Longhorn Block Storage vs. StarWind SAN & NAS

Longhorn Block Storage is well suited for most Kubernetes workloads where data storage is required, but when very high storage speed is essential, Longhorn Block Storage might not be the best solution. For those rare situations, we use local storage mounts. Longhorn Block Storage's ability to easily create/restore volume snapshots is a very frequently used feature among our dev teams because they can easily play multiple scenarios with the same data - modify data, restore it and modify it again.

StarWind is best suited for the integration and deployment part and for the storage part as well. The product is budget-friendly and helps us to improve business agility. Can't think of negative scenarios as of now.

Incentivized

• Creates read-write many (RWX) volumes
• Longhorn Block Storage is an easy to deploy solution
• Scheduled and on-demand volume snapshots can be created using web GUI
• Volume backups can be stored offsite on any S3 compatible storage solution
• Backups and snapshots can be restored using web GUI

• Ease of Deployment
• Management interface
• Documentation and support
• performance

• Version to version upgrades takes more expertise to do than initial deployment
• If something goes wrong, you will need a help from support
• Longhorn Block Storage speed is slightly slower than local disk storage speed

• Can improve documentation.
• Can more focus on user training.

Incentivized

We chose StarWind SAN & NAS over Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct because it was more flexible to configure.

Incentivized

• It has provided a highly available storage solution for almost all our Kubernetes deployments
• We can deploy new app versions with peace in mind because we have working data backups
• Application development is faster because devs can play with data and easily restore it when needed

• Allowed us to go all flash for 1/5 the cost
• Boosted end user experience due to high iops on flash
• lowered expenses on arrays and licensees