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Red Hat Ceph Storage vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance comparison

Red Hat and StarWind are both solutions in the Software Defined Storage (SDS) category. Red Hat is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.9, while StarWind is ranked #11 with an average rating of 10.0. Red Hat holds a 19.8% mindshare in SDS, compared to StarWind’s 2.2% mindshare. Additionally, 82% of Red Hat users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 98% of StarWind users who would recommend it.
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Pure Storage FlashBlade
Read 38 Pure Storage FlashBlade reviews
  • 5,202 Views
  • 780 Comparison Views
94% willing to recommend
Red Hat Ceph Storage
Read 27 Red Hat Ceph Storage reviews
  • 15,133 Views
  • 3,178 Comparison Views
82% willing to recommend
StarWind HyperConverged App...
Read 66 StarWind HyperConverged Appliance reviews
  • 1,456 Views
  • 801 Comparison Views
98% willing to recommend
 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 5, 2024

Red Hat Ceph Storage and StarWind HyperConverged Appliance are competing in the data storage and management category. StarWind seems to have the upper hand with its efficient storage management, ease of operation, and superior deployment model.

Features: Red Hat Ceph Storage provides integration with OpenStack services, high availability, and a single solution for managing the entire infrastructure. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance offers high availability in a small setup, ease of management through a single console, and flexibility to deploy without specific hardware requirements.

Room for Improvement: Red Hat Ceph Storage could enhance its deployment ease, reduce initial setup complexity, and streamline customer support responsiveness. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance might benefit from improving its integration capabilities with diverse platforms, expanding its feature flexibility beyond existing hardware, and refining its support documentation for broader audiences.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Red Hat Ceph Storage provides comprehensive documentation and training resources for deployment but may be seen as requiring more effort in initial setup. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance focuses on a streamlined process, offering personalized customer support which enhances the user experience throughout deployment.

Pricing and ROI: Red Hat Ceph Storage, while having a higher initial cost, offers substantial ROI through long-term scalability. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is noted for its cost-effectiveness, providing a fast ROI due to relatively lower setup costs and immediate operational efficiency.

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To learn more, read our detailed Red Hat Ceph Storage vs. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance Report (Updated: August 2025).
Buyer's Guide
Red Hat Ceph Storage vs. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance
August 2025
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Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Pure Storage FlashBlade
Sponsored
Ranking in Software Defined Storage (SDS)
8th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.8
Number of Reviews
38
Ranking in other categories
All-Flash Storage (15th), File and Object Storage (8th)
Red Hat Ceph Storage
Ranking in Software Defined Storage (SDS)
2nd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
27
Ranking in other categories
File and Object Storage (1st)
StarWind HyperConverged App...
Ranking in Software Defined Storage (SDS)
11th
Average Rating
9.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.7
Number of Reviews
66
Ranking in other categories
HCI (14th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Software Defined Storage (SDS) category, the mindshare of Pure Storage FlashBlade is 4.4%, up from 4.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Red Hat Ceph Storage is 19.8%, down from 21.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is 2.2%, up from 1.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Software Defined Storage (SDS)
 

Featured Reviews

Eric Black - PeerSpot reviewer
The ability to leverage multi-tenancy along with immutability is a huge benefit for us
The only thing I feel FlashBlade is missing is the SOS API. If it had SOS API, that would put it well over the top. Veeam Backup specifically has started to streamline their API, and they are doing that with SOS API. They have optimized it. Any of the S3 devices out there that support this SOS API can have far more API calls at once. On our side, that translates to better restoration. With SOS API, it can leverage far more restorations at a single given time or read from the device in simple terms. That results in maximizing the output and throughput from the device itself.
Read full review
Rifat Rahman - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers reliable performance and availability for large deployments
I would like to see improvements in Red Hat Ceph Storage not because I necessarily think it needs improvement, but because I generally prefer to do things manually rather than following the containerization part. Current deployments are based on containers, but I deploy manually with my scripts and controls. If there are no Kubernetes-like requirements, I often prefer to deploy a whole manual process. I don't ask for improvements in the deployment model because Red Hat has its own philosophy about making things, but it's my personal choice that I prefer things manually. Some features are available only in the containerization part, so if those are also available in manual deployment, that will help.
Read full review
Russ Le Puill - PeerSpot reviewer
Proactive support with improved speed and resilience
There was a long delay with shipping, which we weren't expecting, but we were kept updated throughout. It wasn't made clear to us that we needed to provide our own SFP modules to connect to our infrastructure, so that could have been a bit clearer. It would be amazing if there was, perhaps, a more automated process for updating the hosts themselves, although the maintenance mode works well. Our StarWind command center doesn't seem to have all the options available currently, which support is investigating for us.
Read full review

