HPE StoreVirtual vs IBM Spectrum Scale comparison

Hewlett Packard Enterprise and IBM are both solutions in the Software Defined Storage (SDS) category. Hewlett Packard Enterprise is ranked #22, while IBM is ranked #9 with an average rating of 9.3. Hewlett Packard Enterprise holds a 1.2% mindshare in SDS, compared to IBM’s 4.6% mindshare. Additionally, 94% of Hewlett Packard Enterprise users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of IBM users who would recommend it.

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 5, 2024

HPE StoreVirtual and IBM Spectrum Scale are major contenders in the storage solutions category. The comparative analysis indicates that while HPE offers a streamlined, all-in-one package, IBM provides superior performance and flexibility suited for heavy workloads.

Features: HPE StoreVirtual delivers a unified approach by integrating compute, storage, and networking with high availability through network RAID. Its seamless integration with VMware and HP Proliant hardware is particularly advantageous. Users appreciate its ease of storage management and adaptability. IBM Spectrum Scale, however, stands out with high performance and a robust parallel file system, making it suitable for intensive workloads. It boasts seamless integration across diverse platforms, offering exceptional scalability and flexibility.

Room for Improvement: HPE StoreVirtual is criticized for latency issues, complex initial setup, and limited expansion capabilities. Users call for better firmware communication and documentation alongside enhanced clustering for diverse disk nodes. Conversely, IBM Spectrum Scale faces challenges with its complex licensing and setup, limited block storage, and integration issues with other vendor systems. Users seek a simpler interface and more efficient deployment processes.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Both HPE StoreVirtual and IBM Spectrum Scale are deployed on-premises. HPE receives mixed reviews regarding support, with some customers commending the specialized support staff and others experiencing delays. Support quality fluctuates based on regional availability and engineer expertise. IBM Spectrum Scale is recognized for excellent customer service, with seasoned technical staff adept at resolving complex problems efficiently. Both companies provide comprehensive documentation, but consistent support is pivotal for user satisfaction.

Pricing and ROI: HPE StoreVirtual is noted for competitive pricing with all-inclusive licensing, covering features like site-to-site replication at no extra cost, making it attractive for SMBs. However, costs can rise with additional redundancy. Its ROI is favorable if system stability is maintained. IBM Spectrum Scale's complex licensing model correlates to processing cores and storage, yet it is often viewed as reasonable given its performance and reliability. Enterprise agreements usually yield positive ROI, though complexity in pricing models can be a deterrent.

To learn more, read our detailed HPE StoreVirtual vs. IBM Spectrum Scale Report (Updated: May 2025).

Buyer's Guide

HPE StoreVirtual vs. IBM Spectrum Scale

May 2025

Download the complete report

Helped 859,129 peers since 2012

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

Pure Storage FlashBlade

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the Software Defined Storage (SDS) category, the mindshare of Pure Storage FlashBlade is 4.2%, down from 4.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of HPE StoreVirtual is 1.2%, down from 1.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Spectrum Scale is 4.6%, down from 5.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Software Defined Storage (SDS)

Featured Reviews

Eric Black

Solutions Architect at Recovery Point Systems

The ability to leverage multi-tenancy along with immutability is a huge benefit for us

The only thing I feel FlashBlade is missing is the SOS API. If it had SOS API, that would put it well over the top. Veeam Backup specifically has started to streamline their API, and they are doing that with SOS API. They have optimized it. Any of the S3 devices out there that support this SOS API can have far more API calls at once. On our side, that translates to better restoration. With SOS API, it can leverage far more restorations at a single given time or read from the device in simple terms. That results in maximizing the output and throughput from the device itself.

Read full review

Vebjorn Nergaard

Senior IT Engineer at Guard Automation AS

Reliable with helpful support and good replication

The setup is okay, however, it comes with a moderate amount of difficulty. If you are new to the product, it is difficult. You do get used to the process over time and it gets easier. A company just needs one person to maintain the solution as it just runs. You don't need any support staff. It's very, very hands-off except when you do updates. The product is living its own life.

Read full review

Bernd Stroehle.

Enterprise Architect at kosakya

Deliver improved performance in data processing and foster extensive AI initiatives

I find IBM Spectrum Scale to be an excellent product known for its fast parallel file system. It achieved the best results when integrated with IBM hardware. Even though it is complex, it provided significant performance advantages in large-scale data management. Its fault tolerance mechanisms and integration capabilities make it popular for extensive AI initiatives and data processing tasks for organizations like Daimler Benz and Bosch.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"The tool's most valuable features are data warehousing, speedy recovery, and analytics. Its latest release is cost-effective."

"The main feature I have found to be product replication."

