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Red Hat Ceph Storage vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance comparison

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jun 3, 2026

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

Everpure FlashArray
Sponsored
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
232
Ranking in other categories
All-Flash Storage (3rd)
Red Hat Ceph Storage
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
27
Ranking in other categories
Software Defined Storage (SDS) (3rd), File and Object Storage (2nd)
StarWind HyperConverged App...
Average Rating
9.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
67
Ranking in other categories
Software Defined Storage (SDS) (13th), HCI (14th)
 

Featured Reviews

Sowjanya MV - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Lead at Wipro Limited
Has improved performance for mission-critical workloads and enabled seamless non-disruptive upgrades
The availability is 99.99%, which is the main factor any customer would need because their data should be available whenever they want to access it. This is one main critical thing. It is very easy to upgrade since Pure Storage FlashArray handles it well. Everything is non-disruptive now; previously, there were forklift shifts, but now that is not the case. Pure Storage FlashArray says no to forklift upgrades. Usually hardware requires downtime, but Pure Storage FlashArray has improved their footprint so that they are not asking for downtime; everything is just a non-disruptive activity, which is why customers are more inclined towards Pure Storage FlashArray. Customers want more of the models in their environment due to the performance they are giving, and everything is in one Pure1 Array console where we can view all the models on one page or just an orchestration tool. You don't miss anything; you have replication, notifications about replication, and details about which host groups replication is happening in and if that replication is successful or failed. On a daily basis, our purpose is to create volumes for infrastructure; our daily activities include creating volumes and mapping them to the host, doing any migrations from a VM, clearing the data stores, and carving the volumes to those VMs. One key factor is the data compression with a ratio of 5:1, focusing on space efficiency, inline deduplication, and the compression Pure Storage FlashArray works on; that is a major factor we can suggest to any customer. Analytical capabilities are crucial. Daily, we check the throughput and consumption, and Pure Storage FlashArray provides predictions for one year regarding usage. This prediction helps plan updates well ahead. For support, we just raise a case, and they follow up and get it done. There is also AI readiness, but with the model R2, we don't have much of that AI readiness. For others, we do have AI readiness that predicts capacity based on daily or monthly trends, enabling us to analyze how much space we need or if we need to expand the disk shelf. From an operational point of view, a good feature is that if you accidentally delete a volume, it will be retained in the destroyed state for the next twenty-four hours, which is not the same with any other vendor. I have worked in this storage domain for the past fifteen years, and this option is remarkable, benefiting any L1 or L2 engineer. Additionally, from a compliance perspective, Pure Storage FlashArray has REST APIs enabled. I have not explored automation much, but from a security standpoint, it is strong with encryption data. If you want to automate, you can easily integrate with all clouds and explore Pure Cloud for scheduling workloads, including volume creation. Customers find benefit in Pure Storage FlashArray's single management pane of glass due to the dual controller and active-active setup. If one of the controllers goes down, all workloads automatically shift to the other controller, ensuring their data is safe and accessible at all times. This is a highlighted feature that any customer desires because their data should always be accessible. For SAN workloads, we use Pure Storage FlashArray because for SAN FC fiber channel, we don't use it; we use NetApp for NAS activities. We have clearly