Red Hat Gluster Storage was a software-defined scale-out NAS option; Red Hat acquired Gluster in 2011, and the product is now discontinued and unsupported.
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StorPool
Score8 out of 10
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StorPool is a block-storage software that uses standard hardware and builds a storage system out of this hardware. It is installed on the servers and creates a shared storage pool from their local drives in these servers. Compared to traditional SANs, all-flash arrays, or other storage software StorPool is faster, more reliable and scalable.
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Pricing
Red Hat Gluster Storage (discontinued)
StorPool
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Red Hat Gluster Storage (discontinued)
StorPool
Free Trial
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
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More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Red Hat Gluster Storage (discontinued)
StorPool
Considered Both Products
Discontinued Products
No answer on this topic
StorPool
Verified User
Chose StorPool
We looked at Ceph. Ceph is believed to be good for block storage, but when we ran tests on similar hardware with both Ceph and StorPool, StorPool outperformed Ceph by an order of magnitude. Our main usage scenario is similar to the heavy workload OLTP (online transaction …
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
GFS is well suited for DEVOPS type environments where organizations prefer to invest in servers and DAS (direct attached storage) versus purchasing storage solutions/appliances. GFS allows organizations to scale their storage capacity at a fraction of the price using DAS HDDs versus committing to purchase licenses and hardware from a dedicated storage manufacturer (e.g. NetApp, Dell/EMC, HP, etc.).
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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.
Scales; bricks can be easily added to increase storage capacity
Performs; I/O is spread across multiple spindles (HDDs), thereby increasing read and write performance
Integrates well with RHEL/CentOS 7; if your organization is using RHEL 7, Gluster (GFS) integrates extremely well with that baseline, especially since it's come under the Red Hat portfolio of tools.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Documentation; using readthedocs demonstrates that the Gluster project isn't always kept up-to-date as far as documentation is concerned. Many of the guides are for previous versions of the product and can be cumbersome to follow at times.
Self-healing; our use of GFS required the administrator to trigger an auto-heal operation manually whenever bricks were added/removed from the pool. This would be a great feature to incorporate using autonomous self-healing whenever a brick is added/removed from the pool.
Performance metrics are scarce; our team received feedback that online RDBMS transactions did not perform well on distributed file systems (such as GFS), however this could not be substantiated via any online research or white papers.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Gluster is a lot lower cost than the storage industry leaders. However, NetApp and Dell/EMC's product documentation is (IMHO) more mature and hardened against usage in operational scenarios and environments. Using Gluster avoids "vendor lock-in" from the perspective on now having to purchase dedicated hardware and licenses to run it. Albeit, should an organization choose to pay for support for Gluster, they would be paying licensing costs to Red Hat instead of NetApp, Dell, EMC, HP, or VMware. It could be assumed, however, that if an organization wanted to use Gluster, that they were already a Linux shop and potentially already paying Red Hat or Canonical (Debian) for product support, thereby the use of GFS would be a nominal cost adder from a maintenance/training perspective.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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.
