IBM Cloud Object Storage vs VMware vSAN comparison

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between IBM Cloud Object Storage and VMware vSAN based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two File and Object Storage solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.
To learn more, read our detailed IBM Cloud Object Storage vs. VMware vSAN Report (Updated: July 2023).
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"One of Cloud Object Storage's best features is infinite capacity. This is one of the main advantages if you don't want to use your own storage. You also have the ability to write only, write once, and read many. It's like tape storage but software-based. This feature is essential for financial institutions that require that kind of protection if you write backup or data there.""IBM has the most number of additional services, this is the main advantage.""The most valuable feature I like is when you connect it via CLI plug-in...It is a stable solution.""The standout feature of IBM Cloud Object Storage is its top-notch security, making it ideal for sensitive applications like mobile financial transactions.""IBM Cloud Object Storage integrates well."

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"We've found the solution to be scalable.""It completely removes the need for a storage network and for a storage administrator and all of that infrastructure and the costs that are involved with them.""The migration of servers feature makes server rack maintenance easy.""I like vSAN because they release features incrementally, every year, and you don't have to upgrade your hardware to get those features. If you bought a traditional SAN, you would have to upgrade your hardware constantly, every three years: You would get it, and it is how it is for three years. But on vSAN, you upgrade when you have to, when your hardware gets old or when you need more capacity. It's great, you get new features constantly.""Very easy to implement in any existing environment.""The deduplication and compression are excellent.""Being hyperconverged, it simplifies what equipment we have to buy.""It is easy to find information out there, not only from searching the web, but even the times I have engaged VMware support."

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Cons
"One area where IBM Cloud Object Storage could potentially improve is in modernizing its underlying codebase.""The performance could be better. It isn't bad, but everything is network-based, so you have a performance penalty on the network. You can never achieve the same performance as hardware. That's the disadvantage of cloud storage solutions in general. Cloud performance is one of the main issues clients have.""One improvement could be incorporating a feature similar to Dropbox's version history. This would allow users to track modifications made to files over time, which is particularly important for maintaining a record of changes. While the free version might not include this feature, it could be included in the paid version to provide added value to clients. Additionally, having a version history feature that allows users to access modifications made to files over the past three months could be beneficial.""IBM has limited cloud storage.""IBM Cloud storage is not cheap, but it could be.""The performance could improve in IBM Cloud Object Storage. The throughput or objects per second can have degradation."

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"This is quite an expensive solution.""It could be more robust. The latency is also an issue for us, and the reliability. I would like it to be faster and a little more flexible.""Its installation should be easier, and its price should be cheaper. It would be good for the product if they can include the data locality feature.""The customer service is good but there is a cost for it. It does not come free.""vSAN itself is a great storage platform, but one of the issues with it is that you have to be fully locked into the VMware package to use it. We're going to be deploying 72 Kubernetes nodes, and we're not going to buy VMware licenses for 72 of them, just so they can access vSAN. That's what we're using the Pure for. Opening it up so you could have vSAN as a data store, use it as a data lake, hit it with an NFS, S3 from outside the VMware ecosystem, would be great.""We plan to switch products since the hardware nowadays is a little bit outdated and we need to scale up a bit.""Improvements can be made with respect to scalability.""The platform's cost affects the business. This particular area needs improvement."

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Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "Pricing is not cheap."
  • "You have the option of a monthly or yearly license. Most customers choose the monthly option. I understand what you would like to say. IBM also lets you choose among four types of Cloud Object Storage. The difference is usage, performance, etc. Of course, high-performance storage is more expensive, while low-performance storage is for cold data, and it's really cheap."
  • "IBM Cloud is cheaper than AWS. If you want to scale your cloud infrastructure, it can be bought at almost the same price."
  • More IBM Cloud Object Storage Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "The first 1-2 years of purchasing vSAN will be expensive. Thereafter, the longer you are running it, the more cost savings you will have."
  • "Its reasonable, compare with other storage vendors"
  • "Basically, vSAN is a license in addition to that of the classic VMware Vsphere, which is also mandatory."
  • "​I would like to see this technology be made available to smaller businesses, who might benefit from high availability but struggle with the entry fee.​"
  • "Perhaps a bundle, like Essentials, would allow more businesses to make the leap to the product."
  • "We have increased our user productivity."
  • "What made us go with this solution was price point. When you can utilize existing storage infrastructure, and not have to continually purchase new SAN products out there that are going up in price as time goes by, then it's a wonderful thing."
  • "We did consider other hyperconverged solutions. It usually came down to price. vSan was the most cost effective thing."
  • More VMware vSAN Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:The most valuable feature I like is when you connect it via CLI plug-in...It is a stable solution.
    Top Answer:IBM Cloud is cheaper than AWS. If you want to scale your cloud infrastructure, it can be bought at almost the same price.
    Top Answer:I can't mention right now what can be improved because I haven't explored the solution in-depth, so I just use it for the standard one. The UI is a good one till now, but it can be improved. Every… more »
    Top Answer:While both run on the vSAN technology from VMware, vSAN needs to be deployed on vSAN ready nodes while VxRail is an engineered system. The choice to choose which technology depends on two major… more »
    Top Answer:We found the reduced power consumption with Nutanix Acropolis AOS a very attractive feature. We also like the interface that allows you to talk directly to your VM from the present software. We found… more »
    Top Answer:HPE SimpliVity is a hyper-converged infrastructure solution that is primarily geared to mid-sized companies. We researched VMware vSAN but found HPE was a better option for us HPE SimpliVity has… more »
    Ranking
    12th
    Views
    2,090
    Comparisons
    1,344
    Reviews
    2
    Average Words per Review
    785
    Rating
    7.5
    3rd
    out of 39 in HCI
    Views
    25,743
    Comparisons
    19,117
    Reviews
    8
    Average Words per Review
    556
    Rating
    8.9
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    Cleversafe
    vSAN
    Learn More
    Overview

    IBM Cloud Object Storage is a web-scale platform that stores unstructured data - from petabyte to exabyte - with reliability, security, availability and disaster recovery without replication.