split this, so SAN is for mission-critical applications, while network-attached storage handles file systems. This architecture helps us maximize the benefit from Pure Storage FlashArray due to the significant workloads from this giant retail client. From a footprint and energy consumption perspective, you can see energy consumption from the Pure1 storage portal on a daily basis, and it is very compact. The three models we use consume only three units, which is quite low. From a footprint and data center perspective, it doesn't occupy much space. As everything moves to cloud, there are requirements to avoid excess spending on data centers, and Pure Storage FlashArray is efficient in energy consumption and is environmentally friendly.
Rifat Rahman - PeerSpot reviewer
Infrastructure Architect & CEO at Tirzok Private Limited
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.
reviewer2865906 - PeerSpot reviewer
System Admin at a financial services firm with 201-500 employees
High availability server failover has provided reliable on‑premises hardware redundancy
The best features StarWind HyperConverged Appliance offers are easy and simple setup. Support did a lot of the work during the setup process, which made it easy for me. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance has positively impacted my organization by giving us high availability. High availability has benefited my team and organization by providing redundancy for hardware failure.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"All use cases for Everpure FlashArray are anything that requires a SAN should use it because it is the easiest thing on the market."
"The deduplication and compression rates are beyond impressive."
"The initial setup was very straightforward and very quick. It was up and running in our data center within 24 hours of receiving it."
"I like the speed, and I like the API and how programmable it is."
"We put a fair amount of stress on it because we run sequel workloads and we run web applications where the same web files are hit over and over, and we have had almost zero stability issues with that SAN, which has been really great for us."
"It is pretty much just plug and play. There is not that much to do with it. It is very easy to use."
"We also use VMware integrations developed by Pure, their plugins in our vCenter environment. They help by allowing our non-technical operations teams to deploy new data stores and resize data stores without me having to involve myself all the time to do those simple tasks."
"The most valuable feature is how it simplifies the management of the SAN."
"Red Hat Ceph Storage is a reliable solution, it works well."
"I like the distributed and self-healing nature of the product."
"The community support is very good."
"We have not encountered any stability issues for the product."
"It's possible that we should have used the solution a long time ago as it appears to cost the business less money to run some of our data systems using it."
"I really like that Red Hat Ceph Storage can be used as a total solution without any storage area network components."
"The most valuable feature is the stability of the product."
"Ceph was chosen to maintain exact performance and capacity characteristics for customer cloud."
"The most valuable features of the solution are the redundancy and its cost. I used to have a SAN, a Dell EMC EqualLogic. Unfortunately, it was they call an "inverted pyramid of doom." It was two or three hosts, two switches, and one storage array at the very bottom. But the SAN, the storage array at the very bottom, is a single point of failure..."
"Downtime is almost non-existent now."
"I'm very happy, it's exactly the solution I wanted to the problem, then extra on top."
"From a small-shop perspective, this is probably the best experience I've ever had in terms of the backing hardware for the services we provide."
"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."
"This solution improved our environment from an increased user experience and administrative experience."
"The product runs wonderfully and has already gone through several failure tests."
"The presence of built-in storage saved the company from having to purchase a separate storage array and related network equipment."
 

