List of the Top 14 On-Prem Software-Defined Storage (SDS) in 2025

SoftNAS represents a cloud-native, software-defined product line designed specifically for enterprise cloud NAS filers. Its versatility allows it to serve as a primary or secondary data storage solution while also facilitating hybrid cloud data integration, enabling existing applications to connect to the cloud securely without the need for extensive modifications. Equipped with enterprise-grade NAS functionalities, SoftNAS ensures high availability alongside features like deduplication, compression, and thin-provisioning. Additionally, it seamlessly integrates with LDAP and Active Directory, thereby safeguarding mission-critical data and optimizing the management of primary, hot, and backup/archive data, ultimately enhancing the efficiency and reliability of cloud data migration. With a diverse array of storage options that balance cost and performance, SoftNAS is available on-demand and can scale to petabytes across both AWS and Azure Marketplaces, as well as on-premises setups using VMware, making it an attractive choice for businesses seeking flexible storage solutions. Furthermore, its robust architecture is designed to adapt easily to the evolving needs of modern enterprises.

Traditional storage providers won't achieve an 80% reduction in costs while enhancing performance by tenfold. However, we can deliver on that promise. Croit stands out as Europe's rapidly expanding storage software firm, earning accolades such as the Deloitte Technology Fast 50 and recognition as one of the Top 100 Innovators in Germany. With Ceph, you gain the most affordable storage solution available globally, whereas DAOS offers unmatched speed. You have the flexibility to select one, the other, or both solutions. Our software-defined storage appliance installs Linux alongside Ceph or DAOS in mere minutes and enables efficient management of 40 Petabytes per administrator. We streamline processes, cutting down days of work to mere minutes and minimizing incidents to nearly nothing. We serve as your and your supervisor's essential tool for revolutionizing the economics and performance of your storage services, ensuring you stay ahead in today's competitive landscape.

Are you facing challenges with storage management that keep you awake at night? Whether you struggle with the complexities of managing varied storage tiers for hot, warm, and cold data, or you are dealing with performance issues and disruptions, a comprehensive software-defined storage solution can bring you peace of mind. DataCore SANsymphony allows for centralized automation and management of capacity provisioning and data placement across a wide array of storage environments, including SAN, DAS, HCI, or JBOD. Utilizing advanced block-level storage virtualization technology along with a robust suite of data services, SANsymphony offers unparalleled flexibility in how you store and safeguard your data. DataCore's software-defined storage (SDS) solution equips organizations with the performance, simplicity, and adaptability necessary to effectively consolidate various isolated storage resources into a single, highly available pool of storage services. Furthermore, DataCore SANsymphony supports an assortment of deployment models, such as hyper-converged, converged (SAN), and storage virtualization, to alleviate the business risks, IT complexities, and financial burdens linked to diverse architectures, data migration projects, and protocols. This ultimately enhances your organization's agility and strengthens its competitive position in the market. Thanks to DataCore's hardware-agnostic strategy, you can seamlessly integrate existing resources without being tied to specific vendors.

Are you finding it challenging to provide access to ever-expanding data sets or facilitate distributed content-based applications? While tape storage is a budget-friendly option, it often suffers from availability issues and can be cumbersome to handle. Additionally, utilizing public cloud services can lead to unpredictable and escalating costs, along with difficulties in meeting privacy standards and performance expectations. DataCore Swarm offers an on-premises object storage solution that streamlines the management, storage, and protection of data. It provides S3/HTTP access for various applications, devices, and users. With Swarm, your data archive evolves into a dynamic, easily accessible content library that supports remote workflows, instant access, and extensive scalability, ensuring your organization's needs are continuously met. This transformation ultimately enhances operational efficiency and responsiveness.

Open-E JovianDSS is an advanced software solution based on ZFS and Linux, tailored for enterprise-level Software Defined Storage (SDS). This robust platform serves as a complete answer for data backup, business continuity, and disaster recovery needs. With a focus on maintaining data integrity, security, and reliability, Open-E JovianDSS stands out as a formidable option for organizations. Its adaptable and hardware-independent architecture enables cost-effective storage strategies that empower businesses to maximize their resources while safeguarding essential data. Built-in features for backup and disaster recovery, including High Availability, Off-site Data Protection, and Read-only snapshots, are designed to support uninterrupted business operations and reduce the risk of disruptions. Furthermore, Open-E JovianDSS is a dynamic solution that evolves alongside the changing landscape of IT requirements, ensuring a secure, scalable, and efficient environment for managing vital enterprise information effectively. Overall, it represents a strategic investment in an organization’s data management infrastructure.

