IBM offers their Block Storage service via IBM Cloud, allowing users to deploy and customize flash-backed iSCSI block storage from 25 GB to 12,000 GB capacity with up to 48,000 IOPS.
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Longhorn Block Storage
Score 10.0 out of 10
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Longhorn is cloud native distributed block storage for Kubernetes, supported by Rancher Labs headquartered in Cupertino.
The service in general is great because on the backend. IBM offers experience and knowledge in the use of data center technologies undeniably. I recommend it for almost any situation but particularly for databases and especially large ones. That possibility of adjusting IOPS dynamically to levels that other data centers do not offer makes it unique. I don't recommend using the service if you don't have an infrastructure expert who knows about servers, Linux, and storage because a lot of the configuration and settings require an expert hand.
Longhorn Block Storage is well suited for most Kubernetes workloads where data storage is required, but when very high storage speed is essential, Longhorn Block Storage might not be the best solution. For those rare situations, we use local storage mounts. Longhorn Block Storage's ability to easily create/restore volume snapshots is a very frequently used feature among our dev teams because they can easily play multiple scenarios with the same data - modify data, restore it and modify it again.
ReadWriteMany Longhorn volumes are still using NFS (file-based) protocol in the core.
Using iSCSI as main protocol instead of FC ties Longhorn to Ethernet-based LAN which is in most architectures much slower that FC-based SAN.
Longhorn could implement S3 as alternative access protocol to its volumes.
Backups, and snapshots configuration could be configured at each volume-level by administrators (maybe from additional CRD object?), because currently is configured at storage-class level which is not granular enough.
Longhorn is mature software defined storage solution that is still developed and receive new functionalities. From the beginning every Longhorn volume have multiple (at least two) replicas, can leverage manual or automatic snapshots and backup to external S3 volume. Longhorn provides nice and clear GUI for administrators, but also can be managed from CLI.
IBM Cloud Block Storage is extensively affordable when compared with the competing applications. Further, IBM Cloud Block Storage works in different operating systems, hence, it is never discriminatory. Again, IBM Cloud Block Storage creates a proper way of integrating with other applications, more so for database control and management. IBM Cloud Block Storage is clear, through its operational charter.
GlusterFS was first Persistent Storage solution used in our Kubernetes-based clusters. It is file-based what in some usages led us to many data corruptions. CEPH is object-based persistent storage which can be used as file-based Persistent Storage in Kubernetes. It is also is much more resource-hungry than other solutions including Longhorn. Dell PowerScale (or Isilon) is a hardware-software solution, that provides volumes that can be accessed by file-based NFS and CIFS protocols. Recently was added access to its volumes with object-based S3 protocol. Longhorn is in the middle. It is block-based, it is build on industry standards like iSCSI, performs very well on 10Gbit or faster LAN and commodity hardware (or in virtual machines)
Longhorn is fully open source. One can try and/or use Longhorn for free even in enterprise and buy subscriptions only for environments that must be fully supported. We started with Longhorn in our lab environment and followed on through reference platform to non-production and production environments.
Longhorn subscriptions are not cheap, but its biggest advantage is that price-to-functionality ratio is very reasonable.
We have volumes with hundreds of gigabytes of data and these on Longhorn perform well in solutions where file-based GlusterFS volumes were corrupting data.
