Best Software-Defined Storage (SDS) for Cloud
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Compare the Top Software-Defined Storage (SDS) for Cloud as of October 2025
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What is Software-Defined Storage (SDS) for Cloud?
Software-defined storage (SDS) is a data storage solution architecture whereby the hardware that handles the data storage is independent of the software layer of the storage system. Compare and read user reviews of the best Software-Defined Storage (SDS) for Cloud currently available using the table below. This list is updated regularly.
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QuantaStor
OSNEXUS
QuantaStor is a unified Software-Defined Storage platform designed to scale up and out to make storage management easy while reducing overall enterprise storage costs. With support for all major file, block, and object protocols including iSCSI/FC, NFS/SMB, and S3, QuantaStor storage grids may be configured to address the needs of complex workflows which span sites and datacenters. QuantaStor’s storage grid technology is a built-in federated management system which enables QuantaStor servers to be combined together to simplify management and automation via CLI and REST APIs. The layered architecture of QuantaStor provides solution engineers with unprecedented flexibility and application design options that maximizes workload performance and fault-tolerance for a wide range of storage workloads. QuantaStor includes end-to-end security coverage enabling multi-layer data protection “on the wire” and “at rest” for enterprise and cloud storage deployments.Starting Price: $/TB based on scale -
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SoftNAS
Buurst
SoftNAS is a cloud-native, software-defined, full-featured enterprise cloud NAS filer product line for primary data storage, secondary storage and hybrid cloud data integration. It enables existing applications to securely migrate to and connect with the cloud without re-engineering. With enterprise-class NAS features like: high-availability, deduplication, compression, thin-provisioning, snapshots, replication, cloning, encryption (at rest and in transit), LDAP and Active Directory integration, and support for NFS, CIFS, iSCSI or AFP storage protocols, SoftNAS protects mission-critical and primary, active/hot data, backup/archive data and makes cloud data migration faster and more reliable. SoftNAS offers the broadest range of storage options in terms of price vs. performance and backend storage selection, on-demand at petabyte scale across the AWS and Azure Marketplaces or on-premises on VMware. -
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Elastifile
Elastifile
Elastifile solves the data challenges associated with cloud integration, empowering you to burst or "lift and shift" with ease. Cloud-native support for standard storage protocols (NFS) provides seamless compatibility with existing applications. Full enterprise feature-set delivers the functionality and relaiblity required for cloud-integration of business-critical workflows. Natively integrated UIs, monitoring, and billing dramatically simplify cloud storage management. Seamless scalability enables on-demand storage right-sizing...providing flexibility to match dynamic business requirements. Cloud-native architecture blends best aspects of cloud to deliver optimized user experience with lowest cost. Automated data tiering enables cost-effective primary storage and ultra low-cost snapshots. Multi-zone. Any region. High availability.Starting Price: $0.000274 -
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StorMagic SvSAN
StorMagic
StorMagic SvSAN is simple hyperconverged storage used to eliminate downtime. It provides high availability with two nodes per cluster, and boasts users among thousands of organizations to keep mission-critical applications and data online and available 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. SvSAN is a lightweight solution that has been designed specifically for small-to-medium-sized businesses and edge computing environments such as retail stores, manufacturing plants and even oil rigs at sea. SvSAN is a simple, 'set and forget' solution that enables lightweight high availability as a virtual SAN (VSAN) with a witness VM that can be local, in the cloud, or as-a-service, and support up to 1,000 2-node clusters. It gives organizations choice and control by allowing configurations of any x86 servers and storage types, even mixed within a cluster. Plus, SvSAN delivers 100% uptime with synchronous mirroring and no single point of failure, and non-disruptive hardware and software upgrades -
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IBM Storage Scale is software-defined file and object storage that enables organizations to build a global data platform for artificial intelligence (AI), high-performance computing (HPC), advanced analytics, and other demanding workloads. Unlike traditional applications that work with structured data, today’s performance-intensive AI and analytics workloads operate on unstructured data, such as documents, audio, images, videos, and other objects. IBM Storage Scale software provides global data abstraction services that seamlessly connect multiple data sources across multiple locations, including non-IBM storage environments. It’s based on a massively parallel file system and can be deployed on multiple hardware platforms including x86, IBM Power, IBM zSystem mainframes, ARM-based POSIX client, virtual machines, and Kubernetes.Starting Price: $19.10 per terabyte
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DataCore Swarm
DataCore Software
