Frequently Asked Questions
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About StorPool Storage
StorPool Storage is an agile, software-defined primary data storage platform designed for cloud builders, hosting providers, and Managed Service Providers (MSPs). It transforms standard, off-the-shelf commodity hardware into high-performance, scalable, and highly reliable storage systems for mission-critical workloads like databases, web servers, and virtual desktops.
StorPool One, built on StorPool Storage, delivers a fully integrated virtualization platform combining compute, storage, networking, and management from a single vendor with an end-to-end expert support model. It ensures the success and continuous operation of your cloud platform, including initial design, deployment, 24/7 proactive monitoring, and all day-to-day administration.
Software-defined storage (SDS) decouples the storage management software from the underlying hardware. This architecture allows organizations to build flexible, scalable storage systems using cost-effective commodity hardware, eliminating the need for expensive, proprietary all-flash arrays.
StorPool uses a fully distributed, parallel architecture that eliminates single points of failure. It aggregates storage resources from all servers in a cluster, optimizing performance with advanced features like thin provisioning, redirect-on-write, and end-to-end data integrity (checksums). The StorPool software uses only 10% of servers’ CPU and RAM, making it ideal for hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI).
StorPool is hardware-agnostic and runs on standard, commodity off-the-shelf (COTS) servers. This allows organizations to avoid vendor lock-in and optimize costs by selecting the best-fit hardware for their performance and capacity needs. See more details here.
StorPool is ideal for diverse, mission-critical environments, including:
- Private Clouds: Building fast, reliable clouds using industry-standard platforms.
- Managed Service Providers (MSPs): Delivering high-uptime, scalable storage for multi-tenant services.
- Shared Hosting: Modernizing hosting infrastructure for improved performance.
- OLTP Databases: Low latency means faster response times to database queries.
- AI Inference Engines: Most storage struggles to keep up with the extreme speed of GPUs, resulting in low utilization. StorPool can match speed with them for higher efficiency.
- Virtual Desktops (VDI): Providing low-latency, responsive storage for user desktops.
- High-Performance Analytics: Handling data-intensive workloads requiring rapid IOPS.
- High Performance: Sub-100 microsecond latency and extreme IOPS performance.
- Seamless Scalability: Expand capacity and performance online without service interruptions.
- High Availability: Proven 99.999% uptime with robust data protection (triple-replication/erasure coding).
- Fully Managed Service: StorPool handles all monitoring and maintenance so your staff can focus on innovation rather than grunt work.
- Integration simplifies management: StorPool’s native integration with cloud management platforms and virtualization managers allows customers to manage storage from the interface they already know.
- Lower TCO: Reduced hardware and operational costs through server consolidation and efficient resource use.
StorPool supports major hypervisors, including VMware (ESXi), Linux KVM, Oracle Virtualization, HPE Morpheus, and Hyper-V.
StorPool integrates with leading platforms, including OpenStack, CloudStack, OpenNebula, and Proxmox VE.
StorPool provides native integration and support for Kubernetes.
StorPool utilizes a specialized parallel iSCSI target designed specifically to handle highly parallel workloads and optimize data transfer between storage clusters and hypervisors.
StorPool supports NFS 4.2 for volumes up to 64TB.
HCI Cloud
StorPool HCI is an ultra-fast, reliable, and cost-efficient block data storage platform designed specifically for public and private clouds. It enables businesses to significantly lower data center operational costs by reducing overall hardware expenditure, power consumption, and cooling requirements.
Since StorPool Storage can be used for multiple purposes simultaneously (e.g., running a private cloud with OpenNebula or Proxmox VE, running virtual machines on VMware ESXi, and running a bare metal Kubernetes install), it can eliminate storage silos.
StorPool empowers companies to construct their storage platforms using industry-standard commodity servers, effectively avoiding vendor lock-in and the need for specialized, proprietary equipment. The system is engineered for high efficiency, utilizing only approximately 10% of a server node’s memory and CPU resources, which preserves the majority of the hardware’s power for virtual machines (VMs) and mission-critical applications.
Since StorPool Storage is a multi-purpose block storage implementation, it can be used to run multiple different workloads simultaneously, allowing you to reduce costs by eliminating storage silos.
StorPool maintains a proven track record of 99.999% uptime and supports non-disruptive upgrades to ensure continuous business operations. Performance is consistently high, delivering sub-100µs in-VM latency. Furthermore, the architecture employs a specialized virtual machine high availability service to guarantee rapid recovery and long-term reliability.
Unlike traditional, standardized HCI configurations that require linear scaling of all resources simultaneously, StorPool eliminates inefficient storage silos. In addition to linear scaling, it provides the flexibility to add compute-only or storage-only nodes based on specific infrastructure demands.
To facilitate seamless automation workflows, StorPool offers native integration with several leading cloud management platforms. These supported platforms include CloudStack, OpenNebula, OpenStack, Proxmox VE, and Kubernetes.
Public Cloud
StorPool is a next-generation software-defined block storage platform designed for building fast, reliable, and cost-efficient public and private clouds. It is optimal for hosting virtual private servers (VPS). It converts sets of standard commodity servers into a linearly scalable storage system, helping cloud builders increase business agility and eliminate the need for expensive traditional SAN or All-Flash Arrays.
StorPool is engineered for mission-critical workloads—such as OLTP databases, web servers, virtual private servers (VPS), and VDI—that require extreme speed and rapid response times. Key performance metrics include:
- Systems that start at 3,000,000+ IOPS.
