Software Defined Storage

  • S3 compatible storage

    Host S3 Compatible Storage on your Synology NAS with MinIO!

    Is object storage something that you can only make use of to store backups and other files as needed when you use cloud storage? No, actually it isn’t. You can host your own cloud-like S3 storage on-premises at your home…

  • Ceph backups

    Ceph Backup: Don’t Lose Your HCI Data

    This is more a public service announcement rather than a technical blog, but we will take a high-level look at a warning that I want to make sure that those who are using Ceph or CephFS on top of Ceph…

  • Glusterfs vs ceph

    GlusterFS vs Ceph: Two Different Storage Solutions with Pros and Cons

    I have been trying out various storage solutions in my home lab environment over the past couple of months or so. Two that I have been extensively testing are GlusterFS vs Ceph, and specifically GlusterFS vs CephFS to be exact,…

  • Ceph dashboard

    Ceph Dashboard Configuration for Storage Health Metrics

    If you are using Ceph storage either in Proxmox or using Ceph storage in vanilla Linux outside of Proxmox, you likely want to have a way to see the health of your Ceph storage environment. Setting up a Ceph dashboard…

  • Microceph

    Try Microceph for an Easy Ceph Install

    One of the software-defined storage solutions gaining popularity in the enterprise and home lab community is Ceph. Ceph is a powerful storage solution and has many great benefits. However, it can be intimidating to configure and manage if you haven’t…

  • Glusterfs setup

    GlusterFS configuration in Ubuntu Server 22.04 and 24.04

    In preparing to spin up a home lab Docker Swarm cluster, I wanted to get a working GlusterFS configuration setup on my Ubuntu Server virtual machines. Let’s look at what GlusterFS is and how you can configure it in Ubuntu…

  • Hyper-V Virtual SAN synchronization with StarWind Virtual SAN

    The StarWind Virtual SAN solution is one of the easiest ways to run software-defined virtual SAN in Hyper-V. It has many great features that were recently updated to provide an even better solution with faster replication. Let’s look at the…

  • Free Virtual Storage Appliance StarWind SAN & NAS new features

    In the virtualized environment, we can use many great tools for storage resources. These include virtual storage appliances, especially to attach to running virtual machine instances in the environment, like VMware vSphere. Recently, StarWind released a new version of their…

  • The installation finishes successfully

    Free Virtual SAN Storage Software with StarWind

    In your home lab environment or production use cases, you may need shared storage for virtualization, scale-out repositories, high availability, hyperconverged infrastructure, and other use cases – free Virtual SAN storage software. You may run various vendor-specific environments like VMware…

  • StarWind HCA appliance architecture with VMware vSphere

    Hyperconverged Infrastructure Trends in 2022

    Unquestionably, hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) is gaining tremendous momentum and adoption in the enterprise data center. In a recent study by the ISG (Information Services Group), in 2020, the HCI market was around $7 billion. The expected revenue will grow substantially…