We performed a comparison between IBM Spectrum Virtualize and VMware vSAN based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Software Defined Storage (SDS) solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."The ability to add the virtual machine on the Spectrum environment to sort out the data movers(DMs) and their schedules is a valuable feature. You are able to have, for example, four data movers to balance them so you do not have too much work on one data mover."
"It provides transparency, because of its advanced copy features."
"The abstraction flair and the abstraction layer. We had a mixture of different storage arrays, and the wonderful thing about SVC is is that it normalizes all it into a single driver. A single view that all hosts see simultaneously."
"One of the main features of Spectrum Virtualize is it virtualizes the servers from the storage. We have a very large infrastructure. A major advantage is when you get the aged storage arrays and you have to replace all of those."
"We are happy with the support that IBM provides us."
"The SVC gives excellent performance with tiered storage behind it."
"It is a single pane of glass management interface, so once the storage is allocated to SVC, they only have one place to go to manage it for everything."
"It has the ability to seamlessly move hardware in and out as we refresh technology."
"To me, VMware is a leader of the visualizations. I think everyone just follow VMware."
"The ability to have a disaster recovery option for our end-users by being able to use VDI and the vSANs, and the ability to do replication across multiple data centers, are valuable to us."
"Stretched Cluster is one of the big features that we use across multiple data centers."
"You get the benefit of local storage, but you have the protection of shared storage."
"By eliminating dependency on that back-end storage, we now depend on everything that's in the VMkernel with vSAN. We eliminate the middleman."
"The product's initial setup phase is simple."
"The feature that I have found most valuable is that it is easy to deploy. It is easy to create and delete virtual servers. It is easy to create the load balancing and the clustering."
"VMware vSAN is an easy to use and easy to manage storage solution. Deploying and upgrading are easy. Technical support is very good."
"The only errors I find sometimes is the solution tells me I cannot operate it because a service has turned off, you can just go back to the VM, go to services, and turn back the services. However, this should improve."
"Anything which improves performance and the ability of our systems would be a nice."
"I would like to see more baseline replication and integration with the operating system between Vmware and IBMI."
"I already discussed possible improvements with some of the guys from Hearnsley. One of our frustrations is when you go to expand volumes in a global mirror environment, you have to stop everything in order to expand. So that's one of the things."
"I hate I/O groups. If you start swapping I/O groups, they can be potentially risky. If they could get rid of the whole I/O group principle, the risk is not there anymore. I understand the fundamental thing about I/O groups, but they are risky."
"Tighter integration with cloud storage might be useful as a target for a variety of use cases."
"GUI should be developed in HTML5 as opposed to Java."
"t is limited in terms of a single system to eight nodes or four, what they call IO groups."
"Ease of administration is one area where vSAN could be improved."
"There's a lot that can be done to segregate. That may be available now in vSAN 7, I suppose, however, the deduplication and compression can be segregated."
"When we talk about improvements for vSAN, there is some way to go from a at least stability perspective. Adding all these new features is nice, but we are now at the level that most of the features you need in production are there."
"What I would like to see, for the really small customers, is the ability to have two nodes."
"It needs to be vanilla. There shouldn't be any custom drivers, any custom anything. It should just be, "Hey, you know what? These drivers are going to work for this version, the next version, and the following version after that." That's the difficulty in this. It takes too much upkeep... The main issue is drivers. Every time we move to a new vSAN version, we're having problems finding the correct drivers for the vendor."
"Integration could be better."
"Hardware load balancing is available on the enterprise version of the solution, however, it's extremely expensive and therefore out of our budget."
"The solution functions as the marketing says, as long as you follow certain rules."
IBM Spectrum Virtualize is ranked 14th in Software Defined Storage (SDS) with 35 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 2nd in HCI with 227 reviews. IBM Spectrum Virtualize is rated 8.8, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of IBM Spectrum Virtualize writes "Robust, stable, with good performance, and easy to implement". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSAN writes "Very stable, easy to set up, and easy to use". IBM Spectrum Virtualize is most compared with Dell VPLEX, VxRail, IBM Spectrum Scale, DataCore SANsymphony and Red Hat Ceph Storage, whereas VMware vSAN is most compared with VxRail, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, HPE SimpliVity, Red Hat Ceph Storage and Dell PowerFlex. See our IBM Spectrum Virtualize vs. VMware vSAN report.
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