- Latency as low as 0.1 ms.
- A distributed architecture that ensures high-speed data access across the entire cluster.
The platform utilizes a parallel multi-node, shared-nothing architecture with no single point of failure. It ensures data integrity and availability through several advanced mechanisms:
- Triple Replication: Data is replicated across three different physical servers to protect against hardware failure.
- End-to-End Data Safety: The system calculates and stores a checksum directly at the client side to prevent data corruption.
- Non-Disruptive Lifecycle Management: Performance and availability are preserved even during hardware upgrades or replacements.
StorPool is designed for high interoperability and integrates seamlessly with numerous cloud technologies. It can be used with multiple technologies simultaneously. It simplifies CloudOps by uniting various environments, including:
- Hypervisors: VMware, KVM, Oracle Virtualization, Hyper-V, and Linux Bare-Metal.
- Management Platforms: OpenStack, OpenNebula, CloudStack, Proxmox VE, Oracle Linux Virtualization Manager (OLVM), and Kubernetes.
- Connectivity: Supports parallel NVMe/TCP, StorPool Block Protocol, iSCSI, and highly available NFS services.
StorPool is a fully managed solution that alleviates the operational load on technical teams by providing 24/7/365 enterprise-grade support. The managed service encompasses:
- Remote installation and initial system design.
- Ongoing software updates and proactive monitoring of thousands of metrics per second.
- System fine-tuning and maintenance to address potential issues before they impact end-customer workloads.
Private Cloud
StorPool provides a fully managed, software-defined storage platform that enables companies to build fast and reliable private clouds based on the cloud management platform of their choice using standard, vendor-agnostic commodity hardware. It eliminates the need for expensive, proprietary all-flash arrays by transforming standard servers into a high-performance storage cluster. The solution is end-to-end, including remote installation, initial configuration, and 24/7/365 proactive monitoring and support.
StorPool reduces TCO by allowing organizations to avoid large upfront investments in dedicated storage hardware. By utilizing standard hardware and a “pay-as-you-grow” scale-out model, companies can start with as little as 10 TB and expand into the petabyte range online without service interruptions. Additionally, the platform’s high efficiency and optimized performance deliver a lower cost-per-IOPS compared to traditional SAN, legacy storage, or Ceph alternatives.
The system utilizes a fully distributed architecture with no single points of failure. Key reliability features include:
- Triple Replication: Data is stored in three copies across different physical servers to prevent loss from hardware failure.
- End-to-End Data Integrity: StorPool calculates checksums directly at the client and stores them with the data to ensure accuracy.
- Proactive Monitoring: The solution is managed 24/7/365 by StorPool’s team to identify and resolve issues before they impact services.
Yes. StorPool is a seamless scale-out solution designed to grow with your business needs. It optimizes performance by combining the IOPS of all drives within a cluster, which provides low latency and handles sudden bursts in storage usage. Capacity and performance can be added online, ensuring there is never a need for maintenance windows or service interruptions during expansion.
StorPool is designed for high compatibility with major private cloud and container technologies. It provides native integration and support for:
- Hypervisors: KVM, Oracle Virtualization, VMware, and Hyper-V.
- Cloud Management Platforms: OpenStack, CloudStack, OpenNebula, and Proxmox VE.
- Container Orchestration: Kubernetes and Docker.
StorPool is hardware-agnostic and can run on most commodity off-the-shelf servers (COTS). See our hardware system requirements.
StorPool delivers on a sovereign strategy by providing a fully managed, software-defined cloud and virtualization alternative to major non-European platforms, such as VMware and Microsoft. Their approach to sovereignty includes:
- Collaborative ‘Eurostack’ Solutions: StorPool participates in the development of ‘Eurostack Packs,’ such as the Eurostack Disaster Recovery Pack, which is positioned as a pragmatic first step toward digital sovereignty.
- Addressing Critical Dependencies: By focusing on critical use cases like disaster recovery, StorPool provides an ‘exit strategy’ that allows organizations to reduce their reliance on non-European hyperscalers and mitigate risks related to outages or geopolitical dependencies.
- Integrated European Technologies: The strategy leverages a mix of European open-source and proprietary technologies, demonstrating how they can coexist to create a robust, sovereign stack.
Managed Service Providers
StorPool is an agile, software-defined primary storage platform designed specifically for Managed Service Providers (MSPs) and cloud builders. It converts standard, off-the-shelf hardware into high-performance, scalable, and reliable primary storage systems for critical workloads like databases, web servers, and virtual desktops. StorPool makes it easy for you to offer your customers high uptime SLAs and meet them.
MSPs choose StorPool for its unmatched performance, seamless scalability, and operational efficiency. By offloading the complexity of storage management to StorPool’s experts and leveraging a cost-efficient, pay-as-you-grow model, providers can build smarter, more profitable clouds.
StorPool utilizes a flexible, pay-as-you-grow pricing model with no fixed-term commitments. MSPs are billed based on the actual amount of data saved, excluding redundant replicas. This approach helps optimize infrastructure costs and improves profit margins as businesses scale.
StorPool simplifies operations by connecting a single storage system to multiple hypervisors and cloud management platforms simultaneously, including VMware, Linux KVM, Oracle Virtualization, Hyper-V, OpenNebula, Proxmox VE, OpenStack, and Kubernetes. This enables seamless support for hybrid- and multi-cloud environments.