"The snapshots, replication, and the ability to have immutable blades are the most valuable features. You're putting data snapshots out in those blades, and they cannot be touched. Its performance is great."

"The product is scalable and easy to expand."

"The performance of FlashBlade is excellent. It does not necessarily leverage the SOS API that some of the newer products leverage, but I found its speed pretty much on par and comparable. It is fast, and it does what it is supposed to do."

"The solution provides many controllers."

"We can capacity plan at a greater level than we used to."

"We have seen a reduction in the total cost of ownership by around 20%."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade pros

"The seamlessness behind the scenes of block management."

"All of the administrative tasks are easy and everything is centralized."

"A very flexible solution."

"The network RAID feature gives us maximum availability, since we cannot afford any downtime, even for a second."

"The solution's most valuable aspect is that it is hardware independent."

"Thin provisioning lets us get the most value from the hard drives."

"The solution is very stable."

"Data is stored in two different places, leveraging more security and availability. Therefore, network problems are having less affect on iSCSI."

More HPE StoreVirtual pros

"We use GPFS Scale for parallel file access, the file management, and it's an essential part of our operations."

"We can have multiple systems within the same file system."

"I rate this product ten out of ten."

"The profile share is a valuable feature."

"It is a scalable solution."

"GPFS monitoring is the best feature."

"The most valuable feature is the ability to share files across different platforms."

"It makes our file system sharing a lot easier, even across different continents. We have had file systems shared across different continents with no performance degradation."

More IBM Spectrum Scale pros

Cons

"I would like to see better integration."

"I would also like to see better support for CIFS workloads."

"In terms of technical support, the experience has been mixed. The support is done through email and is not that great, making it a very problematic area I've been dealing with for over four years."

"It would be nice if you could store file-based in the same box with the same technology."

"On our dedupe during our initial buy, we were expecting a number a little higher like 4x. However, we are getting about 3.6. While it is close enough, it doesn't quite hit the numbers. So, this has been a challenge."

"It would be beneficial if the layer could support the S3 protocol and be container ready in the next release."

"The feature that we're waiting on is better integration with the cell services."

"In the realm of micro-services, I think that Pure Storage can do well if they start getting in there and making their arrays more micro-services ready."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade cons

"The management aspect of the solution needs to be improved in order to make the product stronger."

"Configuration of application integrated snapshots for VMware is convoluted and it did not work immediately."

"It would be nice if there were more parts available in Brazil and HPE could swap out faulty equipment quicker."

"I would like to have this solution easily integrate with VMware."

"f you're doing the 10Gb adapters, SFPs don't come with it, but it doesn't say that. It might say that somewhere else, but it's not clear."

"In our country, Qatar, most of the industry isn't using too much HP. StoreVirtual doesn't move fast. It's not a popular product."

"Hardware and disk failures are happening frequently."

"Product looks like it is in the end of development."

More HPE StoreVirtual cons

"There can be improvements in fault tolerance and making erasure coding faster."

"They should probably simply the Red Hat implementation portion. This portion was not as straightforward as I would like it to be."

"Making it a little easier to add bad file sets would help. There is a transition to how you add storage and how you add a file set, so making that a little smoother would probably be my recommendation."

"The main issue that we have now is with the encryption. They want to use more metrics in encryption, which is not working very well."

"This is probably the biggest challenge, getting everything upgraded, because it just takes time. We wish it was a faster solution to be able to do everything at once, but you have do each node individually. The more nodes, the longer it takes."

"Integration with other vendors is not available."

"The solution's pricing could be better."

"I believe there is no graphic user interface, so they should include it."

More IBM Spectrum Scale cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I have seen ROI. It has allowed me to increase the density of my VMs without having to purchase anything additional."

"The price of this solution could be made more affordable."

"It's a costly solution, but Pure Storage FlashBlade doesn't require additional licenses. All of the software is combined into one bundle."

"The product is very expensive."

"The pricing for FlashBlade is between cheap and moderate."

"We used a reseller for the purchase."

"The price is a little high."

"The price could be cheaper."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade pricing and cost advice

"For our organization, I believe the cost is 16,000 Euros for a three-year license. It costs a bit more to do the maintenance on our servers as well. It's also on an HP ProLiant server and an organization will need to do the maintenance there also. I believe the price for that is around 2000 Euros a year."

"The prices are OK, so we don't have much difficulty selling HPE in Brazil."

"It costs less than $10,000 for one machine. If it costs more than 15% higher than this, then the customer may change to another solution."

"If you buy a five-year license, not only does the technical support expire after five years, but you also lose the ability to change and expand the VSA, and the systems won't go down."

"Licensing is not exactly straightforward, but not the worst I have ever seen."

"One of the key features about it is that when you buy either a VSA license or a StoreVirtual appliance, all your software's included."

