Longhorn is cloud native distributed block storage for Kubernetes, supported by Rancher Labs headquartered in Cupertino.
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StarWind SAN & NAS
Score 9.7 out of 10
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StarWind SAN & NAS is an HCL-certified software-defined shared storage for VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V. The solution also enables the user to repurpose servers into certified backup targets if they are using Veeam. StarWind SAN & NAS, as a Linux-based VM, leverages all the features of ZFS to ensure optimal storage use, data safety and integrity. The solution is designed to present a unified,…
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 companies wanting a lean 2 node HC cluster Starwind VSAN is the way to go. Performance, ease of setup, reliability, and management are very good. However, If companies have more than 2 node-setups Starwind isn't the best option as it only does mirrors. Having more than 2 nodes essentially means wasting 2/3 of storage capacity. If StarWind can add distributed raids in future releases that would be perfect
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.
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)
Overall the combination is really doing great and helping the business to perform smoothly. The main reason behind selecting StarWind is, It's budget-friendly, has good support and it's great product functionalities.
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.
Even though we have had one host disk failure on one of the cluster nodes, there was no interruption to our users. The server was repaired and the StarWind SAN & NAS made the transition very simple.
There has been zero downtime since the StarWind SAN & NAS was implemented.,