Are you struggling with protecting and providing access to rapidly scaling data sets or enabling distributed content-based use cases? Using tape is cost-effective but data is not instantly accessible; and tape is difficult to manage. The public cloud often presents the challenge of compounding, unpredictable recurring costs, and the inability to meet local performance and privacy requirements. DataCore Swarm provides an on-premises object storage solution that radically simplifies the ability to manage, store, and protect data while allowing S3/HTTP access to any application, device, or end-user. Swarm transforms your data archive into a flexible and immediately accessible content library that enables remote workflows, on-demand access, and massive scalability. -
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Nexenta
Nexenta
Eliminate storage silos with Nexenta's open source-driven storage software. Comprehensive storage management in appliance & configurable reference architectures. The features you need and expect from the leader in software-defined storage. Agile storage software allowing you to take advantage of all-flash, hybrid, and all-HDD options. Nexenta storage software is installed in thousands of companies across the world serving a wide variety of workloads and business-critical situations. It powers some of the world’s largest cloud deployments, hosts some of the industry’s best entertainment content, serves vast quantities of government data across multiple continents and ensures that hundreds of thousands of medical records are kept safe and available at the point of service for healthcare companies located worldwide. -
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StoneFly
StoneFly
StoneFly is the provider of high-performing, elastic and always available IT infrastructure solutions. Coupled with StoneFusion, our intelligent & patented operating system architecture, we can support your data dependent processes and applications seamlessly anywhere, anytime. Configure backup, replication, disaster recovery, scale out block, file and object storage in private and / or public clouds. Support virtual, container hosting & more. StoneFly also offers Cloud data migration services for email, archives, documents, SharePoint and physical and virtual storage. Total backup and disaster recovery solutions in a single appliance or cloud solution. Hyperconverged options allow physical machines to be restored as virtual machines running directly on the StoneFly disaster recovery appliance for instant recovery.Starting Price: $499 -
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Red Hat Gluster Storage
Red Hat
Red Hat Gluster Storage stores data without the need for a metadata server, eliminating any single point of failure. Scale as you grow. Deploy a multi-tenant storage system in a few minutes, without being tied to rigid innovation cycles or specific hardware configurations. Run Red Hat Gluster Storage where it makes the most sense: bare metal, virtualized, containerized, or in the cloud. The transition to digital workflows and content has increased demand for digital storage. Red Hat Gluster Storage is ideal for the media industry. Build cost-effective, agile, and optimal virtual server and storage infrastructures across heterogeneous hardware platforms. Storage needs for media and entertainment are outpacing capacity and budgets. The transition to digital workflows and content has increased demand for digital storage. With lower costs than proprietary storage vendors and the ability to scale on demand, Red Hat Gluster Storage is ideal for the media industry. -
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IBM Storage Ceph
IBM
Consolidate block, file, and object data on-premises with an enterprise storage platform that delivers a cloud-native experience. IBM Storage Ceph is an enterprise storage platform that unifies block, file, and object data to help organizations eliminate data silos and deliver a cloud-like experience while helping reduce costs and provisioning times. IT Leaders are shifting from a traditional storage approach towards integrated enterprise storage platforms that can handle diverse modern workloads seamlessly across on-premises and hybrid environments to simplify IT operations, reduce costs, and adapt to new and changing requirements. IBM Storage Ceph is the only enterprise storage platform that unifies block, file, and object data protocols within a single software-defined solution that can support most enterprise operational workloads to help reduce long-term costs of operating dedicated storage systems, delivering a cloud-like experience on-premises. -
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Scality
Scality
Scality provides file and object storage for enterprise data management deployments of all sizes. We adapt to your environment. Traditional on-prem storage? No problem. Storage for modern cloud-native applications? We’ve got you covered. Whether it’s critical healthcare or financial data, government intelligence, digitized national treasures, streaming video content or any other valued asset — Scality has a proven track record of ensuring eleven 9s data durability and long-term protection. -
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Unified, infinitely scalable and simple to manage storage solution designed for modern data centers. It seamlessly transforms enterprise storage infrastructure into a powerful vehicle to accelerate innovation. SUSE Enterprise Storage is a flexible, reliable, cost-efficient and intelligent storage solution. Powered by Ceph, a cloud-native solution is engineered for a wide range of demanding workloads–from archival to high performance computing (HPC). Available for x86 and Arm architecture, it is deployed on generally available off-the-shelve hardware, allowing businesses to store and efficiently process data in order to get competitive edge–optimize business operations, develop deeper customer insights and business intelligence delivering better products and services. SUSE Enterprise Storage supports Kubernetes and seamlessly integrates with ML/AI, EDGE, IoT and embedded architecture.
