosystem. It allows a great way for you to move storage around easily and allows you to quickly provision storage as needed based on the business requirement. For us, it's easy to move between our EC2 images that had been linked with EBS storage between these Amazon accounts.

The support for Amazon Elastic Block Store is great as long as you can articulate your needs. Like most tools, there may be some back and forth before you find a support person that is knowledgable in the tool and can provide you with necessary insights.

Volumes range from cost-effective dollar-per-GB to high performance with the fastest IOPS and throughput. You can change volume types, tune performance, or increase volume size without disrupting your critical applications. EBS volumes are replicated within an Availability Zone (AZ) and can easily scale to petabytes of data. Build your SAN in the cloud for I/O-intensive applications. Run relational or NoSQL databases.

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

• In terms of ROI, I found it's really cost-effective since maintenance cost is not there. No need to spend extra money on the procurement of hard drives
• On demand feature of Ebs is quite effective when you require extra storage you can allocate and pay as per your need.
• Accessibility from everywhere and deployment of it across different geographical location.

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