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Storage Comparison — Ceph vs MinIO vs Longhorn

Summary

A side-by-side comparison of the three storage systems in this vault: Ceph (unified block, object and file on RADOS, LGPL), Longhorn (Kubernetes-native replicated block storage, Apache-2.0, CNCF Incubating) and MinIO (S3-compatible object storage whose AGPLv3 community edition is archived; development continues only in the commercial AIStor product). Versions, licenses, features and limits match the topic pages as of 2026-09-25. For open-source replacements of MinIO, see MinIO Alternatives.

Which One Should I Pick?

The flowchart gives a first cut by storage type and platform. The tables below explain each branch.

flowchart TD
    Q1{"Which storage type<br/>do you need?"}
    Q1 -->|"File (shared POSIX), or<br/>more than one type"| CEPH["Ceph<br/>(RBD + RGW + CephFS)"]
    Q1 -->|"Block only"| Q2{"Running on Kubernetes?"}
    Q1 -->|"Object (S3) only"| Q5{"Open-source license<br/>required?"}

    Q2 -->|"No: VMs, OpenStack,<br/>Proxmox VE"| CEPHRBD["Ceph RBD<br/>(cephadm or pveceph)"]
    Q2 -->|"Yes"| Q3{"Small or medium cluster,<br/>no dedicated storage team?"}
    Q3 -->|"No: large cluster or<br/>many volumes"| ROOK["Ceph via Rook<br/>(Ceph-CSI RBD)"]
    Q3 -->|"Yes"| Q4{"Local NVMe, kernel 6.7+,<br/>spare CPU cores, huge pages?"}
    Q4 -->|"No"| LHV1["Longhorn V1 engine<br/>(iSCSI, default)"]
    Q4 -->|"Yes, latency-sensitive"| LHV2["Longhorn V2 engine<br/>(SPDK, GA in v1.12)"]

    Q5 -->|"No, a subscription is fine"| AISTOR["MinIO AIStor<br/>(Free single node,<br/>Enterprise Lite, Enterprise)"]
    Q5 -->|"Yes"| Q6{"Already run Ceph, or<br/>also need block or file?"}
    Q6 -->|"Yes"| RGW["Ceph RGW"]
    Q6 -->|"No"| ALT["See MinIO Alternatives:<br/>Silo fork, RustFS,<br/>SeaweedFS, Garage"]

MinIO community edition is not a new-deployment option

The minio/minio repository was archived in February 2026 (re-archived on 2026-04-25 after a brief unarchive, as reported), official community binaries and images stopped in October 2025, and the minio/minio Docker Hub images were deleted on 2026-09-11. CVE-2026-39414 is fixed only in AIStor. See MinIO: Community Edition Status.

Quick Reference

Dimension Ceph MinIO Longhorn
Type Unified (block + object + file) Object only (S3) Block (Kubernetes PVs); RWX through NFS
Latest version 20.2.4 "Tentacle" (2026-08-19). Squid 19.2.6 until its 2026-10-31 target EOL Community: last release RELEASE.2025-10-15T17-29-55Z, repository archived. AIStor: RELEASE.2026-08-07T18-34-35Z (newest seen 2026-09) v1.12.1 (2026-08-14). Also maintained: v1.11.3
License LGPL-2.1 or LGPL-3.0 (core) Community: AGPLv3 (archived). AIStor: proprietary (Free tier) or commercial subscription Apache-2.0
Architecture RADOS cluster; CRUSH placement Server pools of erasure sets; no metadata server Per-volume engine with synchronous replicas
Language C++, Python Go Go. V2 engine builds on SPDK (C)
CNCF Not a CNCF project (Rook, its Kubernetes operator, is) No Incubating (since 2021-11-04)
Scale Exabyte-scale deployments; CERN tested more than 10,000 OSDs No documented limit on servers or drives; grow by adding server pools Official scale tests stop at 9 workers and about 1,500 volumes (v1.6.1 report)
Governance Ceph Foundation (Linux Foundation) plus Steering Committee; IBM, CLYSO, Canonical among contributors MinIO, Inc. (single vendor) CNCF; maintained mainly by SUSE (sold as SUSE Storage)

Storage Interface Coverage

Interface Ceph MinIO Longhorn
Block Yes: RBD (librbd, krbd, Ceph-CSI) No Yes: CSI volumes. V1 uses iSCSI, V2 uses NVMe-TCP between engine and node
Object (S3) Yes: RGW (S3 and Swift) Yes: native S3 No (uses S3 only as a backup target)
File (shared) Yes: CephFS, a POSIX distributed filesystem No Partial: RWX through one NFSv4.1 share-manager pod per volume, not a distributed filesystem
NVMe-oF export Yes: NVMe/TCP gateway (cephadm service since Reef, much expanded in Tentacle) No No external export. NVMe-TCP is the V2 engine's internal frontend
SMB Yes: SMB manager module, GA in Tentacle (cephadm only) No No
NFS Yes: NFS-Ganesha exports of CephFS or RGW No Yes, for RWX volumes only

