IBM Spectrum Scale vs IBM Spectrum Virtualize comparison

IBM Spectrum Scale and IBM Spectrum Virtualize are both solutions in the Software Defined Storage (SDS) category. IBM Spectrum Scale is ranked #10 with an average rating of 9.0, while IBM Spectrum Virtualize is ranked #14 with an average rating of 8.7. IBM Spectrum Scale holds a 4.2% mindshare in SDS, compared to IBM Spectrum Virtualize’s 1.5% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of IBM Spectrum Scale users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 91% of IBM Spectrum Virtualize users who would recommend it.

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 5, 2024

IBM Spectrum Virtualize and IBM Spectrum Scale compete in the data management category. IBM Spectrum Scale seems to have the upper hand due to its wide-ranging features, making it valuable for data-intensive environments.

Features: IBM Spectrum Virtualize provides advanced storage virtualization with a unified view of storage resources and enhances data efficiency through compression and de-duplication. It simplifies storage management across heterogeneous systems. IBM Spectrum Scale offers scalable, high-performance data management with parallel file systems for fast access, a benefit for big data and analytics, and supports numerous data protocols.

Room for Improvement: IBM Spectrum Virtualize could improve in supporting newer storage technologies faster and enhance its performance analytics tools. It may also benefit from more cloud integration features. IBM Spectrum Scale's complexity in deployment can be reduced, and its user interface could be more intuitive. It might also expand support for emerging data protocols.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: IBM Spectrum Virtualize provides an easy deployment process and excellent customer service support, integrating seamlessly into existing infrastructures. IBM Spectrum Scale requires a more detailed deployment approach due to its architecture, but is backed by comprehensive documentation and a responsive customer support team.

Pricing and ROI: IBM Spectrum Virtualize generally has lower initial costs, providing immediate ROI with storage efficiency. IBM Spectrum Scale may have higher upfront costs but offers significant long-term ROI through performance and scalability in handling data-intensive tasks.

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

Buyer's Guide

IBM Spectrum Scale vs. IBM Spectrum Virtualize

August 2025

Download the complete report

Helped 867,349 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 September 2025, in the Software Defined Storage (SDS) category, the mindshare of Pure Storage FlashBlade is 4.2%, down from 4.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Spectrum Scale is 4.2%, down from 4.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Spectrum Virtualize is 1.5%, up from 1.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Software Defined Storage (SDS) Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Pure Storage FlashBlade	4.2%
IBM Spectrum Scale	4.2%
IBM Spectrum Virtualize	1.5%
Other	90.1%

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

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

MD.Faisal Alam

Manager, Technical Services, IBM Storage & Backup Solutions. at Thakral

Built-in compression enhances data management efficiency

I have noticed that the technical support for software issues, such as with Spectrum Protect, needs improvement. The case logging process is efficient, but resolving software problems takes too much time. This delay can hinder customers and strain vendor relationships. For hardware issues, IBM handles them efficiently, but software-related support requires enhancement. Overall improvement in support for software cases is necessary.

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 solution is able to handle workloads and is easy to use. It allows us to actually manage the boxes in less time."

"The most valuable features are the Metro clustering, and disaster recovery."

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

"FlashBlade offers low latency, high throughput, and seamless scalability."

"The most valuable feature is Safe Mode."

"Speed and ease of use are the two most valuable features."

"I like its size. It is smaller than the other competitors. We can plug in many blades, and we can have data up to one terabyte."

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

More Pure Storage FlashBlade pros

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

"I would rate my overall experience with IBM Spectrum Scale as nine out of ten."

"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."

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

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

"I find IBM Spectrum Scale to be an excellent product known for its fast parallel file system."

"I rate this product ten out of ten."

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

More IBM Spectrum Scale pros

"The most valuable feature is its reliability."

"Although the GUI from the XIV was used (in my view), IBM has polished and refined the GUI providing a pleasant and easy to navigate GUI experience."

"IBM provides exceptional technical support, which I rate as the best along with Cisco."

"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 provides transparency, because of its advanced copy features."

"I like all the features, but the most impressive recently has been the introduction of IBM's Flash Core Modules. They are a form of a flash drive, but they have many more features."

"We are happy with the support that IBM provides us."

"In my opinion, the quick restore, the low latency, and the ease of use are some of the most valuable features."

More IBM Spectrum Virtualize pros

Cons

"File storage needs a lot of improvement. Mainframe connectivity also needs improvement because it requires additional components to be integrated with Pure Storage FlashBlade. If you want to keep your backup data, then this becomes an even more expensive solution because Pure Storage FlashBlade will not be able to meet your backup needs."

"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."

"I would like to see the licensing fees improved as well as the price per terabytes."

"There could be improvements in public cloud integration."

"There is some room for new features related to authentication and integration with Kubernetes, and other solution using S3 Bucket."

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

"It usually comes down to just what you hit and the value you're getting when you spend the money and license the products. I would always go, "If you want to make things better, lower your price and make your licensing simpler." There's always an opportunity around that."

"In terms of scalability, it doesn't expand out quite as robustly as some of the others, but it covers 90% of the market in what it does."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade cons

"It would be helpful if there was a graphical user interface that could walk you through the deployment process. The instructions surrounding setup aren't the best. They need to be more step-by-step."

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

"The biggest problem is that it is not able to provide block storage."

"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."