The FMS from StorPool is a comprehensive, end-to-end expert support model that goes beyond traditional managed services to guarantee the success and continuous operation of your cloud platform.
- End-to-End Expert Support: StorPool engineers manage all critical phases of cloud adoption, including the initial design and deployment.
- 24/7 Monitoring and Maintenance: The expert team provides round-the-clock monitoring and handles all day-to-day administration and error correction.
This fully managed approach minimizes your operational burden and transition risks, ensuring StorPool is a reliable partner for managed service providers and a smarter choice than self-managed storage alternatives.
StorPool provides extensive data management features designed to ensure business continuity, including native support for snapshots, backups, high availability, and disaster recovery (DR). Customers can also protect their data using triple-mirroring or enhanced erasure coding. Due to StorPool’s seamless integration with multiple management platforms, these features can all be accessed from within the interface administrators already know. These built-in capabilities allow MSPs to safeguard critical workloads across hybrid- and multi-cloud environments effectively, reducing the need for complex, third-party data protection solutions.
Oracle Virtualization
StorPool Storage improves application speed by providing ultra-low storage latency, consistently delivering response times under 100 microseconds (μs). StorPool’s software-defined architecture removes traditional hardware bottlenecks, ensuring that business-critical workloads run at peak performance.
Businesses looking to exit VMware are selecting Linux KVM as the go-to replacement for ESXi. StorPool makes flexible hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) for virtualized environments easy and provides a modern alternative to legacy virtualization stacks by offering:
- Ultra-Fast Performance: High IOPS and low latency optimized for business-critical applications.
- End-to-End Automation: Seamless integration with Oracle Virtualization that reduces manual management overhead.
- Flexible Scaling: The ability to scale storage and compute independently using commodity hardware, avoiding vendor lock-in.
StorPool’s Oracle Virtualization plugin is lightweight and efficient, containing no unnecessary code. It is completely dependency-free, requiring no external libraries or changes to the oVirt software. Lastly, it is decoupled from Oracle Linux Virtualization Manager (OLVM), allowing OLVM and the plugin to be updated independently of each other.
The platform ensures enterprise-level reliability with the following features:
- High Availability: A proven track record of 99.999%+ storage uptime for continuous operations.
- Data Protection: Built-in features like checksums, triple-mirroring, erasure coding, and automated snapshots, backup, and disaster recovery.
- Non-Disruptive Upgrades: A lightweight, dependency-free plugin allows for storage updates without impacting the virtualization layer. Additionally StorPool Storage’s clustered architecture allows any upgrades to the storage layer to happen with zero downtime.
StorPool provides a fully managed storage solution, but not in the same way a Managed Service Provider (MSP) does. MSPs provide hardware and software housed in their data centers. StorPool Storage runs on the commodity hardware of the customer’s choice, running on-premises in your own data center.
Expert StorPool engineers handle the design, deployment, configuration, monitoring, maintenance, and optimization of the storage layer, allowing internal IT teams to focus on managing their applications and business growth rather than infrastructure maintenance. StorPool Storage is licensed on a pay-as-you-grow model where you only pay based on the amount of data stored on the system. Fully managed services are provided at no additional cost. Request a custom quote today.
VMware Alternative
StorPool One is a turnkey KVM cloud platform that provides a cost-effective, high-performance, and open virtualization solution for customers seeking to move away from VMware.
- Eliminate Licensing Lock-in: It leverages open-source Linux KVM, providing freedom from vendor licensing constraints and the high costs associated with Broadcom’s changes to VMware’s licensing model.
- Achieve Excellence in KVM: StorPool One pre-integrates compute, storage, and networking into a streamlined, complete stack designed for KVM environments.
- Flexible Deployment: The platform supports hyperconverged, disaggregated, or mixed infrastructure deployment models to match specific organizational needs.
StorPool One offers a superior, smarter path forward by delivering a fully supported, highly reliable alternative to proprietary virtualization platforms.
StorPool One is engineered to deliver enterprise-grade performance and reliability, ensuring mission-critical applications run without compromise.
- Ultra-High Performance: The platform delivers ultra-low latencies and millions of IOPS across the cluster to accelerate application performance.
- Proven Uptime: It provides greater than 99.999% production-proven uptime, ensuring continuous availability for your workloads. Read our uptime report.
- Robust Data Protection: Includes advanced disaster recovery features like unlimited snapshots and asynchronous replication for comprehensive data protection.
When comparing virtualization options, StorPool One consistently surpasses the performance metrics of many legacy virtualization platforms like VMware vSAN. Some of our customers call us the “vSAN for KVM environments”.
StorPool One is built on an open, Linux KVM-based platform and is designed to fit diverse infrastructure needs, enabling maximum resource utilization and cost efficiency.
- Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI): This deployment model is highly cost-effective, as the StorPool storage software uses only about 10% of a server’s CPU and memory resources, leaving the rest for computing power.
- Disaggregated and Mixed Models: StorPool One’s architecture provides the flexibility to deploy storage in a dedicated disaggregated model or a mixed model, adapting to your existing infrastructure needs.
By offering flexible deployment options like HCI and disaggregated storage, StorPool One ensures that you can optimize your resources and lower TCO, unlike rigid proprietary solutions.
The FMS from StorPool is a comprehensive, end-to-end expert support model that goes beyond traditional managed services to guarantee the success and continuous operation of your cloud platform.