"The solution is costly but reliable."

"The licensing is based on the number of terabytes."

"The licensing model is complex and depends on factors such as the number of processing cores and the amount of storage."

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Software Defined Storage (SDS) solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

859,129 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

14%

Educational Organization

12%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

20%

Financial Services Firm

13%

Manufacturing Company

13%

Government

11%

Financial Services Firm

20%

Computer Software Company

14%

Manufacturing Company

13%

Educational Organization

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Pure Storage FlashBlade?

The tool's most valuable feature is its fast performance, especially in handling snapshots. It helps during power out...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pure Storage FlashBlade?

The pricing for FlashBlade is between cheap and moderate. FlashBlade is worth the money due to the experience and per...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashBlade?

Its configuration should be easier. There should be easier language for the configuration.

See all answers

Ask a question

Earn 20 points

What do you like most about IBM Spectrum Scale?

It is a scalable solution.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IBM Spectrum Scale?

IBM Spectrum Scale is very expensive with complex pricing models usually based on the amount of storage used or the n...

See all answers

What needs improvement with IBM Spectrum Scale?

There is room for improvement in the web interface. There could be more information available, such as charts and gra...

See all answers

Comparisons

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 20% of the time

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 11% of the time

MinIO vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 11% of the time

Pure Storage FlashArray vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 10% of the time

VAST Data vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 10% of the time

More Pure Storage FlashBlade Competitors

VMware vSAN vs HPE StoreVirtual

Compared 52% of the time

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs HPE StoreVirtual

Compared 48% of the time

More HPE StoreVirtual Competitors

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs IBM Spectrum Scale

Compared 27% of the time

DDN IME vs IBM Spectrum Scale

Compared 14% of the time

Portworx Enterprise vs IBM Spectrum Scale

Compared 11% of the time

Red Hat Gluster Storage vs IBM Spectrum Scale

Compared 7% of the time

VMware vSAN vs IBM Spectrum Scale

Compared 7% of the time

More IBM Spectrum Scale Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Pure Storage FlashBlade

June 2025

Download Pure Storage FlashBlade product report

Buyer's Guide

HPE StoreVirtual

June 2025

Download HPE StoreVirtual product report

Buyer's Guide

IBM Spectrum Scale

June 2025

Download IBM Spectrum Scale product report

Also Known As

No data available

HPE StoreVirtual, HPE VSA

No data available

Overview

FlashBlade is the industry’s most advanced scale-out storage for unstructured data, powered by a modern, massively parallel architecture to consolidate complex data silos (like backup appliances and data lakes) and accelerate tomorrow’s discoveries and insights.

Pure Storage

HPE StoreVirtual storage ensures that organisations can optimise the benefits of server virtualisation with cost-effective high availability and disaster recovery. The iSCSI-based, scale-out storage platform is easy to manage and change – meeting ongoing business demands without creating IT bottlenecks or application downtime. Overcoming the cost and management limitations of traditional storage area networks (SANs), HPE StoreVirtual nodes use storage clustering to form a single pool of resources that enable organisations to buy only what they need today, scaling non-disruptively to meet requirements in the future.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise

IBM Spectrum Scale is a cluster file system that provides concurrent access to a single file system or set of file systems from multiple nodes. The nodes can be SAN attached, network attached, a mixture of SAN attached and network attached, or in a shared nothing cluster configuration. This enables access to this common set of data to support a scale-out solution or to provide a high availability platform. IBM Spectrum Scale has many features beyond common data access including data replication, policy based storage management, and multi-site operations. You can create a cluster of AIX nodes, Linux nodes, Windows server nodes, or a mix of all three. IBM Spectrum Scale can run on virtualized instances providing common data access in environments, leverage logical partitioning, or other hypervisors. Multiple IBM Spectrum Scale clusters can share data within a location or across wide area network (WAN) connections.

IBM

Sample Customers

ServiceNow, Mercedes-AMG Petronas Motorsport, Dominos, Man AHL

NBrIX, WIND Telecom, Netrics

Information Not Available

Buyer's Guide

HPE StoreVirtual vs. IBM Spectrum Scale

May 2025

Free Report: HPE StoreVirtual vs. IBM Spectrum Scale

Find out what your peers are saying about HPE StoreVirtual vs. IBM Spectrum Scale and other solutions. Updated: May 2025.

DOWNLOAD NOW

859,129 professionals have used our research since 2012.

See our HPE StoreVirtual vs. IBM Spectrum Scale report.

See our list of best Software Defined Storage (SDS) vendors, best Software Defined Storage (SDS) vendors, and best Cloud Software Defined Storage vendors.

We monitor all Software Defined Storage (SDS) reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.