ZFS and Nexenta, (which is based on ZFS), are two popular storage software products available on the market. With the rise in popularity and demand for “Software-defined storage” they positioned themselves as a “software-defined storage”, (SDS) products. They can be called an SDS product, albeit an SDS 1.0 one, having a good concept, but their architecture and implementation is only scale-up. StorPool has a similar concept, but delivers on the promises of being a truly SDS solution, so think SDS 2.0.

StorPool takes flexibility, simplicity and storage capabilities to a whole new level and provides a comprehensive scale out cluster solution, whilst ZFS was designed as a storage server solution and only scales up, with severely limited scale out options. This means that you have one head node and attach more drives/JBODs to the same head. Although this increases capacity, it does not increase performance and simply creates silos of storage.

In general ZFS uses more expensive hardware than StorPool, usually utilising SAS drives. Furthermore ZFS uses the so called ZIL algorithm, (journal), on very expensive SSDs, since they need the extra endurance. StorPool on the other hand uses standard SATA drives, be they hard disks or SSDs.

Benefits of StorPool compared to ZFS:

• Exceptional performance – forget about customers complainging of slow storage. Our storage solutions START at 500,000 IOPS and 0.2ms of latency!
• A single storage server which is good for running ZFS is worth approx. $10,000, without the SSDs. The server needed to run StorPool is worth approx. $2,000. It can have a mix of 2/3 HDD and 1/3 SSD and still provide significantly higher performance.
• Compared to a ZFS All-SSD system, StorPool is a lot more efficient in terms of CPU and memory usage. For example a ZFS box which used 256 GB RAM and all the CPU resources, when converted to StorPool will only use 30GB RAM and 2 or 3 CPU cores. I.e. StorPool is approximately 10 times more efficient, so the remaining memory and CPU is then used for running compute workloads in a converged fashion. Only this freed compute capacity is worth more than StorPool’s fee.
• Single pool of data, no need to move customers between ZFS boxes and less space is wasted for free space in each pool.
• Full-service solution – StorPool takes care of recommending a complete architecture, tuning the storage system, upgrading when necessary and providing high quality 24/7 support for any issues you might have. This allows focusing on the core areas of our customer’s business.
• And not least – integrations with most cloud management systems (OpenStack, OpenNebula, CloudStack, OnApp and custom through API). Our customers can get the full benefit of using a modern storage system, with each volume/snapshot being a separate entity in the storage system and an integrated system datastore.