Utilize a holistic enterprise storage solution to integrate block, file, and object data locally, providing a cloud-like experience. IBM Storage Ceph emerges as a comprehensive storage platform, enabling businesses to eliminate data silos while offering a cloud-native ambiance that helps reduce costs and accelerate provisioning. As IT leaders shift from traditional storage methods to more integrated enterprise solutions, they discover that these platforms proficiently handle a variety of modern workloads within both on-premises and hybrid environments, thereby optimizing IT operations and adapting to changing demands. Unique in its ability, IBM Storage Ceph consolidates block, file, and object data protocols into a single software-defined system, effectively catering to diverse enterprise operational workloads and minimizing the long-term costs tied to maintaining disjointed storage infrastructures. This innovative approach not only boosts efficiency but also empowers organizations to better tackle future challenges in data management. Furthermore, the unified platform ensures that data is readily accessible and scalable, enhancing overall organizational agility.

MooseFS introduces an innovative approach to the Big Data Storage sector by merging data storage with processing capabilities on standard hardware, leading to a remarkable return on investment. Our company specializes in providing expert consultation and professional services tailored to storage solutions, along with implementation and ongoing support for your operational needs. Established in 2008 as a spinoff from Gemius, a prominent European firm that conducts internet measurements across more than 20 nations, MooseFS has evolved into one of the most desirable data storage software options worldwide. It remains integral to Gemius' primary operations, managing an impressive volume of over 300,000 events analyzed each second, continuously around the clock. Each solution we propose to our clients is rigorously tested within a genuine Big Data Analytics environment, ensuring reliability and effectiveness. This commitment to quality and performance sets us apart in the ever-evolving landscape of data storage technology.

Scality provides customized file and object storage solutions designed for effective enterprise data management at any scale. Our offerings easily blend with your current infrastructure, accommodating both traditional on-premises systems and cutting-edge cloud-native applications. Whether dealing with critical healthcare and financial records, classified government information, treasured national artifacts, or streaming video, Scality has proven its ability to protect essential assets, boasting an outstanding eleven 9s of data durability for enduring security. With our unwavering dedication to reliability, you can have confidence that your data is well-managed and secure. Additionally, our solutions are designed to evolve alongside your business needs, ensuring that you remain equipped for future challenges.

OpenIO is a cutting-edge, open-source object storage platform designed specifically for Big Data, high-performance computing (HPC), and artificial intelligence (AI) applications. Its unique distributed grid framework, driven by the proprietary self-learning ConsciousGrid™ technology, facilitates seamless scalability without necessitating data rebalancing, all while ensuring consistently high performance. This solution supports S3 compatibility and can be deployed in either on-premises or cloud environments, making it suitable for any hardware setup you choose. You can easily expand your storage capacity from Terabytes to Exabytes simply by incorporating additional nodes, which not only increases capacity but also enhances performance linearly. With the ability to transfer data at speeds of 1 Tbps and higher, OpenIO guarantees reliable performance even when scaling operations are underway. This platform is especially adept at handling intense workloads that demand significant storage capacity. You have the option to choose servers and storage media that meet your evolving needs, effectively avoiding vendor lock-in and ensuring flexibility. Moreover, OpenIO allows for the seamless integration of diverse hardware with varying specifications, generations, and capacities at any point, ensuring your system remains adaptable as your requirements change. This remarkable level of adaptability, coupled with robust performance, positions OpenIO as an attractive option for organizations in search of a dynamic storage solution that can keep pace with their growth. Its ability to evolve in tandem with technological advancements further enhances its appeal, making it a forward-thinking choice for future-oriented businesses.

NetApp ONTAP Select offers robust enterprise storage solutions that can be easily deployed on your chosen commodity hardware within your data center. By combining the agility and precise capacity scaling of cloud services with the flexibility, resilience, and proximity of local storage, it fosters a highly effective hybrid environment. This innovative system converts a server’s internal disk drives—whether NVMe, SSD, or HDD—alongside HCI and external array storage, into a flexible and adaptable storage infrastructure, providing numerous advantages similar to dedicated storage systems powered by NetApp® ONTAP® data management software. Users can swiftly initiate storage resources with the efficiency of cloud services, moving from initial setup to active data serving in just minutes. It facilitates seamless data movement and replication, ensuring consistent management across your data fabric. You can dynamically expand capacity and boost performance to meet changing business needs. Moreover, it supports Extreme Edge deployments, making it suitable for mobile or autonomous vehicles, remote industrial environments, and tactical field operations, thus broadening its range of applications. This versatility makes it an optimal choice for organizations aiming to enhance their storage strategy across a variety of operational contexts, ultimately leading to improved efficiency and resource utilization.