Architecture Comparison

Aspect Ceph MinIO Longhorn
Deployment Dedicated hosts (cephadm), Kubernetes (Rook v1.20), or Proxmox VE (pveceph) Single binary on Linux hosts, or Kubernetes via the frozen Operator v7.1.1 Kubernetes only (Helm, manifests, GitOps); manager DaemonSet plus per-node instance managers
Data placement CRUSH maps PGs to OSDs by failure domain Object name hashed to an erasure set; Reed-Solomon shards across its drives Replicas scheduled with node, zone and disk anti-affinity
Data protection Replicated pools (default size 3) or EC pools (FastEC opt-in in Tentacle) Erasure coding, default EC:4 for sets of 8-16 drives; HighwayHash bitrot checks Synchronous replication (default 3 replicas). Erasure-coded V2 sharding is experimental in v1.12.1
Minimum footprint 3 monitors plus 3 OSD hosts for size-3 pools 4 homogeneous nodes for distributed HA; single-node single-drive and multi-drive modes exist but give little or no availability 3 nodes recommended for 3 replicas (use 2 replicas with fewer nodes)
Kubernetes integration Rook operator and Ceph-CSI (RBD, CephFS) S3 over HTTP; Operator frozen at v7.1.1 Native CSI driver driver.longhorn.io
Management cephadm, Ceph Dashboard, ceph CLI Community: mc (archived; mcli fork) and an object-browser-only console. AIStor and the Silo fork have a full admin console Longhorn UI (no built-in authentication), kubectl, longhornctl
Multi-site / DR RBD mirroring between clusters; RGW multisite Site replication (active-active) Backups to S3, NFS, SMB or Azure Blob; DR standby volumes in another cluster

Use Case Decision Matrix

Use case Recommendation
OpenStack or VM block storage Ceph RBD: the standard OpenStack backend and the Proxmox VE hyperconverged option
Kubernetes PVs, small to medium cluster Longhorn: Helm install, local disks only, no storage team needed
Kubernetes PVs, large cluster Ceph via Rook: scales further than Longhorn's tested range
Latency-sensitive databases on Kubernetes with local NVMe Longhorn V2 (SPDK, dedicated cores and huge pages) or Ceph RBD; benchmark both, no controlled comparison is published
S3-compatible object storage, open source Ceph RGW, or a lighter store from MinIO Alternatives
S3-compatible object storage, commercial OK MinIO AIStor (Free tier is single node only)
AI/ML data lakes MinIO AIStor (AIStor Tables: Iceberg V3 REST catalog) if commercial is acceptable, or Ceph RGW
Shared POSIX file system Ceph (CephFS). Longhorn RWX (NFS per volume) suits modest RWX needs only
Edge / lightweight (K3s, RKE2) Longhorn V1. V2 needs dedicated CPU cores and huge pages, so the small footprint applies to V1 only
KubeVirt / Harvester VM disks Longhorn (migratable RWX block volumes)
Unified block + object + file Ceph: the only unified option here

Operational Complexity

Dimension Ceph MinIO Longhorn
Install complexity High: cluster design, network and hardware planning Low for the binary itself, but community builds are now source-only; use AIStor or fork packages Low (Helm chart). Needs open-iscsi (V1), NFS client for RWX, privileged pods
Team expertise Storage engineering team DevOps / SRE Any Kubernetes admin
Upgrades Rolling upgrades via cephadm or Rook; two stable series at a time AIStor or fork releases; community gets none One minor version at a time; V2 volumes must be detached
Day-2 operations Heavy: OSD replacement, rebalancing, PG tuning; August 2026 CephX aes256k key rotation Light operationally, but the community edition is unpatched Light; watch replica rebuilds and attach/detach throughput at high volume counts
Monitoring Dashboard + Prometheus exporter in ceph-mgr Prometheus v2 endpoints (bearer token) UI + Prometheus metrics from longhorn-manager

Security releases in 2026

Ceph 20.2.4 and 19.2.6 (2026-08-19) fix four high-severity CVEs, including a CephX authentication bypass and two RGW flaws; after upgrading, every CephX key must be rotated to aes256k (Ceph How-to). The MinIO community edition gets no fixes for advisories published after the archive (MinIO Reference).

Using Them Together

Longhorn and MinIO are not mutually exclusive: Longhorn backs up volumes to any S3-compatible target, including MinIO-compatible stores and Ceph RGW. Ceph can replace both when one team wants a single system.

Sources