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"FlashBlade offers low latency, high throughput, and seamless scalability."
"The most valuable features of this solution are the rewrite speed and the nonstop services."
"Approximately 40% to 50% of my time is saved using Pure Storage FlashBlade compared to different products."
"It's very easy-to-use."
"The solution is able to handle workloads and is easy to use. It allows us to actually manage the boxes in less time."
"The main feature I have found to be product replication."
"It has absolutely simplified our storage because the dashboards on the consoles show a clear understanding of where you are, and it is also very easy to provision. This been a big help for our teams."
"The solution provides many controllers."
More Pure Storage FlashBlade pros
"Ceph has simplified my storage integration. I no longer need two or three storage systems, as Ceph can support all my storage needs. I no longer need OpenStack Swift for REST object storage access, I no longer need NFS or GlusterFS for filesystem sharing, and most importantly, I no longer need LVM or DRBD for my virtual machines in OpenStack."
"We use the solution for cloud storage."
"High reliability with commodity hardware."
"Ceph Storage allows us to add value related to cost and offers a unique experience compared to traditional storage."
"The community support is very good."
"Most of the features are beneficial and one does not stand out above the rest."
"Ceph Storage allows us to add value related to cost and offers a unique experience compared to traditional storage."
"We have some legacy servers that can be associated with this structure. With Ceph, we can rearrange these machines and reuse our investment."
More Red Hat Ceph Storage pros
"Live migration between nodes was quick and simple."
"Reliability and overall uptime are key as we're also hosting client environments in addition to our own."
"The StarWind command centre is a very handy tool to have. It allows less skilled staff to have a view and manage our virtual machines."
"We run probably 16 virtual machines, and all of them are now highly available, and highly redundant."
"What makes it valuable is the high-availability. In the education field, when you've got students in classrooms, any loss of service disrupts the lessons to a point that the whole lesson is affected. For part of the business which isn't business-critical, to have a little bit of a hiccup wouldn't be such a big thing, but here, it's the high availability of service that is important."
"It improved all services running on the new cluster and took up less space and less energy."
"The setup was easy to deploy, and management is simplified compared with traditional SAN solutions."
"The solution has provided our company with a fully redundant virtual environment at half the cost of a traditional SAN implementation."
More StarWind HyperConverged Appliance pros
 