    VMware vSAN is a software-defined storage product that is used in collaboration with VMware ESXi hypervisor and that provisions and manages storage based on policies, regardless of the underlying hardware. The solution enables you to prime your business for growth through its seamless evolution (it is integrated with vSphere and requires no new tools), its flexibility, and its multi-cloud capabilities. As an industry-leading software, VMware vSAN provides high levels of performance with minimal impact on CPU and memory.

    VMware vSAN Features

    VMware vSAN has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

    • Storage policy-based management (SPBM): VMware vSAN supports storage policy-based management for automated management of storage profiles.
    • Software-defined data-at-rest encryption: With this VMware vSAN feature, you can prevent unauthorized access of data at rest.
    • Multiple nodes: VMware vSAN provides clusters that can include as few as 2 nodes or as many as 64 nodes.
    • High security and availability: VMware vSAN offers stretched clusters, allowing more than one virtualization host server to be used in the same setup, promoting higher security as well as availability.
    • Deduplication: VMware vSAN’s deduplication compresses data to ensure efficient storage management and security.
    • HCI mesh updates: VMware vSAN clusters can share storage capacity with non-HCI Sphere clusters and can adopt HCI without having to scale computing resources and storage or replace existing servers.
    • Simplified file services: With VMware vSAN’s file services, backup of file shares is simplified. You can use APIs that allow backup and recovery software vendors to integrate with your VMware vSAN file services, which enables backup software to track new data and add scalability enhancements to files.

    VMware vSAN Benefits

    There are many benefits to implementing VMware vSAN. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

    • Reduced total cost of ownership (TCO): VMware vSAN helps you reduce upfront costs for businesses because it can be easily deployed on inexpensive x86 servers. In addition, its highly scalable infrastructure and quick deployment also save organizations time and money, making it an efficient storage solution. 
    • Good manageability: VMWare vSAN is easy to set up, manage, and provision, without sacrificing performance. 
    • Scalability: VMware vSAN is agile and allows administrators to scale storage on demand, quickly, and efficiently via policies and rules.
    • Simplicity: VMWare vSAN is simple to configure since it is embedded in the vSphere hypervisor. Installing it using the vSphere Web Client can be done quickly. 
    • Reduced risk: VMWare vSAN reduces the risk associated with digital transformations by utilizing existing tools, skill sets, and solutions.

    Reviews from Real Users

    Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by PeerSpot users currently using the VMware vSAN solution.

    PeerSpot user Yves S., CEO, Cloud Evangelist at Comdivision Consulting GmbH, says, “vSAN gives us a lot of advantages when we need to expand resources. We have an overall larger host infrastructure, and we split that up for specific customer test and use cases. In that specific scenario, we can easily add more hosts or reduce the number of hosts in the environment.”

    A reviewer who works in Infrastructure Security explains, “The ease of use is great. The initial setup and upgrade process was pretty straightforward. And, technical support is great.”

    Laurent N., Director at Softlogic, comments, "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."

    Sample Customers
    Bitly, Dreamstime, Prime Research
    Read Some Case Studies At Home Cloud CaribCINgroupDiscovery Check out the Rest of our Customer Stories Here
    Top Industries
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization33%
    Financial Services Firm18%
    Computer Software Company9%
    Government6%
    REVIEWERS
    Computer Software Company16%
    Comms Service Provider12%
    Financial Services Firm11%
    Healthcare Company9%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization45%
    Computer Software Company9%
    Manufacturing Company6%
    Financial Services Firm5%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business38%
    Midsize Enterprise25%
    Large Enterprise38%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business12%
    Midsize Enterprise35%
    Large Enterprise53%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business34%
    Midsize Enterprise22%
    Large Enterprise44%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business13%
    Midsize Enterprise53%
    Large Enterprise34%
    Buyer's Guide
    IBM Cloud Object Storage vs. VMware vSAN
    July 2023
    Find out what your peers are saying about IBM Cloud Object Storage vs. VMware vSAN and other solutions. Updated: July 2023.
    765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    IBM Cloud Object Storage is ranked 12th in File and Object Storage with 6 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 3rd in HCI with 219 reviews. IBM Cloud Object Storage is rated 7.8, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of IBM Cloud Object Storage writes "Helps to store files, trigger actions, share files, and secure them with authentication". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSAN writes "Very stable, easy to set up, and easy to use". IBM Cloud Object Storage is most compared with Red Hat Ceph Storage, MinIO, Dell ECS, IBM Spectrum Scale and NetApp StorageGRID, whereas VMware vSAN is most compared with VxRail, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, HPE SimpliVity, Red Hat Ceph Storage and Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI). See our IBM Cloud Object Storage vs. VMware vSAN report.

    We monitor all File and Object Storage 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.