- End-to-End Expert Support: StorPool engineers manage all critical phases of cloud adoption, including the initial design and deployment.
- 24/7 Monitoring and Maintenance: The expert team provides round-the-clock monitoring and handles all day-to-day administration and error correction.
This fully managed approach minimizes your operational burden and transition risks, ensuring StorPool is a reliable partner in your migration to KVM and a smarter choice than self-managed storage alternatives.
StorPool One is designed to minimize risk and simplify the shift from VMware to open-source KVM virtualization with automated migration capabilities.
- Automated Migration: The platform facilitates automated, seamless migration from existing VMware environments to KVM.
- Eliminate Storage Silos: By modernizing your virtualization stack, you eliminate existing storage silos, consolidating your environment for better efficiency.
For businesses dealing with the high cost and complexity of VMware/ESXi, StorPool One provides a clear, supported path to KVM, making the move to an open-source, high-performance cloud infrastructure straightforward.
Disaster Recovery
StorPool ensures dependable data backups by utilizing its VolumeCare service to automatically create atomic crash-consistent snapshots based on user-defined policies. These snapshots can be replicated to other StorPool systems.
- Differential Snapshots: These snapshots capture only the data that has changed since the previous backup.
- Space Efficiency: The snapshot mechanism is designed to remain highly space-efficient.
- Performance Optimization: Snapshots are created and maintained without negatively impacting storage performance.
The StorPool Disaster Recovery Engine is a built-in solution that provides cross-site intelligence to protect and replicate data for KVM-based clouds. This engine enables users to set customized policies for each virtual machine to automatically replicate data and safeguard against entire data center failures.
The StorPool Disaster Recovery Engine supports multiple deployment models for flexible and comprehensive coverage.
- Active-Passive: This model utilizes a dedicated recovery site.
- Active-Active: This configuration offers bi-directional replication between sites.
- Many-to-One: A cost-effective configuration for multi-site protection.
- Multi-Site Mesh: Supports load-balancing across multiple recovery sites for maximum resilience.
In comparison, these models allow service providers to balance cost and redundancy requirements while ensuring continuous data availability across their infrastructure.
The StorPool software-defined block data storage platform incorporates multiple data protection services, designed for modern infrastructure. These services include:
- Built-in Redundancy: Native protection against hardware and software failures.
- Triple-Mirroring: Data is simultaneously written to three locations to ensure survival in the event of hardware loss.
- Enhanced Erasure Coding: Advanced algorithms for efficient data recovery and storage overhead reduction.
Service providers recommend StorPool because its backup and disaster recovery solutions are specifically designed to meet the demands of modern cloud infrastructures. Executives from companies like CloudSigma and RapidCompute endorse the platform for its ability to maintain service consistency and protect customer workloads during outages.
Highly Available Shared Hosting
StorPool Highly Available Shared Hosting solution is a modernized hosting infrastructure that converts traditional physical shared hosting servers into virtual machines running on highly available, software-defined block storage. Unlike traditional architectures that struggle with performance and reliability, our solution utilizes virtualized servers and commodity hardware to create a more resilient and cost-efficient service delivery platform.
StorPool’ shared hosting solution significantly improves server utilization, allowing hosting providers to support more customers with fewer physical servers. For instance, a setup for 9,000 customers requires only 5 physical servers using StorPool, compared to 32 servers in a traditional setup. This consolidation leads to:
- Reduced Rack Space: A drop from 34 RU to just 6 RU.
- Lower Power Consumption: Energy needs decrease from 7.60 kW to 2.09 kW.
- Lower Cost Per User: Estimated monthly costs can drop from $0.85 to $0.73 per user.
The architecture delivers blazing all-NVMe performance and near-instant loading times for websites, which directly improves user experience and checkout operations. Key technical advantages include:
- Live Migration: The ability to move virtual machines between hosts without downtime.
- High Hardware Utilization: Optimizing the use of physical resources to reduce overhead.
- Preventative Maintenance: Performing server maintenance without requiring scheduled maintenance windows or impacting service availability.
Data is protected using triple replication, ensuring that the system continues to work seamlessly even in the event of a drive or hypervisor failure. The architecture includes built-in failover capabilities and data redundancy, which allows websites to remain online and recover automatically from hardware failures. This level of high availability helps hosting providers eliminate downtime, keep their SLAs, and reduce customer churn.
StorPool Storage is designed to be highly scalable and can be automatically orchestrated through various industry-standard Cloud Management Platforms. Supported platforms include:
- CloudStack
- OpenStack
- OpenNebula
- Proxmox VE
Additionally, StorPool provides fully managed services to handle storage expertise, allowing hosting teams to focus entirely on their customers rather than infrastructure management.
AI Solutions
Sovereign AI allows you to keep everything under your own control, keeping your private data and trade secrets private, as well as removing any dependencies on outside organizations.
There are several key differences including:
- Data types – Traditional databases store structured, transactional data, while vector databases store unstructured data (long text, images, video, etc.).
- Data structure – Traditional databases use rigid tables, while vector databases use embeddings – numeric representations of semantic meaning generated by machine learning models.
- Search mechanism –Traditional databases use exact matching from SQL queries while vector databases use similarity metric to find items “close” in meaning.
- Performance – Vector databases use approximate nearest neighbor (ANN) algorithms to handle multi-dimensional queries at scale, which is faster for AI use cases.
