Longhorn Block Storage vs. OVHcloud Public Cloud

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.

For demo uploads or for production uploads of companies from different sectors looking for a "general computing" cloud solution, I think that OVH can be a good provider. However, for more delicate or advanced loads or for specific solutions of, for example, AI, OVH has a wide margin for improvement.

Incentivized

• Creates read-write many (RWX) volumes
• Longhorn Block Storage is an easy to deploy solution
• Scheduled and on-demand volume snapshots can be created using web GUI
• Volume backups can be stored offsite on any S3 compatible storage solution
• Backups and snapshots can be restored using web GUI

• Price
• Quality hardware
• Quality network
• Administrative tools
• Range of products

Incentivized

• 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.

• Technical support
• Account support
• Billing support

Incentivized

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.

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)

Most notably OVHcloud [Public Cloud] has dedicated servers which are a different breed of product than Linode's flagship VPS servers, the unfortunate fact of the matter is that OVHcloud [Public Cloud] can provide a fully-dedicated server at a lower price point than Linode's virtual server. Even worse than that is that with a dedicated server from [OVHcloud Public Cloud] there is zero chance of "cpu theft" (aka, noisy neighbor) which is a very real problem at Linode (we would require multiple migrations every year for servers hosted at Linode that were experiencing cpu theft). In addition to the improvement in quality for network/hardware at OVHcloud [Public Cloud] with their dedicated server offering, their VPS servers are also highly competitive against Linode's VPS servers - in the 2 years we've used OVHcloud [Public Cloud] VPS's we've had zero downtime associated with OVH actions such as host-node reboots or cpu theft or host node upgrades, a stark difference compared to Linode which regularly experiences those types of downtimes and many more on a very regular basis.

Incentivized

• 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.

• Cost of virtual servers was reduced by 20% versus other VPS/Cloud providers.
• Cost of dedicated servers was reduced by 50% versus other dedicated server providers.
• Network speeds decreased considerably versus other providers.
• Network quotas improved considerably versus other providers (unlimited at OVH).
• Uptime has improved considerably which has improved client reputation.

Incentivized