Azure Managed Disks vs. Scality ARTESCA vs. StorPool

When it comes to addressing the durability and sacilibity issues with high security and availibilty Azure managed disks might be one of the best options out there but on the other hand if your project is low budgeted you could explore other options as well, as Azure manged disks can be quite expensive.

Incentivized

The team in charge of implementing Scality has to be full stack in order to guarantee the correct functioning of the entire system. However, you have to think very carefully about the balance between servers and disks, perhaps adopting smaller fully populated servers instead of large semi-populated servers, which would mean that over time our disk updates will not have a fully useful life.

Incentivized

Storpool performs well on block level (and that is what we use it for). It is not yet supporting a kind of distributed filesystem or object storage - a filesystem layer needs to be built on top of it.

• Improved reliability: Managed Disks come with built-in redundancy and automatic failover capabilities to ensure high availability and data durability.
• Improved reliability: Managed Disks come with built-in redundancy and automatic failover capabilities to ensure high availability and data durability.
• Flexible storage options: Managed Disks offer a variety of storage options such as Standard, Premium, and Ultra Disk storage, to cater to different performance and cost requirements.
• Easy to use: Managed Disks can be easily created, configured, and managed using the Azure Portal, Azure PowerShell, Azure CLI, and Azure SDKs.

Incentivized

• I love the redundancy of the software.

Incentivized

• Distributed Storage array with very high throughput in terms of reading & write operations.
• Horizontal scaling without much complexity of management.
• Easily integrate with OpenStack cloud.
• Doesn't depend on proprietary hardware, integrates with commodity hardware.

• Open source is nice but a bit confusing for many without the full technical background.
• Upgrades come but involve a learning curve which can be slow.
• Risk management often needs additional oversight which could be better integrated.

Incentivized

• The overall packaging is not very good. I think it could be more efficient for installation.
• There are many components in storage servers. This can generally be complex to understand, you have to be patient.

Incentivized

• Graphical interface is for monitoring and stats, but not for operations.

As an organization, it took us a while to understand the shift from a traditional black box SAN to software-defined storage, but now we are much more certain of what this means. The time invested and the resources were not very high, thanks on the one hand to the technical support and on the other to the coherence and good development of the platform.

Incentivized

I have seen Scality in the office meeting with our VP and get the feeling that they are here to support us.

Incentivized

Azure Managed Disks stacked up very well against Amazon Elastic Block Store. In the End it really came down to the fact we are running numerous other Microsoft Azure products and Azure Managed Disks would fit nicely into that ecosystem. We had less ramp up for training and learning issues.

Incentivized

Due to the nature of our business we require extensive encryption and availability for sensitive customer data. The erasure encoding that Scality provides gives us the assurance that documents are rest are never in a state of being downloaded or available to a casual data thief. This is something that can be found with other vendors but at a fraction of the same cost. Having this kind of performance, availability and redundancy at the cost that Scality provides has made a large difference to our organization.

Incentivized

We made a very careful selection of our storage vendor and solution. After researching the newest technologies, our team decided to deploy a software-defined storage solution from StorPool.

• With Azure Managed Disks, it is easy and fast to transfer data.
• The software offer amazing security features and we no longer worry about data security.
• The software is great for data backup.

Incentivized

• Keeping sensitive customer data secure is a must for our organization and Scality has great features to make this happen.
• We replaced a single SAN with a Scality ring and found performance to improve as we store more and more customer data.
• Being able to lose various portions of our Scality ring and allow it to continue to service customers while maintaining high performance has been key to our business.

Incentivized

• We have not calculated precise ROI. We focused on getting the best solution at a reasonable price, based on market research. Initially, we didn’t need a lot of capacity, so we invested in servers and network, which could handle several times more capacity, but bought smaller drives to keep the investment low. We achieved a starting price of $3.2/GB usable and $1.4/GB logical. Later we expanded the capacity by adding more drives to the system. Currently, the system has a price of approximately $2.3/GB usable and $0.99/GB logical and a price of $0.09/IOPS.