MinIO, Ceph and Scality are three of the software-defined storage platforms UK teams reach for when they want to own their storage, and choosing between them is usually argued on features and licensing. There is another lens that matters just as much to the people paying for the racks: the hardware each one demands. The three platforms have genuinely different appetites for CPU, memory, drives and networking per node, and matching the host hardware to the platform is how you avoid an under-resourced cluster or money spent on resources the software cannot use. This compares the three strictly by the hardware they ask for.
Three platforms, three hardware appetites
It is tempting to treat all software-defined storage as the same hardware problem, but the platforms differ in what they lean on. MinIO is deliberately lightweight and simple, designed for high-performance S3-compatible object storage with a small footprint per node. Ceph is a unified, feature-rich platform that provides object, block and file from one cluster, and that breadth comes with a heavier per-node resource appetite. Scality is an enterprise-grade platform aimed at very large, durable object and file deployments.
Those differences are not marketing; they show up directly in the bill of materials. The same petabyte built on each platform will want different amounts of memory per node, different CPU, and a different balance of flash to capacity. Comparing them by hardware, rather than only by features, is the part of the decision that determines what the cluster actually costs to build and run, which is why we look at it explicitly when designing on the HPE Apollo platform.
MinIO: lightweight and flash-friendly
MinIO's appeal is its simplicity and performance. It is light on per-node resources compared with a full unified platform, which makes it well suited to high-performance, S3-only object storage where you want speed without a heavy operational footprint. It pairs naturally with fast drives, including all-flash nodes, when the workload is performance-led, because its lean design does not waste the speed of the underlying media.
That lightness makes MinIO a strong fit for performance-oriented object workloads and for teams who want a smaller, simpler cluster. The hardware story is correspondingly straightforward: balanced nodes with fast networking, drives matched to whether the workload is capacity- or performance-led, and modest memory relative to the heavier platforms. It is the platform that asks the least of each node while still scaling out, which keeps the per-node cost down.
- •Lightest per-node resource appetite of the three
- •S3-only object storage, simple to operate
- •Pairs well with fast or all-flash nodes for performance
- •Modest memory per node relative to Ceph and Scality
Ceph: unified, memory-hungry
Ceph is the most capable of the three and the most demanding per node. Because it delivers object, block and file from one cluster and manages everything itself, it leans heavily on memory, with each OSD needing a working allowance that multiplies across a dense node, and it benefits from a flash tier for its write-ahead log and metadata. A Ceph node is therefore a more substantial build than a MinIO node of the same capacity.
That cost buys breadth and flexibility: one cluster serving object, block and file, with mature resilience and a large ecosystem. If you need more than object storage, Ceph's unified nature can replace several systems, which can justify its heavier per-node footprint. The hardware discipline is to size the memory for the OSD count plus recovery headroom and add the flash tier, which we cover in depth in our guide to building a Ceph node on the HPE Apollo, with the right memory and RAM.
Scality: enterprise scale and durability
Scality is built for very large, enterprise object and file deployments where durability and scale at the petabyte-and-beyond level are the priority. It is the platform organisations choose when the dataset is huge, the retention long and the operational expectations enterprise-grade, and its hardware appetite reflects that: substantial, balanced nodes designed to scale to large clusters and to protect data with efficient erasure coding across many nodes.
The hardware story for Scality is one of balanced, capacity-led nodes at scale rather than the leanness of MinIO or the unified breadth of Ceph. It suits large backup, archive and data-lake roles where the value is in durable capacity and enterprise support, and the node design follows the same dense-storage principles, capacity drives presented through HBAs, a metadata flash tier, and fast networking, sized for a large multi-node cluster from the outset.
Common ground: what every SDS node needs
Whatever the platform, some hardware rules are universal. Present the drives through a host bus adapter in pass-through mode so the software owns each disk and manages redundancy, never a hardware RAID controller. Give every node fast, redundant networking, with 25GbE a sensible baseline and higher for dense or busy nodes, and separate cluster traffic from client traffic on larger clusters. Choose the right drives with our SSD and NVMe guidance.
And every one of these platforms is multi-node by design: durability and availability come from spreading data with replication or erasure coding across enough nodes to survive failures, so the smallest sensible cluster on any of them is several balanced nodes, not one. The platform changes the per-node recipe; it does not change the need for a resilient minimum cluster. Those shared rules are the foundation on which the platform-specific differences sit.
Putting it together
Choose the platform on features and operations, but cost and size the cluster on its hardware appetite: MinIO for lean, high-performance object storage with modest nodes; Ceph for unified object, block and file at the price of memory-hungry nodes plus a flash tier; Scality for enterprise-scale, durable object and file on balanced capacity nodes. All three want HBA pass-through, fast redundant networking and a resilient minimum node count. We design the right nodes for each on the HPE Apollo platform with the appropriate SSD and NVMe and memory tiers.