Cons

"We've had it in place for about a year and a half and have had zero complaints, other than that box-to-box replication is not encrypted."
"I would like to have support available in Spanish."
"The pricing needs to be improved as they offer very high budgeting prices. Searching is a big challenge in Pure Storage FlashArrays, especially when trying to restore a VM."
"A noticeable area for improvement is the support for object storage."
"The problem is that we can only make a few groups, around five or six groups. I like groups and we need a lot of them. We had to put all the information in only a few groups and cannot make a more detailed separation of them."
"The solution could improve by having a multi-tenant feature."
"I would like the ability to swap out the network adapters into it. So, without taking out the whole controller, I would like to be able to swap adapters. This would make things easier."
"Its price needs improvement. Its price is almost double than any other flash storage solution."
"Please create a failback solution for OpenStack replication and maybe QoS to allow guaranteed IOPS."
"If troubleshooting is needed, the response should be faster."
"This product uses a lot of CPU and network bandwidth. It needs some deduplication features and to use delta for rebalancing."
"It takes some time to re-balance the storage in case of server failure."
"In the deployment step, we need to create some config files to add Ceph functions in OpenStack modules (Nova, Cinder, Glance). It would be useful to have a tool that validates the format of the data in those files, before generating a deploy with failures."
"The management features are pretty good, but they still have room for improvement."
"Geo-replication needs improvement. It is a new feature, and not well supported yet."
"It needs a better UI for easier installation and management."
"I think some performance metrics would be nice to see, especially on the storage side."
"I'd like a better UI and some limitations on "breaking it.""
"The only real flaw that I have seen so far is this hard drive that was accidentally ejected because when it was received and added back into the RAID. There was an error there. It was not added back into the RAID correctly, so I have an outstanding hard disk. Apparently, a guy just knocked it with his hand as he was in my office, so it was just a small eject. He said that he didn't crash into anything. That is the only thing that has reared its head."
"That situation, where Dell EMC servers were going down, has been my only real difficulty... it ended up being something that the wider audience of Dell EMC was actually aware of as an issue. Neither the StarWind technicians nor the Dell EMC technicians were able to actually identify that problem sooner than a week or so... The communication between Dell EMC support and StarWind support, in that particular scenario, left something to be desired, for me. I did express those concerns to StarWind and they were very responsive to that."
"At times there has been a language barrier when communicating issues."
"Over the past three years, there were two instances where our cluster had an issue, yet StarWind proactively notified me of those issues and effortlessly guided me through the process of correcting the issue with minimal effort on my part."
"I wish I understood what goes into the StarWind software a little bit better. To me, it's kind of magic the way some of it works. As an IT professional, you don't really want things to be magic. I do wish there was a little more "Here's how it works." There could be more documentation given to administrators..."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The cost was initially high, but once more people were using it, the costs came down. This was because the University was reselling it to other departments."
"I don't know the exact cost but it's around $1,000."
"For us, as the customer, it reduced the price of the management."
"It is cheaper than NetApp."
"Pure Storage FlashArray's pricing is very competitive."
"We are finding the TCO of flash to be lower than SSD implementations."
"The guaranty that Pure Storage provides when you purchase it doesn't meet the overall capacity needs to provide extra storage, if needed. Thus, it is not meeting our expectations."
"We have seen a reduction in the TCO, because Pure Storage is partnering with Belfrics. This partnership reduces our latency and space."
"I rate the product’s pricing an eight out of ten."
"The price of this product isn't high."
"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."
"The price of Red Hat Ceph Storage is reasonable."
"We never used the paid support."
"The operational overhead is higher compared to Azure because we own the hardware."
"Most of time, you can get Ceph with the OpenStack solution in a subscription​​ as a bundle.​"
"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."
"It's an all in one package, making it very easy."
"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."
"The HCA price is all-inclusive (setup, hardware, support, warranty), except for your standard Microsoft Server licensing."
"When I researched they came the most cost-effective."
"There is a bit of a start-up cost. Having never used HCAs before, I was reluctant to buy it. I would suggest that you jump in and do it, as I wish I hadn't wasted so much time."
"Our entire package was around $35,000 for everything, including three years of support."
"I was able to bring the price per year down by going out to a five-year plan."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Outsourcing Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Computer Software Company
9%
Construction Company
19%
Outsourcing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Marketing Services Firm
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business73
Midsize Enterprise38
Large Enterprise160
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business13
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise15
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business51
Midsize Enterprise23
Large Enterprise8
 

Questions from the Community

Which should I choose: HPE 3PAR StoreServ or Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform F Series?
Both are great platforms, but if you are considering all flash solutions, I would recommend you to consider Pure Stor...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pure Storage FlashArray?
When comparing cost, I find that the cost is either the same or slightly higher, but that is returned by the ease of ...
What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashArray?
The only thing I think could be improved is price. The price is the main concern for our customers.
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 ...
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...
What advice do you have for others considering Red Hat Ceph Storage?
I do not have experience working with solutions such as Red Hat Ceph Storage and StorPool. I have plenty of experienc...
What needs improvement with StarWind HyperConverged Appliance?
I think nothing needs improvement in StarWind HyperConverged Appliance.
What is your primary use case for StarWind HyperConverged Appliance?
My main use case for StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is server failover. I use StarWind HyperConverged Appliance fo...
What advice do you have for others considering StarWind HyperConverged Appliance?
Regarding StarWind HyperConverged Appliance's AI capabilities, I think it does not have any. I think it does not have...
 

Also Known As

Pure Storage FlashArray
Ceph
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Nielsen, Lamar Advertising, LinkedIn, Betfair, UT-Dallas
Dell, DreamHost
Sears Home and Franchise Business
Find out what your peers are saying about Red Hat Ceph Storage vs. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance and other solutions. Updated: October 2026.
917,433 professionals have used our research since 2012.