Cons

"An area for improvement in Pure Storage FlashBlade is its price. It could be reduced. The technical support for Pure Storage FlashBlade also needs improvement. It used to be good, with more experienced engineers. Nowadays, it isn't, and it takes longer for support to solve problems."
"I want efficiency. FlashBlade doesn't have efficiency now."
"In terms of scalability, it doesn't expand out quite as robustly as some of the others, but it covers 90% of the market in what it does."
"The solution is expensive."
"We initially encountered challenges with the assembly process due to issues with the documentation required during setup, an area where Pure Storage needs improvement."
"File storage needs a lot of improvement. Mainframe connectivity also needs improvement because it requires additional components to be integrated with Pure Storage FlashBlade. If you want to keep your backup data, then this becomes an even more expensive solution because Pure Storage FlashBlade will not be able to meet your backup needs."
"We haven't been able to use much of the cloud area of Pure Storage. We have a storage server and it would be better if it could integrate with other cloud features of this solution."
"It would be beneficial if the layer could support the S3 protocol and be container ready in the next release."
More Pure Storage FlashBlade cons
"Areas of Red Hat Ceph Storage that have room for improvement include more promotion. Many people do not know about the Stratus case, which is one of the most reliable systems available in the world, but they are not aware that a system can keep working even if there is a hardware failure."
"Some documentation is very hard to find."
"I have encountered issues with stability when replication factor was not 3, which is the default and recommended value. Go below 3 and problems will arise."
"I have not identified any drawbacks, however, the response to public platform inquiries could be faster."
"Rebalancing and recovery are a bit slow."
"The licensing cost is excessively high. This is a significant issue from my perspective."
"It took me a long time to get the storage drivers for the communication with Kubernetes up and running. The documentation could improve it is lacking information. I'm not sure if this is a Ceph problem or if Ceph should address this, but it was something I ran into. Additionally, there is a performance issue I am having that I am looking into, but overall I am satisfied with the performance."
"While the documentation for Ceph Storage is helpful, it could be improved."
More Red Hat Ceph Storage cons
"Maybe they could have a support portal that you can have direct access to a current support representative."
"The only thing my team has recommended improving on is possibly a StarWind-customized GUI to monitor the overall system health, similar to 5nine Manager."
"It would be nice to have some kind of GUI interface implemented to give you an overall view of the system's health at a glance."
"At the moment, the initial configuration is very technical and error-prone. That is the reason Starwind does it for you as a service, which is a great thing. But it would be nice if we could change or rearrange storage assignments ourselves."
"What would have to be done urgently is the adaptation of the hardware to the configuration."
"It would be nice if the software told you a new version was available and prompted you to do the upgrade to keep everything up to date."
"The management console could use a facelift."
"The only thing I have run into is that I did want to add more hard drives into the host, so that we could look at doing a RAID 10, and the hard drive prices were pretty expensive... that's pretty nit-picky and I don't think it has anything to do with StarWind itself. I think it's more on whomever they work with for their hardware."
More StarWind HyperConverged Appliance cons
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Pure Storage FlashBlade is a hardware appliance, and it's very expensive if you compare its price with other solutions. You can get the same features and benefits from its competitor, VAST Data, but for half the price of Pure Storage FlashBlade."
"The price of this solution could be made more affordable."
"I rate the tool's pricing a seven to eight out of ten."
"It's a costly solution, but Pure Storage FlashBlade doesn't require additional licenses. All of the software is combined into one bundle."
"I have seen ROI. It has allowed me to increase the density of my VMs without having to purchase anything additional."
"Support is a separate line item. Support is a different cost, but whatever your support is now, that's what you're going to pay forever. If your support's $100 today, six years from now it's $100. It doesn't fluctuate unless you upgrade it, or change it, etc."
"The pricing for FlashBlade is between cheap and moderate."
"Our customers have seen a reduction in TCO."
More Pure Storage FlashBlade pricing and cost advice
"The price of Red Hat Ceph Storage is reasonable."
"If you can afford a product like Red Hat Ceph Storage then go for it. If you cannot, then you need to test Ceph and get your hands dirty."
"The price of this product isn't high."
"Most of time, you can get Ceph with the OpenStack solution in a subscription​​ as a bundle.​"
"I rate the product’s pricing an eight out of ten."
"We never used the paid support."
"The other big advantage is that Ceph is free software. Compared to traditional SAN based storage, it is very economical."
"There is no cost for software."
More Red Hat Ceph Storage pricing and cost advice
"A desired feature or service would be the ability to have a hardware subscription plan that ensures routine hardware updates in conjunction with hyper-converged software."
"The HCA price is all-inclusive (setup, hardware, support, warranty), except for your standard Microsoft Server licensing."
"We didn't have any issue with pricing or any of the sales process."
"This was all completed at an affordable price point for an SMB, which was also a key element for an NPO."
"I was able to bring the price per year down by going out to a five-year plan."
"We looked at Nutanix and found it did almost the same thing but for more money. In fact, StarWind was nearly one-third of the price; it cost us £36,000. That includes five years of monitoring... The Nutanix was near enough £110,000 for relatively the same amount of performance and storage."
"The Nutanix piece was about $45,000, getting close to $50,000 with all the licensing involved, whereas the StarWind was less than half of that, after Microsoft licensing and such."
"Our entire package was around $35,000 for everything, including three years of support."
More StarWind HyperConverged Appliance pricing and cost advice
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
7%
Computer Software Company
18%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Comms Service Provider
6%
Educational Organization
17%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Non Profit
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Pure Storage FlashBlade?
The tool's most valuable feature is its fast performance, especially in handling snapshots. It helps during power out...
See all answers
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pure Storage FlashBlade?
The pricing of Pure Storage FlashBlade is expensive compared to other products I used from other companies in the pas...
See all answers
What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashBlade?
I believe there is not much improvement needed because they have everything we need, but the interface is a little bi...
See all answers
How does Red Hat Ceph Storage compare with MiniO?
Red Hat Ceph does well in simplifying storage integration by replacing the need for numerous storage solutions. This ...
See all answers
What do you like most about Red Hat Ceph Storage?
The high availability of the solution is important to us.
See all answers
What needs improvement with Red Hat Ceph Storage?
Areas of Red Hat Ceph Storage that have room for improvement include more promotion. Many people do not know about th...
See all answers
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for StarWind HyperConverged Appliance?
It's not the cheapest, however, the solution works incredibly well and is so simple to licence and maintain.
See all answers
What needs improvement with StarWind HyperConverged Appliance?
There was a long delay with shipping, which we weren't expecting, but we were kept updated throughout. It wasn't made...
See all answers
What is your primary use case for StarWind HyperConverged Appliance?
We desperately needed to update yet downsize our data centre. We had six hosts for only approximately 14 or so Virtua...
See all answers
 

