2016-09-01T12:26:00Z

Storpool vs. ScaleIO

We are going to purchase a new main storage device. I would like to see more opinions on the selected products which are quite similar in my opinion. 

The history of both products is also quite similar except the purchase of ScaleIO by EMC which increased the pricing of ScaleIO but made this product much more "reliable" in all points of view also. The pricing of Storpool is interesting, the bundled services also, in fact the whole sales model is OK. But I am not able to find enough independent information about Storpool which could mean that the product is just good or... 

Do you have some deeper experiences with Storpool? Thank you.

12
PeerSpot user
12 Answers
it_user236322 - PeerSpot reviewer
Principal Systems Engineer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
Consultant
2016-09-03T23:46:24Z
Sep 3, 2016

Is vendor after sales support is important to you? Frankly at this point, technically, it won't matter as much anymore..

Assumption: 10Gbps dedicated "iSCSI only" network bandwidth
with jumbo frames enabled.
This will probably work out to maybe 800MB/sec maximum throughput per link - this is the demand your storage has to provide.
Proposed Solution: Based on one link, just plan your storage IOPs to be able to write to disk @ 2400MB/sec (800MB x 3).
Justification: No matter how many servers you intend to attach to the storage, because iSCSI is the protocol of choice, the network will be the bottleneck. 800MB/s calculation throughput takes into account network overheads. 2400MB/s takes into account disk redundancy overheads.

Search for a product comparison in Software Defined Storage (SDS)
it_user6186 - PeerSpot reviewer
Independent Analyst and Advisory Consultant at Server StorageIO - www.storageio.com
Consultant
Top 20
2016-09-03T16:54:52Z
Sep 3, 2016

With the additional context and detail, e.g. need for iSCSI, SQL Servers, Windows, 4 x PMs, no virtual, 20TB (is that raw, or protected usable?), your options for doing with software include Microsoft Storage Spaces/SOFS (e.g. with 2012 R2), or Storage Spaces Direct (S2D) and Storage Replicat (SR) however thats not GA yet. Other software options for your scenario include Starwind for doing a converged approach. For non-converged there is datacore amont other software or even use windows storage server for that matter. Then there are the various CI/HCI folks that do non virt for windows like Gridstore among others. Of course the CI/HCI folks have a value prop if you can convert to a virtual environment to use Dell/EMC/VCE, Maxta, Nutanix, Pivot3, Simplivity, Tintri among others. While not trendy, your solution could also be something like an EMC VNX/Unity or similar system with direct attached (or switched) iSCSI.

Cheers gs - vExpert & MVP

2016-09-03T15:02:37Z
Sep 3, 2016

Hi guys, thanks for the current responses. I missed that Storpool doesn't have native iSCSI support currently which is a problem for me because I do not want to build some linux bridge with iSCSI target between our servers and storage. The planed capacity for the storage is 20TB usable capacity. We will use the storage for MSSQL databases mainly so we want to connect our windows server with the storage over an iSCSI. We count with up to 4 MSSQL powerfull physical servers which won't be virtualized in any way.

it_user236322 - PeerSpot reviewer
Principal Systems Engineer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
Consultant
2016-09-03T07:15:57Z
Sep 3, 2016

It really depends on your use-case. What do you think you will use the storage for over a period of 3 to 5 years?

it_user429375 - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Solutions Architect at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees
Real User
2016-09-03T05:18:14Z
Sep 3, 2016

Have only used ScaleIO not Storpool - no basis for comparison. My perspective on all the pure play SW products is to wait one more server cycle for NVRam, products like the new Samsung 1 million IOPS SSD for io caching and commoditization of high capacity SSDs (4+ TB). These are all either here and pricey or being introduced over the next two quarters and will radically improve performance and capacity of the storage part of your new platform. Additionally, HCI products like VxRail offer scale and performance using All Flash at reasonable price.

If just looking for a storage subsystem, the Unity system from EMC hits all the big buttons.

it_user6186 - PeerSpot reviewer
Independent Analyst and Advisory Consultant at Server StorageIO - www.storageio.com
Consultant
Top 20
2016-09-03T02:34:17Z
Sep 3, 2016

What operating systems are the servers? Do you need hypervisor support? Assume you are looking for block access, or do you need or want file access? How many servers? How much storage space or number of devices, assume you are looking for something with direct attached that can be created into a software defined storage system? Storpool is linux centric so if you are all Linux that and ScaleIO are good options. If you want to create an external software based storage system with your own server/drives, datacore, starwind among others are options. If you are mixed windows, *nix, vmware etc, ScaleIO is good option, if you have vmware, than vsan. Likewise if windows centric, there is storage spaces (or in 2016 S2D), SOFS, etc. Likewise many CI/HCI options as well. Comes down to what are you trying to do, need to do, use or choose your own hw, or have it prescribed to you, number type of servers, OS, hypervisors etc...