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Red Hat Ceph Storage
Red Hat
Red Hat® Ceph Storage is an open, massively scalable, simplified storage solution for modern data pipelines. Engineered for data analytics, artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML), and emerging workloads, Red Hat Ceph Storage delivers software-defined storage on your choice of industry-standard hardware. Scale to unprecedented levels, up to 1 billion objects and beyond, without compromising on performance. Expand or shrink storage clusters with no downtime. Gain the agility you need to get to market faster. Start faster with dramatically simplified installation. Quickly gain insights from massive amounts of unstructured data with streamlined operation, monitoring, and capacity management. Safeguard your data from outside threats and hardware failures with integrated data protection and data security features, including client-side and object-level encryption. Easily handle backup and recovery with a single point of control and administration. -
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OpenIO
OpenIO
OpenIO is a software-defined open source object storage solution ideal for Big Data, HPC and AI. With its distributed grid architecture and unique self-learning ConsciousGrid™ technology, OpenIO scales easily without mandatory data rebalancing, while delivering consistent high performance. OpenIO is S3 compatible and can be deployed on-premises or cloud-hosted, on any hardware that you choose. Scale seamlessly from Terabytes to Exabytes. Simply add nodes to expand capacity, without rebalancing data, and watch as performance increases linearly. Transfer data at 1 Tbps and beyond. Experience consistent high performance, even during scaling operations. Ideal for capacity-intensive and challenging workloads. Use servers and storage media that suit your evolving needs. Avoid vendor lock-in. You can combine heterogenous hardware at any time, of different specs, generations, and capacities. -
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Nutanix AOS Storage
Nutanix
Nutanix AOS Storage is a modern, software-defined storage solution that replaces traditional SAN and NAS systems with a highly automated, high-performance, and scalable infrastructure. It delivers enterprise-grade capabilities through a distributed architecture, ensuring high availability and resilience. Key features include data locality, which stores data close to the application for low latency; intelligent tiering, automatically optimizing data placement between SSD and HDD tiers; and advanced data protection mechanisms like granular snapshots and self-healing capabilities. AOS Storage allows for linear scaling of performance and capacity, enabling organizations to start small and expand seamlessly as their needs evolve. Additionally, it offers flexibility in hypervisor choice and supports various data services, making it suitable for a wide range of applications and workloads. -
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Dell EMC PowerFlex
Dell Technologies
PowerFlex (formerly VxFlex) software-defined storage solutions enable transformational agility for organizations looking to modernize their datacenter operations. PowerFlex enables extreme flexibility, massive scalability, and enterprise-class performance and resiliency while simplifying infrastructure management and operations. PowerFlex empowers organizations to move faster and respond effectively to rapidly changing business needs. It provides unprecedented freedom to deploy and scale the critical workloads that drive your business, while ensuring exceptional simplicity and manageability. Unlock massive performance, scalability, and resiliency with software-first architecture. Respond to changing business needs effortlessly with a flexible, agile foundation. Ensure enterprise-class outcomes with extensive automation and superior workload execution. -
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VMware vSAN
Broadcom
Reduce storage cost and complexity with VMware vSAN, an enterprise-class storage virtualization software that provides the easiest path to HCI and hybrid cloud. Integrated hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) powered by vSAN, combined with vSphere, enables you to manage compute and storage with a single, integrated platform. Take the easiest path to future-ready HCI and hybrid cloud with an integrated solution that improves business agility, speeds operations and lowers costs. Extend virtualization to storage with a secure hyperconverged solution that leverages existing tools and is integrated with your hypervisor and leading public clouds. Achieve better price per performance by supporting the latest storage technology on industry-standard servers. -
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StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN)
StarWind
StarWind VSAN has been designed with small businesses’ needs and restricted IT budgets in mind. It pulls out close to 100% of the IOPS from your existing raw storage —no crazy expensive hardware required. Licensing is flexible and transparent without any pitfalls or feature paywalls. Virtual SAN from StarWind ensures high uptime and fault tolerance starting with just two nodes. You don’t need a witness if you don’t want to have one. Your IT environment won’t skip a beat even if you lose an entire node plus one individual storage device, HDD or SSD. Scale up, down, or out when and how you need it. Operate your HCI clusters through a unified StarWind web UI. Our engineers will assist in migrating your existing workload to StarWind at no extra cost! Our solution has been specifically designed to bring enterprise-grade features to SMBs, which do not operate corporate budgets. StarWind VSAN requires no witnesses and brings all the promised benefits in a two-node scenario already. -
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Vexata
Vexata
