#1 most frequent
India
50.0%1 installation of 2
What is StorPool?
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.
Categories & Use Cases
Videos
Who Buys & Uses StorPool
#2 most frequent
Sweden
50.0%1 installation of 2
secrets of StorPool storage
Pros
- 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.
Cons
- Integration between SAN storage and StorPool.
- The total cost of ownership.
- Supporting fibre channel uplink.
Most Important Features
- Higher Performance: Works much closer to the hardware, so it is much closer to the raw IO speeds of the underlying hardware.
- Scalability & Flexibility: A cluster is a flat hierarchy of drives and new drives can be added or removed at any time.
- Scale-out, not Scale-Up - The solution is fundamentally about scaling by adding more drives or nodes rather than scaling up (adding capacity by replacing a storage box with a larger storage box). can grow without interruption and in small steps - one hard drive, one server, and one network interface at a time.
Return on Investment
- Stability of environment.
- Ease of implementation.
- Ease of doing business transactions with StorPool.
Alternatives Considered
Red Hat Ceph Storage
Other Software Used
Rackspace OpenStack, Red Hat Ceph Storage
Storpool Distributed Block Storage
Pros
- We chose StorPool not just because of the better price/performance ratio, but also because StorPool managed to offer us smooth implementation without an impact on our production environment. StorPool’s biggest advantages are the high availability of the system, hardware failure handling, and performance. The OpenNebula integration and ease of operation were also crucial.
Cons
- Cons - Support for VMware is with iSCSI at this point. This is fine, but we're waiting for the full VMware integration they are working on.
Return on Investment
- At this point we haven’t calculated it, as our case is complex, however, our research did find StorPool to be the solution with the best price/performance ratio.
Storpool Review
Pros
- One of the attractions of StorPool was that it is a very technology-focused company and has highly talented individuals. We are confident, not only that the product was the right product, because of the design and the architectural aspects, but also that the team behind it was very engaged and had the skills and ability to support a service provider. For a cloud provider, the storage is a system which cannot be taken down, even for maintenance, because it’s impossible to coordinate thousands of customers regarding downtime. With StorPool, however, we don’t have to worry about that.
Cons
- Graphical interface is for monitoring and stats, but not for operations.
Return on Investment
- By using StorPool we achieved over a 15% increase in our gross margin and that is huge for a service provider. To be able to increase our gross margin by adopting a new storage system and at the same time increase performance significantly, that’s really a major change. From a commercial perspective aſter adopting StorPool we’ve been able to achieve a much more efficient fabric that’s allowing us to sell more services on the same hardware.
Maximum speed and storage at a reasonable price
Pros
- The performance of hundreds of thousands of IOPS and throughput of tens of GB/s. Some other factors such as cost-efficiency, implementation, and support also helped StorPool stand out in the decision-making process.
Cons
- Support for VMware is with iSCSI at this point. This is fine, but we're waiting for the full VMware integration they are working on.
Return on Investment
- At this moment we haven’t yet calculated exactly the ROI. Our main focus is to secure the best performance on a reasonable price and that's exactly what we got when we started working with Storpool.
Other Software Used
Ubuntu OpenStack, OnApp CDN
Yes, we would definitely recommend StorPool.
Pros
- Simplicity and compatibility - StorPool is intuitive and can be managed with minimal training.
- StorPool also proved to be very scalable and easy to deploy.
- StorPool has a great technical support team - quick and professional. In many cases, they walk the extra mile to advise us on all aspects of our cloud - from hardware selection to soſtware solutions.
Cons
- Monitoring and statistics UI is a bit clumsy, although StorPool is working on a new version.
Return on Investment
- 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.
Alternatives Considered
Red Hat Ceph Storage
Other Software Used
Red Hat Gluster Storage, Oracle ZFS