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it_user485313 - PeerSpot reviewer
Assistant FAE Manager at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Vendor
2016-09-02T15:05:15Z
Sep 2, 2016

Nutanix is more popular in the market and the product is so good enough

it_user478068 - PeerSpot reviewer
User at a tech company with 51-200 employees
Vendor
2016-09-02T15:03:49Z
Sep 2, 2016

It really matters what you're trying achieve. I've no experience with Storpool, If you looking for performance, windows, vmware support then go with ScaleIO. We've done POC with ScaleIO and EMC stood strong in terms of guaranteed IO throughput and read/writes. I see StorPool does not support windows or Vmware. CEPF is also alternative for SDS for block storage.

it_user481791 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Customer Engineer at a tech services company with 5,001-10,000 employees
Consultant
2016-09-02T12:54:24Z
Sep 2, 2016

Nutanix is also very good.

VI
Product Manager at Synnex Metrodata Indonesia
User
2016-09-02T12:48:29Z
Sep 2, 2016

they are all similar but the best SDS is Nutanix if you had try how simple PRISM and the true power of Acropolis distributed storage fabric

VSAN still use RAID at disk level
NUTANIX use RAID at metadata level

no further explaination

Vendor
2016-09-02T12:39:30Z
Sep 2, 2016

i have no expirience with scaleio or storepool. I think you have to take a look on Datacore and VSAN also. We are going to hyperconverged (nutanix or simplivity).

it_user481791 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Customer Engineer at a tech services company with 5,001-10,000 employees
Consultant
2016-09-02T11:54:03Z
Sep 2, 2016

With StorePool No experience with it. But if you are looking for a Hypercoverged solution with Extreme IO reliability look at ScaleIO or Atlantis Hyperscale. I am deploying a solution on Atlantis, its the best thing since Mobile Money.

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What should a storage vendor implement to support them?  What should a customer be aware of?
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Shibu Babuchandran - PeerSpot reviewer
Regional Manager/ Service Delivery Manager at a tech services company with 201-500 employees
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Hi @Evgeny Belenky ​, HERE ARE THE STORAGE REQUIREMENTS FOR DEEP LEARNING Deep learning workloads are a special kind of beast: all DL data is considered hot data, which raises the dilemma of not being able to employ any sort of tiered storage management solution. This is because normal SSDs usually used for hot data under conventional conditions simply won’t move the data required for millions, billions, or even trillions of metadata transfers for an ML training model to classify an unknown something out of only a limited amount of examples. Below are a few examples of a few storage requirements needed to avoid the dreaded curse of dimensionality. COST EFFICIENCY Enormous AI data sets become an even bigger burden if they don’t fall within the budget set aside for storage. Anyone who has been in charge of managing enterprise data for any amount of time knows well that highly-scalable systems have always been more high-priced on a capacity versus cost basis. The ultimate deep learning storage system must be both affordable and scalable to make sense. PARALLEL ARCHITECTURE In order to avoid those dreaded choke points that stunt a deep learning machine’s ability to learn, it’s essential for data sets t to have parallel-access architecture. DATA LOCALITY While it might be possible that many organizations may opt to keep some of their data on the cloud, most of it should remain on-site in a data center. There are at least three reasons for this: regulatory compliance, cost efficiency, and performance. For this reason, on-site storage must rival the cost of keeping it on the cloud. HYBRID ARCHITECTURE As touched on above, different types of data have unique performance requirements. Thus, storage solutions should offer the perfect mixture of storage technologies instead of an asymmetrical strategy that will eventually fail. It’s all about simultaneously meeting ML storage performance and scalability. SOFTWARE-DEFINED STORAGE Not all huge data sets are the same—especially in terms of DL and ML. While some of them can get by with the simplicity of pre-configured machines, others need hyper-scale data centers featuring purpose-built servers architectures that are previously set in place. This is what makes software-defined storage solutions the best option. Our X-AI Accelerated is an any–scale DL and ML solution that offers unmatched versatility for any organization’s needs. X-AI Accelerated was engineered from the ground up and optimized for “ingest, training, data transformations, replication, metadata, and small data transfers.” Not only that but RAID Inc. offers all the aforementioned requirements such as all-flash NVMe X2-AI/X4-AI or the X5-AI, which are hybrid flash and hard drive storage platforms. Both the NVMe X2-AI/X4-AI and the X5-AI support parallel access to flash and deeply expandable HDD storage as well. Furthermore, the X-AI Accelerated storage platform permits one to scale out from only a few TBs to tens of PBs.
TS
CEO at Rufusforyou LLC
Nov 29, 2021
Storage requirements are depending on several factors.  For example, the language you will use, the data you will receive, do you use a RAID, etc. 
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