While expensive compared to traditional compute, neoclouds are often cheaper than public hyperscalers – for AI workloads. Neoclouds focus on procuring the latest and most advanced AI chips which are in high demand and short supply. Beyond the cost of the GPUs themselves, operating these systems requires massive power, data center infrastructure, and specialized networking for high-throughput AI workloads.
AI works well in containerized environments and Kubernetes is the open-source de facto standard for containers. Kubernetes provides the orchestration, scalability, and hardware acceleration needed to train and deploy complex models. StorPool’s container storage interface (CSI) provides Kubernetes seamless integration with the underlying storage.
StorPool is built using a distributed architecture, ensuring no single points of failure exist. This distributed architecture allows for non-disruptive software and hardware upgrades, making planned downtime a thing of the past. StorPool clusters have built-in data protection (triple mirroring, erasure coding, checksums, snapshots) proactive monitoring allowing small problems to be fixed before they become larger problems. Combined, these features are providing for uptimes of greater than 99.999% across our customers’ production environments.
Databases
StorPool Storage is an ultra-fast block data storage platform designed for demanding database environments. It directly addresses the root cause of laggy applications—slow underlying storage—by delivering extreme performance, including sub-100 microsecond (µs) latency and millions of IOPS.
Low latency is the most critical metric for highly transactional workloads, such as Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) or vector databases in AI inference engines. Optimizing for low latency is essential to ensure rapid query response times and prevent the loss of revenue and user trust due to slow applications.
Data storage is critical to database performance because it dictates how quickly data can be read, written, and retrieved, acting as the primary bottleneck for application responsiveness. Database performance is often constrained by I/O operations per second (IOPS). Faster storage media like NVMe SSDs provide 5-10x faster performance for transactions, significantly lowering latency compared to traditional HDDs. A single StorPool Storage system can perform at 113 Million IOPS under a sustained workload while still maintaining sub-100 microsecond (µs) latency.
Proper storage design minimizes the physical movement of data between disk and memory, which is crucial for high-performance computing (HPC) and real-time data analytics. StorPool Storage provides quality of service (QoS) features that don’t rely on data movement. Databases leverage RAM to cache frequently accessed data. Efficient storage management keeps “hot” data in faster tiers and “cold” data in slower storage, balancing cost and speed.
StorPool supports a wide range of database types virtualized or not, including relational systems like Oracle, MS SQL Server, MySQL, Time Series databases such as Prometheus, and modern AI Vector databases used for large language models and inference engines.
The platform ensures enterprise-level reliability with the following features:
- High Availability: A proven track record of 99.999%+ storage uptime for continuous operations.
- Data Protection: Built-in features like checksums, triple-mirroring, erasure coding, and automated snapshots, backup, and disaster recovery. The built-in Disaster Recovery Engine allows cloud managers to configure and test failover processes directly from the CloudStack environment.
- Non-Disruptive Upgrades: A lightweight, dependency-free plugin allows for storage updates without impacting the virtualization layer. Additionally StorPool Storage’s clustered shared-nothing architecture allows any upgrades to the storage layer to happen with zero downtime.
As a fully managed, software-defined storage solution, StorPool helps organizations reduce costs by allowing for denser infrastructure, requiring fewer servers, and using less power. Additionally, StorPool experts handle all day-to-day administration and error correction.
Native Integrations
CloudStack
StorPool delivers ultra-fast block data storage, achieving storage latency under 100 microseconds (µs) and system-wide performance of up to 113 million IOPS. This application acceleration allows cloud builders to create more efficient public and private IaaS platforms within CloudStack.
The deep integration allows for seamless management of advanced storage capabilities directly through the standard CloudStack User Interface. Key supported features include cloned provisioning, thin provisioning, and the application of Quality of Service (QoS) policies per virtual machine.
The platform ensures enterprise-level reliability with the following features:
- High Availability: A proven track record of 99.999%+ storage uptime for continuous operations.
- Data Protection: Built-in features like checksums, triple-mirroring, erasure coding, and automated snapshots, backup, and disaster recovery. The built-in Disaster Recovery Engine allows cloud managers to configure and test failover processes directly from the CloudStack environment.
- Non-Disruptive Upgrades: A lightweight, dependency-free plugin allows for storage updates without impacting the virtualization layer. Additionally StorPool Storage’s clustered shared-nothing architecture allows any upgrades to the storage layer to happen with zero downtime.
StorPool delivers a breakthrough Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) that is up to three times cheaper than comparable storage solutions. This is accomplished by a number of factors including its use of commodity servers rather than specialized hardware, the fact that storage vendors add a large margin to any drives purchased from them, and our pay-as-you-grow licensing model where you pay based on the actual data you’re storing, not the amount you have provisioned.
Additionally, StorPool Storage’s distributed, shared-nothing architecture eliminates the need for scheduled downtime, further reducing operational costs.
StorPool provides a fully managed storage solution, but not in the same way a Managed Service Provider (MSP) does. MSPs provide hardware and software housed in their data centers. StorPool Storage runs on the commodity hardware of the customer’s choice, running on-premises in your own data center.
Expert StorPool engineers handle the design, deployment, configuration, monitoring, maintenance, and optimization of the storage layer, allowing internal IT teams to focus on managing their applications and business growth rather than infrastructure maintenance. StorPool Storage is licensed on a pay-as-you-grow model where you only pay based on the amount of data stored on the system. Fully managed services are provided at no additional cost. Request a custom quote today.