The Vexata VX‑100F unleashes the performance of NVMe over fabrics (NVMe-oF) to deliver breakthrough economics and transformative performance. The Vexata architecture removes excess latency from the storage controller to consistently deliver high performance at scale to accelerate application response time. Real-time analytics requires heavy data ingest and processing, Vexata Accelerated Data Architecture delivers more throughput and faster response times. Vexata shatters the traditional cost/performance barrier with a scalable solid state storage platform that accelerates application and analytics ecosystems. VX-Cloud is the first and only software-defined solution built to support all Machine Learning stages to support the performance and scale of cognitive and AI workloads for Cloud scale and economics. -
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Improve the way you manage, protect and store data, with unlimited access to select IBM SDS products and IBM Cloud®Object Storage. IBM Storage Software Suite provides a unified interface that streamlines data management, and cost-per-TB pricing makes it easier to plan as your capacity grows. Non-production use of the software in test environments is included. Straightforward per-TB pricing for the entire suite is related to the amount of storage capacity, not the type of storage or how it is used. There are no licensing headaches when changing from one type of storage to another or from one data type to another. All the IBM Storage Software Suite products share a consistent user interface, reducing user errors and the need for training. All the products are designed to work together, streamlining integration and worldwide support for the complete solution.
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QxStor
QCT
Cloud native technology has been highlighted in modern cloud infrastructure design for its light weight and high portability. It also achieves efficient development and operation (DevOps), thereby facilitating agile service deployment and business innovation. To accelerate cloud-native transformation at minimized expenses, QCT validated the Red Hat® OpenShift Container Platform and Kubernetes Platform to ensure high-quality service and performance. QCT QxStack with Cloud-Native Platform is a Platform as a Service (PaaS) solution built on the Red Hat® OpenShift® Container Platform and strengthened by Intel Enhanced Platform Awareness (EPA) technology. The production-ready performance-optimized solution features a Hyper Converged Infrastructure (HCI) architecture that supports VMs and container coexistence and allows resource sharing. Furthermore, with exceptional network performance and stability, the solution achieves ideal CAPEX and OPEX in all stages of new technology implementation. -
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HPE Pointnext
Hewlett Packard
This confluence put new demands on HPC storage as the input/output patterns of both workloads could not be more different. And it is happening right now. A recent study of the independent analyst firm Intersect360 found out that 63% of the HPC users today already are running machine learning programs. Hyperion Research forecasts that, at current course and speed, HPC storage spending in public sector organizations and enterprises will grow 57% faster than spending for HPC compute for the next three years. Seymour Cray once said, "Anyone can build a fast CPU. The trick is to build a fast system.” When it comes to HPC and AI, anyone can build fast file storage. The trick is to build a fast, but also cost-effective and scalable file storage system. We achieve this by embedding the leading parallel file systems into parallel storage products from HPE with cost effectiveness built in. -
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Acronis Cyber Infrastructure
Acronis
Meet modern IT demands with Acronis Cyber Infrastructure – a multi-tenant, hyper-converged infrastructure solution for cyber protection. Reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) and maximize productivity with a trusted IT infrastructure solution that runs disaster recovery workloads and stores backup data in an easy, efficient, and secure way. Acronis Cyber Infrastructure has been optimized to work with Acronis Cyber Cloud’s suite of products to ensure seamless operation. Leverage a solution that fits any business model. It separates the software from the hardware and offers flexible licensing, including a pay-as-you-go model. Ensure that systems are up and running smoothly and troubleshoot problems before they impact end-users or third-party systems. Built-in management and monitoring tools make it easy. Solve data integrity issues and ensure your data is secure with integrated Acronis CloudRAID and Acronis Notary with blockchain technology to verify data authenticity. -
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ONTAP Select
NetApp
NetApp ONTAP Select offers robust enterprise storage services that are easily deployed on your choice of commodity hardware from the comfort of your own data center. It combines the best of the cloud, in terms of agility and granular capacity scaling, with the flexibility, resilience, and locality of on-premises storage. ONTAP Select converts a server’s internal disk drives, NVMe, SSD or HDD, as well as HCI and external array storage, into an agile, flexible storage system with many of the same benefits offered by dedicated storage systems based on NetApp® ONTAP® data management software. Spin up storage resources with cloudlike agility from start to serving data in just minutes. Move and replicate data easily with consistent management across your data fabric. Dynamically add capacity and scale performance to meet changing business needs. And deploy Extreme Edge for mobile or autonomous vehicles, remote industrial environments, and tactical field deployments. -
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IBM Elastic Storage System (ESS) is a modern implementation of software-defined storage, making it easier for you to deploy fast, highly scalable storage for AI and big data. With the low latency and high performance NVMe storage technology and 8YB global file system and global data services of IBM Spectrum Scale, the ESS 3200 and ESS 5000 nodes can grow to YB configurations in a single federated global storage system from edge to core data center to the public cloud. By consolidating storage requirements and eliminating silos across multiple platforms — including Kubernetes and Red Hat OpenShift — IBM ESS can reduce inefficiency, lower acquisition costs, simplify storage management and support multiple demanding workloads, delivering high performance throughout your organization.
