IBM Spectrum Accelerate vs IBM Spectrum Scale comparison

IBM Spectrum Accelerate and IBM Spectrum Scale are both solutions in the Software Defined Storage (SDS) category. IBM Spectrum Accelerate is ranked #24, while IBM Spectrum Scale is ranked #8 with an average rating of 9.3. IBM Spectrum Accelerate holds a 1.6% mindshare in SDS, compared to IBM Spectrum Scale’s 4.5% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of IBM Spectrum Accelerate users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of IBM Spectrum Scale users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 5, 2024

IBM Spectrum Accelerate and IBM Spectrum Scale compete in the storage solutions category. IBM Spectrum Scale often has the upper hand due to its extensive features and scalability that outperform the affordability of IBM Spectrum Accelerate.

Features: IBM Spectrum Accelerate offers consistent high performance, flexible scaling in all-flash, and hybrid-cloud environments. IBM Spectrum Scale provides enterprise-grade data management, seamless synchronization, and broad scalability, crucial for complex storage scenarios.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: IBM Spectrum Accelerate has user-friendly setup procedures for streamlined deployment. Spectrum Scale, requiring more technical expertise, presents a complex deployment model with numerous configuration options. It provides comprehensive customer service to support its intricate deployment.

Pricing and ROI: IBM Spectrum Accelerate is seen as cost-effective with lower setup costs and rapid benefits, suitable for budget-constrained environments. IBM Spectrum Scale, while demanding a higher initial investment, offers significant ROI through advanced capabilities for handling large-scale data management and processing.

To learn more, read our detailed IBM Spectrum Accelerate vs. IBM Spectrum Scale Report (Updated: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

IBM Spectrum Accelerate vs. IBM Spectrum Scale

April 2025

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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 May 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 IBM Spectrum Accelerate is 1.6%, up from 0.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Spectrum Scale is 4.5%, down from 5.7% 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.

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reviewer1154616

IS Auditor at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

A robust solution with good performance and support

This is a solution that scales well, although I think that we have stabilized in terms of use. With respect to scalability, we have an open question as to whether we will be able to grow into a cloud-based deployment. We don't know in what ways this solution will assist us with the migration, or whether we can still use it for DR. We don't know about the type of backup, be it full, incremental, or otherwise. We are also looking for a cost-savings if we migrate. These are things that we will find out over time. We have about two petabytes of data.

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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.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable features of FlashBlade include its replication capabilities, reports, and easy allocation. Everything is user-friendly."

"It is very easy to use, and it is very fast."

"The most valuable feature is Safe Mode."

"The most valuable feature of this solution is performance."

"We have integrated it with VMware. The integration process is pretty good. Especially with VMware, it helps with the capacity of it."

"The initial setup was straightforward. If you know how to plug in power and network you're pretty much qualified. They were on site to configure the network, the box to fit into our network architecture. Other than that, we self-managed from there."

"The most valuable features include the ease of implementation, ease of use and the speed that you can do backup and recovery on."

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

More Pure Storage FlashBlade pros

"The most valuable feature is the robustness, which is typical of IBM because their software generally just works."

"The ease of use is the solution's most valuable aspect. It's very user-friendly."

"We are using it for monitoring all of our storage."

"Its great servicing high availability. That is what it is used for."

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

"Allows us to share files across multiple environments."

"It is a scalable solution."

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

"I rate this product ten out of ten."

"Technical support has been very helpful. They provide us with pretty good solutions that we can implement moving forward."

More IBM Spectrum Scale pros

Cons

"I would like to see more VM-Aware features in the next release of this solution."

"The Pure Storage Orchestrator is our biggest pain point at the moment. If we can have more say in future developments of feature sets that we will need to support for our use case, that would be pretty beneficial to us."

"The solution is expensive."

"Recently, while upgrading the version code, one of the controllers failed. Replacing the controller took between 14 to 20 days."

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

"The features provided for SMB customers are limited."

"We initially encountered challenges with the assembly process due to issues with the documentation required during setup, an area where Pure Storage needs improvement."

"Compared to, for example, Hitachi NAS, the solution is not mature at all. It's just in its infancy as far as technology goes."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade cons

"he interface is not user-friendly so the ease of use could be improved."

"The reporting mechanisms need improvement."

"We do have some issues where Spectrum Scale does not work as expected. We have seen our Spectrum Scale servers go down unexpectedly, but because we have a cluster, it does not take out the entire organization."

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

"Maybe it needs integration with HA."

"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."

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

"I wish there were some graphical user interface to access the GPFS file system creation and monitoring."

"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."

More IBM Spectrum Scale cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is within reason for what you get. From what we have found comparing it to other vendors, it is in the same range as others. Given the choice, we would definitely redeploy it based on the cost."

"I feel that the price could always be lowered."

"We used a reseller for the purchase."

"Pure Storage FlashBlade is a hardware appliance, and it's very expensive if you compare its price with other solutions. You can get the same features and benefits from its competitor, VAST Data, but for half the price of Pure Storage FlashBlade."

"The pricing is relatively expensive due to the FlashBlade technology. However, for companies needing quick and reliable data access, the cost is justified."

"I rate the tool's pricing a seven to eight out of ten."

"The price could be cheaper."

"The product is very expensive."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade pricing and cost advice

"If you are cost-sensitive then this solution is not for you."

"For a database, on a yearly basis, we pay approximately $3,500 for licensing fees. The solution is sold as a subscription on a yearly basis so there are no other ancillary costs."

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

"The solution is costly but reliable."

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

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

27%

Computer Software Company

12%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Manufacturing Company

No data available

Financial Services Firm

20%

Computer Software Company

14%

Manufacturing Company

14%

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

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...

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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...

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What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashBlade?

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

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What do you like most about IBM Spectrum Scale?

It is a scalable solution.

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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...

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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...

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Comparisons

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 21% of the time

VAST Data vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 11% 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 8% of the time

More Pure Storage FlashBlade Competitors

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs IBM Spectrum Accelerate

Compared 44% of the time

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Red Hat Ceph Storage vs IBM Spectrum Scale

Compared 27% of the time

DDN IME vs IBM Spectrum Scale

Compared 15% of the time

Portworx Enterprise vs IBM Spectrum Scale

Compared 14% of the time

NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP vs IBM Spectrum Scale

Compared 7% of the time

VMware vSAN vs IBM Spectrum Scale

Compared 6% of the time

More IBM Spectrum Scale Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Pure Storage FlashBlade

April 2025

Download Pure Storage FlashBlade product report

Buyer's Guide

Software Defined Storage (SDS)

April 2025

Download IBM Spectrum Accelerate product report

Buyer's Guide

IBM Spectrum Scale

May 2025

Download IBM Spectrum Scale product report

Also Known As

No data available

IBM XIV

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

IBM Spectrum Accelerate is a software-defined block storage solution designed for rapid deployment across heterogeneous infrastructure for hybrid cloud and delivering consistent service levels to a dynamic workload mix. It is based on proven grid-architecture, enterprise-scale IBM XIV technology. IBM Spectrum Accelerate can be deployed, including as hyper-converged infrastructure, on any x86 server, on pre-installed third-party appliances or on public cloud infrastructure, and is available as a service on IBM Cloud infrastructure.

IBM

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

Silverpop

Information Not Available

Buyer's Guide

IBM Spectrum Accelerate vs. IBM Spectrum Scale

April 2025

Free Report: IBM Spectrum Accelerate vs. IBM Spectrum Scale

Find out what your peers are saying about IBM Spectrum Accelerate vs. IBM Spectrum Scale and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.

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