GlusterFS is a flexible network filesystem tailored for high-performance applications, such as cloud storage and media streaming services. Being both open source and free, it is designed to work seamlessly with standard hardware. This software serves as a scalable, distributed file system that integrates storage resources from multiple servers into a single global namespace. Organizations can easily adjust their storage capacity, performance, and availability as their needs grow, without being locked into a particular vendor, whether they are utilizing on-premises infrastructure, public cloud environments, or hybrid configurations. A variety of industries, including media, healthcare, government, education, web 2.0, and financial services, have successfully implemented GlusterFS within their production workflows. The system can effectively scale to several petabytes and adeptly handle thousands of clients while maintaining POSIX compliance. It runs on standard commodity hardware and is compatible with any on-disk filesystem that permits extended attributes. Additionally, GlusterFS can be accessed through popular protocols such as NFS and SMB, and it boasts vital features like replication, quotas, geo-replication, snapshots, and bitrot detection, all of which contribute to ensuring data integrity and availability. The combination of its versatility and powerful features positions GlusterFS as an appealing option for organizations striving to enhance their data storage solutions. With its ability to adapt to various technological landscapes, GlusterFS continues to be a valuable asset for businesses looking to innovate in their data management strategies.

We help our clients achieve remarkable operational efficiency and cost savings for both private and public cloud storage solutions. Our cutting-edge software-defined block storage solution, Lightbits, enables organizations to effortlessly scale their operations, improve IT workflows, and reduce costs, all while harnessing the speed of local flash technology. This innovative solution severs the conventional connection between computing and storage, enabling independent resource allocation that brings the adaptability and effectiveness of cloud computing to on-premises setups. Our technology not only guarantees low latency and outstanding performance but also ensures high availability for distributed databases and cloud-native applications, including SQL, NoSQL, and in-memory systems. As data centers grow, a major challenge persists: applications and services that operate at scale must remain stateful during their migrations within the data center to ensure consistent accessibility and efficiency, even in the face of frequent failures. This level of adaptability is crucial for upholding operational stability and maximizing resource utilization in a constantly changing digital environment. Moreover, our commitment to innovation means we continually refine our solutions to meet the evolving needs of businesses in this dynamic landscape.

SwiftStack offers a flexible solution for data storage and management, tailored for applications and workflows that depend heavily on data, facilitating easy access to information across both private and public cloud environments. Its on-premises component, SwiftStack Storage, provides a scalable object and file storage system that starts from tens of terabytes and can expand to accommodate hundreds of petabytes. By integrating existing enterprise data into the SwiftStack platform, organizations can improve accessibility for modern cloud-native applications without undergoing a cumbersome storage migration, making effective use of their current tier 1 storage. Additionally, SwiftStack 1space enhances data management by distributing information across multiple clouds, in accordance with policies set by operators, which brings users and applications closer to the data they require. This system establishes a unified addressable namespace, ensuring that the movement of data within the platform is both seamless and transparent to users and applications, thereby improving the efficiency of data access and management. Furthermore, this strategy alleviates the challenges associated with handling data in multi-cloud settings, allowing organizations to concentrate on their primary business functions while enjoying streamlined data operations. The result is a more integrated and user-friendly environment for managing vast amounts of data.

Microsoft Azure StorSimple is crafted to meet the needs of applications that emphasize both performance and storage capacity, providing a robust hybrid cloud storage solution specifically designed for businesses. It merges the benefits of traditional physical arrays suitable for data center applications with virtual arrays that are perfect for smaller business environments like branch offices that require network-attached storage (NAS). This flexible infrastructure reduces the necessity for costly on-premises hardware for unique projects or new ventures. Moreover, users can enhance performance by utilizing local storage, allowing them to maintain all volume data locally for faster access. StorSimple also empowers organizations to efficiently manage data growth by automatically archiving inactive primary data from local servers to the cloud, thereby simplifying capacity expansion. In addition, you can eliminate the need for separate backup systems by implementing cloud snapshots, which provide off-site data protection while also negating the need for remote data replication to a secondary data center through cloud storage options. This forward-thinking strategy not only optimizes data management but also significantly improves operational efficiency throughout the organization. By embracing this hybrid approach, businesses can focus on innovation while ensuring their data infrastructure is both scalable and resilient.