Comparisons

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Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs Pure Storage FlashBlade
Compared 19% of the time
MinIO vs Pure Storage FlashBlade Logo
MinIO vs Pure Storage FlashBlade
Compared 10% of the time
Pure Storage FlashArray vs Pure Storage FlashBlade Logo
Pure Storage FlashArray vs Pure Storage FlashBlade
Compared 10% of the time
VAST Data vs Pure Storage FlashBlade Logo
VAST Data vs Pure Storage FlashBlade
Compared 9% of the time
Dell ECS vs Pure Storage FlashBlade Logo
Dell ECS vs Pure Storage FlashBlade
Compared 5% of the time
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MinIO vs Red Hat Ceph Storage Logo
MinIO vs Red Hat Ceph Storage
Compared 39% of the time
NetApp StorageGRID vs Red Hat Ceph Storage Logo
NetApp StorageGRID vs Red Hat Ceph Storage
Compared 6% of the time
VMware vSAN vs Red Hat Ceph Storage Logo
VMware vSAN vs Red Hat Ceph Storage
Compared 5% of the time
Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct vs Red Hat Ceph Storage Logo
Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct vs Red Hat Ceph Storage
Compared 4% of the time
Dell PowerFlex vs Red Hat Ceph Storage Logo
Dell PowerFlex vs Red Hat Ceph Storage
Compared 3% of the time
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Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance Logo
Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance
Compared 27% of the time
StorMagic SvSAN vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance Logo
StorMagic SvSAN vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance
Compared 20% of the time
Azure Stack HCI vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance Logo
Azure Stack HCI vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance
Compared 18% of the time
DataCore SANsymphony vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance Logo
DataCore SANsymphony vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance
Compared 13% of the time
VxRail vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance Logo
VxRail vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance
Compared 13% of the time
More StarWind HyperConverged Appliance Competitors
 

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide
Pure Storage FlashBlade
August 2025
Pure Storage FlashBlade reportDownload Pure Storage FlashBlade product report
Buyer's Guide
Red Hat Ceph Storage
August 2025
Red Hat Ceph Storage reportDownload Red Hat Ceph Storage product report
Buyer's Guide
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance
July 2025
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance reportDownload StarWind HyperConverged Appliance product report
 

Also Known As

No data available
Ceph
No data available
 

Overview

FlashBlade is the industry’s most advanced scale-out storage for unstructured data, powered by a modern, massively parallel architecture to consolidate complex data silos (like backup appliances and data lakes) and accelerate tomorrow’s discoveries and insights.

Pure Storage
Red Hat Ceph Storage is an enterprise open source platform that provides unified software-defined storage on standard, economical servers and disks. With block, object, and file storage combined into one platform, Red Hat Ceph Storage efficiently and automatically manages all your data.
Red Hat

For SMB, ROBO and Enterprises, who look to bring in quick deployment and operation simplicity to virtualization workloads and reduce related expenses, our solution is StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA). It unifies commodity servers, disks and flash, hypervisor of choice, StarWind Virtual SAN, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct or VMware Virtual SAN and associated software into a single manageable layer. The HCA supports scale-up by adding disks and flash, and scale-out by adding extra nodes.

StarWind HyperConverged Appliance consists of StarWind Virtual SAN, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct or VMware Virtual SAN “Ready Nodes”, targeting those, who are building their virtualization infrastructure from scratch. In case there is an existing set of servers, we offer a “software only version”, which is essentially our years proven StarWind Virtual SAN. Basically, it’s the fuel powering StarWind HCA. 

StarWind
 

Sample Customers

ServiceNow, Mercedes-AMG Petronas Motorsport, Dominos, Man AHL
Dell, DreamHost
Sears Home and Franchise Business
Buyer's Guide
Red Hat Ceph Storage vs. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance
August 2025
Free Report: Red Hat Ceph Storage vs. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance
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