StorPool Storage provides a free CloudStack native plugin that allows cloud managers to perform all storage-related tasks for their virtualization infrastructure without ever leaving the CloudStack interface they already know. Foremost, the plugin will automatically create a storage volume and any virtual disks when an admin creates a virtual machine (VM). This also includes cloned provisioning, scheduling per-VM automated snapshots, setting per-VM performance-based quality of service (QoS), and set per-VM replication policies for backup and disaster recovery.
Kubernetes
StorPool Storage is a software-defined block storage platform specifically designed to provide persistent, high-performance solutions for Kubernetes. It allows developers to run stateful applications, such as databases, with direct access to reliable storage. By integrating seamlessly through its Container Storage Interface (CSI) driver, StorPool enables the dynamic attachment and detachment of volumes, ensuring that data persists even as pods are rescheduled across the cluster.
StorPool delivers enterprise-class performance and “five 9s” (99.999%) reliability, which is essential for mission-critical applications. Key performance advantages include:
- Ultra-Low Latency: Optimized for high-speed data access required by stateful applications.
- Rapid Pod Restarts: The platform facilitates immediate Pod restarts on different hosts by eliminating the delays typically associated with slow volume attachment processes.
- Workflow Automation: Administrators can manage volumes and create snapshots without manual intervention, integrating storage management directly into existing automated workflows.
Enterprises, and other organizations concerned about getting the best performance possible from Kubernetes often choose to run on bare metal, i.e., without a host OS installed on the server hardware.
Type 2, or hosted, hypervisors have the OS as a layer between the containers or virtual machines and the hardware. Type 1 hypervisors, bare metal, allow the containers and VMs to have direct access to the CPU and memory without needing to go through the OS. This prevents the OS from being a performance bottleneck and shaves microseconds or milliseconds off of storage latency.
StorPool Storage works with both Type 1 and 2 hypervisors and can work with both types simultaneously, eliminating any storage silos in your virtualization infrastructure.
Yes. StorPool supports various deployment types, including bare-metal containers and virtual machines managed via KubeVirt. This integration allows organizations transitioning from traditional infrastructure to run VM-based workloads on the same pods as containerized applications. This flexibility enables a unified storage strategy across hybrid Kubernetes environments.
StorPool Storage is multi-purpose block storage. As such, it can be used for multiple different environments and applications simultaneously. Customers can use the hypervisor of their choice and Kubernetes in separate volumes on the same storage system. This flexibility allows customers to eliminate storage silos.
StorPool provides a fully managed storage solution, but not in the same way a Managed Service Provider (MSP) does. MSPs provide hardware and software housed in their data centers. StorPool Storage runs on-premises in your own data center on the commodity hardware of your choice.
Expert StorPool engineers handle the design, deployment, configuration, monitoring, maintenance, and optimization of the storage layer, allowing internal IT teams to focus on managing their applications and business growth rather than infrastructure maintenance. StorPool Storage is licensed on a pay-as-you-grow model where you only pay based on the amount of data stored on the system. Fully managed services are provided at no additional cost.
Automation is a core feature of the StorPool solution. Through the CSI driver, the platform supports dynamic volume provisioning and management. This ensures that stateful applications have the storage they need exactly when they need it, with features like automated snapshots and volume scaling built into the lifecycle of the Kubernetes pods. For organizations looking to maximize productivity, StorPool also provides technical resources such as solution briefs and white papers to guide implementation.
OpenNebula
StorPool’s integration with OpenNebula, via a native plugin, creates highly performant, flexible, and reliable hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) for enterprise cloud environments. StorPool’s shared-nothing distributed architecture is designed for extreme reliability (proven 99.999+% across our customer base) and low latency (sub-100μs), making it faster and more scalable compared to traditional SANs and all-flash arrays. The StorPool plugin provides OpenNebula users with a seamless experience as they can perform all storage-related tasks from the OpenNebula management interface.
Read our uptime report.
Yes, StorPool Storage includes built-in disaster recovery (DR) capabilities with its Disaster Recovery Engine (included at no additional cost). Users can configure snapshot replication policies on a per-VM basis from OpenNebula.
OpenNebula is one of several cloud management platforms that StorPool integrates with. Due to StorPool’s native OpenNebula plugin, customers can test automated failover, and execute actual failover procedures without leaving the OpenNebula management interface.
The solution is designed to drastically reduce vendor lock-in. It supports the use of cost-efficient commodity hardware and leverages common open-source software like Linux KVM virtualization.
StorPool Storage is designed to drastically reduce vendor lock-in. It supports the use of cost-efficient commodity hardware and leverages common open-source software like Linux KVM virtualization, along with other hypervisors like VMware ESXi, Hyper-V, and Oracle Virtualization. Customers can leverage or repurpose existing hardware.
OpenNebula is open-source with a strong supporting community.
The FMS from StorPool is a comprehensive, end-to-end expert support model that goes beyond traditional managed services to guarantee the success and continuous operation of your cloud platform.
- End-to-End Expert Support: StorPool engineers manage all critical phases of cloud adoption, including the initial design and deployment.
- 24/7 Monitoring and Maintenance: The expert team provides round-the-clock monitoring and handles all day-to-day administration and error correction.
This fully managed approach minimizes your operational burden and transition risks, ensuring StorPool is a reliable partner in your migration to KVM and a smarter choice than self-managed storage alternatives.