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GlusterFS
Gluster
GlusterFS is a scalable network filesystem suitable for data-intensive tasks such as cloud storage and media streaming. GlusterFS is free and open source software and can utilize common off-the-shelf hardware. Gluster is a scalable, distributed file system that aggregates disk storage resources from multiple servers into a single global namespace. Enterprises can scale capacity, performance, and availability on demand, with no vendor lock-in, across on-premise, public cloud, and hybrid environments. Gluster is used in production at thousands of organisations spanning media, healthcare, government, education, web 2.0, and financial services. Scales to several petabytes, handles thousands of clients, POSIX compatible, uses commodity hardware, can use any ondisk filesystem that supports extended attributes, accessible using industry standard protocols like NFS and SMB, provides replication, quotas, geo-replication, snapshots and bitrot detection, and more. -
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Azure StorSimple
Microsoft
Microsoft Azure StorSimple meets the needs of performance- and capacity-centric applications, and gives you a complete hybrid cloud storage solution for enterprises. It’s the best of both worlds—physical arrays for deployments in datacenters and virtual arrays for smaller enterprise environments like remote and branch offices, which require network-attached storage (NAS). Its on-demand infrastructure means you don’t need to set up or maintain costly on-premises equipment for new or special projects. Also, by using local storage for performance, you have the flexibility to retain all volume data locally. Manage your data growth more effectively—StorSimple can automatically archive inactive primary data from on-premises to the cloud to create effortless capacity expansion. Remove the need for separate backup infrastructures with cloud snapshots that provide off-site data protection, and eliminate the need for remote replication of data to a secondary datacenter with cloud storage. -
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Red Hat® OpenShift® Data Foundation—previously Red Hat OpenShift Container Storage—is software-defined storage for containers. Engineered as the data and storage services platform for Red Hat OpenShift, Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation helps teams develop and deploy applications quickly and efficiently across clouds. Developers—even those with limited storage expertise—can provision storage directly from Red Hat OpenShift without switching to a separate user interface. Format data as files, blocks, or objects to support all kinds of workloads created by enterprise Kubernetes users. Our technical experts can work with you to find an approach that meets your storage needs for hybrid cloud and multicloud container deployments.
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Lightbits
Lightbits Labs
We help our customers achieve hyperscale efficiency and cost savings for their own private cloud or public cloud storage as a service offering. With our software-defined block storage solution, Lightbits, customers scale their business effortlessly, accelerate IT operations, and reduce cost – at the speed of local flash. Break the dependency between compute and storage to allocate resources independently to bring the flexibility and efficiency of the cloud on-premises. Deliver low latency and high performance while guaranteeing high availability for your distributed databases and cloud native applications such as SQL, NoSQL, and “in memory”. With the constant growth of data in the forever available data center, one of the critical challenges is that applications and services running at scale must stay stateful as they migrate around the data center in order to keep services available and efficient in the presence of constant failures. -
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FlashOS
Burlywood
Burlywood FlashOS™ is the industry’s first flash storage architecture that analyzes application behavior at the flash controller level, tunes SSD performance & features to be a perfect fit for the application, and delivers measurable benefits to the bottom line for customers deploying cloud storage, all-flash arrays, and hyper-converged solutions. Our purpose-built FlashOS™ controller technology enables the next generation SSDs for the data center. The first software-defined SSD solution for today’s complex cloud applications. Deep analysis and understanding of your storage environment. A unique, flexible software business model gives you control of the supply chain and costs. The only application-focused, adaptable solution for storage. Technical and strategic support during all phases of the lifecycle. Legacy storage can not keep pace with today’s complex cloud applications.