"Maybe it needs integration with HA."

"Integration with other vendors is not available."

"The solution's pricing could be better."

"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."

More IBM Spectrum Scale cons

"Anything which improves performance and the ability of our systems would be a nice."

"Tighter integration with cloud storage might be useful as a target for a variety of use cases."

"There are things that occur when you get to this size and capacity. We're very large, i.e., petabytes. When you get to that sheer volume of the numbers of things, it is too big for people to keep track of."

"The disk reliability is not that good."

"IBM could improve IBM Spectrum Virtualize by bundling Storage Scale and Storage Virtualize into a single appliance. This would provide a more appealing and cost-effective solution."

"I would like to see them provide a unified platform that offers block, file, and object-based protocol access."

"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."

"For improvement considerations, I would probably say multiple sites."

More IBM Spectrum Virtualize cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We used a reseller for the purchase."

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

"Our customers have seen a reduction in TCO."

"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 product is very expensive."

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

"In my opinion, we have paid the right price for the product. I don't think that it is too much or too little."

"Support is a separate line item. Support is a different cost, but whatever your support is now, that's what you're going to pay forever. If your support's $100 today, six years from now it's $100. It doesn't fluctuate unless you upgrade it, or change it, etc."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade pricing and cost advice

"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."

"I am very happy with the pricing. There is no comparison when it comes to pricing. I have looked at all solutions from EMC, Veritas, Hitachi, Dell, etc. None of them compares to IBM when it comes to pricing. I get great pricing from them."

"This solution came as an additional cost for the TSM package we chose."

"We would like the CPU cycle to save more on the licensing costs for us."

"The entry point of pricing for this product is the most amazing price ever in the industry."

"Generally the bundled licensing is more cost effective and gives flexibility to the solution. Linking into the Spectrum Suite can also be advantageous, but depends on the scale of the enterprise."

"I think it is a good value for the price."

"It has a lot of advanced functions for a reasonable price."

"Do a proof of concept, if you are not comfortable jumping in, but do it."

More IBM Spectrum Virtualize pricing and cost advice

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

867,349 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

12%

Financial Services Firm

12%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Government

Financial Services Firm

20%

Manufacturing Company

12%

Computer Software Company

10%

Government

Computer Software Company

14%

Performing Arts

13%

Financial Services Firm

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	11
Midsize Enterprise	11
Large Enterprise	20

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	6
Large Enterprise	7

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	11
Midsize Enterprise	4
Large Enterprise	31

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 of Pure Storage FlashBlade is expensive compared to other products I used from other companies in the pas...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashBlade?

I believe there is not much improvement needed because they have everything we need, but the interface is a little bi...

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

What is your primary use case for IBM Spectrum Scale?

My personal use of this product is for parallel writing or reading files.

See all answers

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

IBM Spectrum Virtualize is not an expensive product. It offers flexibility with different flavors, whether appliance-...

See all answers

What needs improvement with IBM Spectrum Virtualize?

IBM could improve IBM Spectrum Virtualize by bundling Storage Scale and Storage Virtualize into a single appliance. T...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for IBM Spectrum Virtualize?

I primarily use IBM Spectrum Virtualize ( /products/ibm-spectrum-virtualize-reviews ) when I have different hardware ...

See all answers

Comparisons

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 20% 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

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 10% of the time

VAST Data vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 8% of the time

More Pure Storage FlashBlade Competitors

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs IBM Spectrum Scale

Compared 23% of the time

DDN IME vs IBM Spectrum Scale

Compared 12% of the time

Portworx Enterprise vs IBM Spectrum Scale

Compared 11% of the time

VMware vSAN vs IBM Spectrum Scale

Compared 8% of the time

IBM Spectrum Accelerate vs IBM Spectrum Scale

Compared 6% of the time

More IBM Spectrum Scale Competitors

Dell VPLEX vs IBM Spectrum Virtualize

Compared 22% of the time

VxRail vs IBM Spectrum Virtualize

Compared 19% of the time

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs IBM Spectrum Virtualize

Compared 16% of the time

Atlantis USX vs IBM Spectrum Virtualize

Compared 16% of the time

More IBM Spectrum Virtualize Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Pure Storage FlashBlade

August 2025

Download Pure Storage FlashBlade product report

Buyer's Guide

IBM Spectrum Scale

September 2025

Download IBM Spectrum Scale product report

Buyer's Guide

IBM Spectrum Virtualize

September 2025

Download IBM Spectrum Virtualize product report

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 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

IBM Spectrum Virtualize is a dependable solution that improves data value, security, and simplicity for new and existing storage infrastructure. Proven over 12 years in thousands of deployments, its innovative virtualization capabilities help organizations achieve better data economics by supporting new workloads that are critical to their success. IBM Spectrum Virtualize software helps make new and existing storage more effective and standardizes functions traditionally deployed separately in disk systems for greater flexibility and potentially lower costs.

IBM

Sample Customers

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

Information Not Available

Pelephone, Sprint IT Enterprise Services

Buyer's Guide

IBM Spectrum Scale vs. IBM Spectrum Virtualize

August 2025

Free Report: IBM Spectrum Scale vs. IBM Spectrum Virtualize

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

DOWNLOAD NOW

867,349 professionals have used our research since 2012.

See our IBM Spectrum Scale vs. IBM Spectrum Virtualize 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.