StorPool Storage’s distributed shared-nothing architecture delivers an always-on cloud model that minimizes outages caused by hardware failures and human errors. It eliminates painful maintenance windows by allowing non-disruptive deployment of software updates, patches, and hardware swap-outs, making planned downtime a thing of the past.
This integrated solution is crucial for enterprise clouds that demand extreme reliability and performance, ensuring highly efficient operations with maximum uptime.
Operational overhead is minimized because StorPool’s team of experts handles the deployment, management, and updating of the storage infrastructure. Key workflows are simplified and automated, allowing everyday tasks such as volume creation, snapshots, cloned provisioning, and restores to be managed directly through OpenNebula’s user interface.
OpenStack
StorPool improves OpenStack performance by delivering data latency under 100μs (microseconds) and high system-wide IOPS. This extreme speed removes storage bottlenecks for high-demand applications and critical business data processing. Cloud builders use this to create much more efficient public and private cloud infrastructure platforms. It ensures a smooth and responsive user experience across all virtual machine instances and services.
The platform uses a fully distributed shared-nothing architecture to handle large-scale data sets and intense traffic. This allows your OpenStack cloud to scale without losing speed or impacting existing application performance. Our system delivers up to 113 million IOPS within a single storage system. It empowers users to run the most demanding workloads with consistent and reliable performance levels.
StorPool features native integration with core OpenStack services like Cinder, Nova, Glance, and the os-brick library. This deep connection allows cloud managers to streamline volume and virtual machine management from one interface. It eliminates the complexity of manual configurations and ensures compatibility across different OpenStack cloud versions. Our native drivers simplify the deployment of new storage resources for faster cloud scaling.
To further ease complex setups, StorPool provides deployment automation recipes for tools like Juju and Charms. We also support Kolla-ansible to help users orchestrate their cloud storage with minimal manual effort. These automation tools reduce the risk of human error during the initial setup and maintenance. Your team can focus on higher-value tasks while our software handles the storage layer.
StorPool ensures 99.999% uptime through a fully distributed architecture with no single points of failure. This design is vital for cloud builders who need to maintain strict service level agreements (SLAs). The platform allows for software and hardware updates with zero downtime to the entire storage system. Your mission-critical applications will remain online during routine maintenance and unexpected hardware failures.
Our storage experts provide a fully managed service to monitor and maintain your entire storage implementation. They design and tune the system to prevent performance issues before they impact your cloud users. This proactive approach guarantees that your OpenStack environment remains stable and reliable at all times. You can trust StorPool to keep your data safe and accessible twenty-four hours a day.
StorPool includes a built-in disaster recovery engine designed specifically for complex OpenStack cloud management tasks at no additional cost. This tool allows cloud managers to plan, test, and execute failover processes from within their OpenStack interface. It simplifies business continuity planning by providing a single interface for managing all data protection workflows. Users can automate failover tasks to ensure their recovery time objectives(RTO) are always met.
The disaster recovery engine works seamlessly with existing OpenStack workflows to provide high levels of protection. You can verify your recovery plans regularly without interrupting the performance of your live production site. This native capability removes the need for expensive third-party plugins or complex external backup solutions. It provides peace of mind that your data is protected against any major site failures.
StorPool delivers a total cost of ownership that is up to three times cheaper than alternative solutions. We achieve this efficiency through a transparent pay-as-you-go pricing model and standard commodity server hardware. This approach avoids the high margins associated with proprietary storage arrays and specialized hardware components. Your organization can save significant capital and operational expenses by choosing our software-defined storage.
Our fully managed service reduces operational overhead because StorPool experts handle all daily storage maintenance tasks. This allows your internal IT team to focus on business growth rather than basic infrastructure upkeep. The system provides extreme performance and reliability at a fraction of the cost of legacy arrays. You get an enterprise-grade solution that fits within your budget while delivering superior technical results.
| Aspect | Traditional Storage | StorPool for OpenStack |
|---|---|---|
| Latency | Often variable and higher | Under 100 microseconds |
| Throughput | Limited by controller heads | Up to 113 Million IOPS |
| Management | Manual and complex tasks | Fully managed by experts |
| Pricing | High upfront capital costs | Transparent pay-as-you-go |
Oracle Virtualization
StorPool Storage improves application speed by providing ultra-low storage latency, consistently delivering response times under 100 microseconds (μs). StorPool’s software-defined architecture removes traditional hardware bottlenecks, ensuring that business-critical workloads run at peak performance.
Businesses looking to exit VMware are selecting Linux KVM as the go-to replacement for ESXi. StorPool makes flexible hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) for virtualized environments easy and provides a modern alternative to legacy virtualization stacks by offering:
- Ultra-Fast Performance: High IOPS and low latency optimized for business-critical applications.
- End-to-End Automation: Seamless integration with Oracle Virtualization that reduces manual management overhead.
- Flexible Scaling: The ability to scale storage and compute independently using commodity hardware, avoiding vendor lock-in.
StorPool’s Oracle Virtualization plugin is lightweight and efficient, containing no unnecessary code. It is completely dependency-free, requiring no external libraries or changes to the oVirt software. Lastly, it is decoupled from Oracle Linux Virtualization Manager (OLVM), allowing OLVM and the plugin to be updated independently of each other.
The platform ensures enterprise-level reliability with the following features:
- High Availability: A proven track record of 99.999%+ storage uptime for continuous operations.
- Data Protection: Built-in features like checksums, triple-mirroring, erasure coding, and automated snapshots, backup, and disaster recovery.
