IBM Spectrum Scale vs. StorPool

When you get a Spectrum Scale solution from IBM you are certain of two things. 1) You will need a specialized storage admin who will be able to take all of its advantages and make available for your organization. It is an appliance that not so many storage admins would be comfortable working on. Invest properly on both hardware and human resources. 2) You will scale forever. We started with a couple of hundred of Terabytes and grew to dozens of Petabytes.

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.

• Secure data storage platform.
• Secure environment to handle big data through.
• Creating reports from multiple platforms easily.

• 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.

• Not suited for HPC.
• Doesn't work well for retail.

Incentivized

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

It was the solution that fit the requirements of our customers.

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.

• Allowed reuse of existing storage
• Flexibility to provision storage quickly, allowing us to right size storage.

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.