- Non-Disruptive Upgrades: A lightweight, dependency-free plugin allows for storage updates without impacting the virtualization layer. Additionally StorPool Storage’s clustered architecture allows any upgrades to the storage layer to happen with zero downtime.
StorPool provides a fully managed storage solution, but not in the same way a Managed Service Provider (MSP) does. MSPs provide hardware and software housed in their data centers. StorPool Storage runs on the commodity hardware of the customer’s choice, running on-premises in your own data center.
Expert StorPool engineers handle the design, deployment, configuration, monitoring, maintenance, and optimization of the storage layer, allowing internal IT teams to focus on managing their applications and business growth rather than infrastructure maintenance. StorPool Storage is licensed on a pay-as-you-grow model where you only pay based on the amount of data stored on the system. Fully managed services are provided at no additional cost. Request a custom quote today.
Proxmox VE
The integration of StorPool Storage into a Proxmox Virtual Environment (VE) allows users to reach ultra-fast performance levels, including latencies under 100 microseconds (µs). Furthermore, the system is capable of delivering up to 113 million IOPS, providing an ultra-fast block storage solution for enterprise virtualization needs.
The native integration, provided as a free Proxmox VE plugin, is designed to simplify cloud management and create more efficient environments. It provides a stable migration path for users moving away from legacy solutions and supports advanced data storage as code, ensuring that storage scales seamlessly with the Proxmox VE management platform.
StorPool provides a fully managed storage solution, but not in the same way a Managed Service Provider (MSP) does. MSPs provide hardware and software housed in their data centers. StorPool Storage runs on-premises in your own data center on the commodity hardware of your choice.
Expert StorPool engineers handle the design, deployment, configuration, monitoring, maintenance, and optimization of the storage layer, allowing internal IT teams to focus on managing their applications and business growth rather than infrastructure maintenance. StorPool Storage is licensed on a pay-as-you-grow model where you only pay based on the amount of data stored on the system. Fully managed services are provided at no additional cost.
Yes, the integration features end-to-end automation that empowers administrators to perform essential tasks without leaving the Proxmox VE interface. The plugin sends instructions to the StorPool API for you. These tasks include:
- Managing virtual machines (VMs) – creating, cloned provisioning, moving, applying quality of service (QoS) policies, changing performance tiers, and reconfiguring.
- Creating and managing snapshots – set per-VM snapshot policies, restore from snapshots, clone from snaps, and decide which get replicated to a remote system.
- Resizing disks – as your business needs change, your storage needs can change along with them. Resize storage volumes and virtual disks (VMDK) as needed.
The platform ensures enterprise-level reliability with the following features:
- High Availability: A proven track record of 99.999%+ storage uptime for continuous operations.
- Data Protection: Built-in features like data checksums, triple-mirroring, erasure coding, and automated snapshots, backup, and disaster recovery. The built-in Disaster Recovery Engine allows cloud managers to configure and test failover processes directly from the CloudStack environment.
- Non-Disruptive Upgrades: A lightweight, dependency-free plugin allows for storage updates without impacting the virtualization layer. Additionally StorPool Storage’s clustered shared-nothing architecture allows any upgrades to the storage layer to happen with zero downtime.
As a fully managed, software-defined storage solution, StorPool helps organizations reduce costs by allowing for denser infrastructure, requiring fewer servers, and using less power. Additionally, StorPool experts handle all day-to-day administration and error correction.
VMware
StorPool Storage is designed to eliminate performance bottlenecks by delivering in-VM storage latency under 100 microseconds. The platform can scale to provide up to 113 million IOPS per single system, significantly accelerating applications and mission-critical workloads. This ultra-fast block data storage ensures that virtual machines (VMs) operate at peak efficiency without the limitations common in traditional storage arrays.
StorPool guarantees a proven 99.999% uptime for VMware environments through a distributed, parallel, multi-controller architecture that eliminates single points of failure. This design supports always-on operations, allowing for patches, updates, and hardware reconfigurations with zero downtime. By providing extreme reliability, StorPool ensures that enterprise teams can maintain business continuity for their most demanding workloads.
Read our uptime report.
StorPool maximizes capacity and efficiency through several advanced features:
- Enhanced Erasure Coding: A unique implementation that offers massive space savings compared to traditional RAID.
- Thin Provisioning: Allocates storage resources only as they are needed to reduce waste.
- Storage Primitive Offloading: Offloads tasks like ATS, UNMAP, and Write Same from VMware compute servers.
- Zeros Detection: Improves efficiency by identifying and managing empty data blocks.
These features collectively allow organizations to run more virtual machines per physical server while reducing the total cost of ownership.
StorPool utilizes a specialized parallel iSCSI target designed specifically for VMware ESXi clients. Unlike standard iSCSI, this technology supports multiple parallel sessions and handles highly parallel workloads effectively. This approach brings better reliability and higher performance to VMware virtual machines by optimizing how data is transferred between the storage platform and the hypervisor.
StorPool functions as a fully managed service, which means dedicated experts handle the entire lifecycle of the storage environment. This includes:
- Design and Deployment: Expertly architected systems tailored to specific business needs.
- Tuning and Monitoring: Continuous performance optimization and proactive monitoring to prevent issues.
- Maintenance: Seamless updates and management performed by StorPool experts.
This model allows internal IT teams to focus on core business objectives while StorPool experts maintain the extreme reliability and performance of the storage infrastructure.