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IBM Spectrum Scale vs Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 5, 2024

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

Everpure FlashArray
Sponsored
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
231
Ranking in other categories
All-Flash Storage (3rd)
IBM Spectrum Scale
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
14
Ranking in other categories
Software Defined Storage (SDS) (10th), Cloud Software Defined Storage (1st)
Microsoft Storage Spaces Di...
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.4
Number of Reviews
12
Ranking in other categories
Software Defined Storage (SDS) (8th)
 

Featured Reviews

Sowjanya MV - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Lead at Wipro Limited
Has improved performance for mission-critical workloads and enabled seamless non-disruptive upgrades
The availability is 99.99%, which is the main factor any customer would need because their data should be available whenever they want to access it. This is one main critical thing. It is very easy to upgrade since Pure Storage FlashArray handles it well. Everything is non-disruptive now; previously, there were forklift shifts, but now that is not the case. Pure Storage FlashArray says no to forklift upgrades. Usually hardware requires downtime, but Pure Storage FlashArray has improved their footprint so that they are not asking for downtime; everything is just a non-disruptive activity, which is why customers are more inclined towards Pure Storage FlashArray. Customers want more of the models in their environment due to the performance they are giving, and everything is in one Pure1 Array console where we can view all the models on one page or just an orchestration tool. You don't miss anything; you have replication, notifications about replication, and details about which host groups replication is happening in and if that replication is successful or failed. On a daily basis, our purpose is to create volumes for infrastructure; our daily activities include creating volumes and mapping them to the host, doing any migrations from a VM, clearing the data stores, and carving the volumes to those VMs. One key factor is the data compression with a ratio of 5:1, focusing on space efficiency, inline deduplication, and the compression Pure Storage FlashArray works on; that is a major factor we can suggest to any customer. Analytical capabilities are crucial. Daily, we check the throughput and consumption, and Pure Storage FlashArray provides predictions for one year regarding usage. This prediction helps plan updates well ahead. For support, we just raise a case, and they follow up and get it done. There is also AI readiness, but with the model R2, we don't have much of that AI readiness. For others, we do have AI readiness that predicts capacity based on daily or monthly trends, enabling us to analyze how much space we need or if we need to expand the disk shelf. From an operational point of view, a good feature is that if you accidentally delete a volume, it will be retained in the destroyed state for the next twenty-four hours, which is not the same with any other vendor. I have worked in this storage domain for the past fifteen years, and this option is remarkable, benefiting any L1 or L2 engineer. Additionally, from a compliance perspective, Pure Storage FlashArray has REST APIs enabled. I have not explored automation much, but from a security standpoint, it is strong with encryption data. If you want to automate, you can easily integrate with all clouds and explore Pure Cloud for scheduling workloads, including volume creation. Customers find benefit in Pure Storage FlashArray's single management pane of glass due to the dual controller and active-active setup. If one of the controllers goes down, all workloads automatically shift to the other controller, ensuring their data is safe and accessible at all times. This is a highlighted feature that any customer desires because their data should always be accessible. For SAN workloads, we use Pure Storage FlashArray because for SAN FC fiber channel, we don't use it; we use NetApp for NAS activities. We have clearly split this, so SAN is for mission-critical applications, while network-attached storage handles file systems. This architecture helps us maximize the benefit from Pure Storage FlashArray due to the significant workloads from this giant retail client. From a footprint and energy consumption perspective, you can see energy consumption from the Pure1 storage portal on a daily basis, and it is very compact. The three models we use consume only three units, which is quite low. From a footprint and data center perspective, it doesn't occupy much space. As everything moves to cloud, there are requirements to avoid excess spending on data centers, and Pure Storage FlashArray is efficient in energy consumption and is environmentally friendly.
Sachin Prakash - PeerSpot reviewer
Assistant Consultant at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Has optimized performance using cluster deployment and distributed file access but needs better visibility into network dependencies
IBM Spectrum Scale being software-based storage allows users to utilize any hardware supported or defined by IBM without dependency on physical hardware provided by IBM. This is one of the features I appreciate most because if you have existing infrastructure at your site but don't want to reinvest in hardware, you can purchase IBM Spectrum Scale software and deploy it as software-defined storage. Users can comfortably access data from their host to the storage host without relying on new network setup when deploying GPFS as it uses the existing corporate network. However, high-speed ethernet network is required. By adding switches to the same network where client hosts reside and deploying GPFS storage array, any file system created on the storage cluster can grant export permissions determining which hosts can access specific file systems. These hosts can directly mount them as remote file systems. The process is simpler compared to defining IQN for providing access to client hosts. Creating a cluster for clients with virtual machines or physical Linux/Windows machines requires installing GPFS services on client nodes, which creates a client cluster. Access is defined on the storage cluster for the particular client cluster, allowing all hosts in that client cluster to mount file systems with granted permissions.
reviewer2588997 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Technical Support Engineer at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
Solution delivers impressive speed and performance with room for better management tool integration
Microsoft should improve the management aspect of Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, as we have raised multiple recommendations but they often refer us to use Microsoft Arc instead of Windows Admin Center. The licensing for Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct could be improved to be clearer, as calculating license requirements requires significant expertise; even Microsoft resources do not provide the full picture needed for licensing, leaving gaps that become evident once we move to deploy solutions. Improving the Windows Admin Center to be more stable with alert notifications and management capabilities for Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct would greatly benefit users, as we have not seen any recent product updates since the announcements last November.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The simplicity of it. The performance is good, but the simplicity is the best thing. Storage management is quite complex, but Pure Storage is easy to manage."
"It overperforms both in terms of storage capacity and throughput, and bandwidth capability."
"Everpure FlashArray has positively impacted my organization, particularly in performance and reliability, as we've had good improvements, making our applications run faster and giving us more confidence that they will not crash."
"The most important feature of any storage array is its reliability, measured by its uptime."
"I am very satisfied with this solution and I would recommend it to others."
"Their technical support is excellent. It's the best out of any of the vendors we work with."
"The support team is available all the time and they seem to know what they are doing."
"All my customers are pretty happy with most Pure Storage solutions."
"We tested a complete site loss with the initial loss of the complete data center and the system was always up."
"Over the past five or ten years, IBM has developed this solution and it has improved a lot."
"I rate this product ten 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."
"Allows us to share files across multiple environments."
"It has been pretty reliable throughout the years. As far as capacity is concerned, it can handle most heavy loads."
"The profile share is a valuable feature."
"GPFS monitoring is the best feature."
"The main positive impact that Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct has had on my company over the years is increasing performance; our checks show it is three times faster than VMware, making us extremely happy and motivated to keep using it."
"The most valuable feature is that there is no single point of failure."
"Its technical support is excellent."
"Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct definitely has its advantages, especially with robustness and scalability."
"The flash ability, in terms of tiering and caching, is amazing."
"The price performance is the best advantage of Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct."
"In terms of reliability, scalability, performance, security and so forth, it is definitely very good."
"It's mainly about the storage expansion, like in hyper-converged solutions."
 

Cons

"The initial setup of the product is complex."
"Price per terabyte is substantially higher than their competition. We would like to see it drop."
"We haven't seen ROI yet."
"It was not proactive communication."
"The backend of this solution utilizes an Active/Passive architecture, rather than an Active/Active architecture, which is a disadvantage, when compared to some of its competitors. Its storage capacity should be expanded in the next release."
"I would like to see additional features like performance monitoring, configuring alerts, and the customization of alert thresholds."
"We would like to be able to connect to data tape for backup, specifically to the LTO backups."
"The solution could improve by having a multi-tenant feature."
"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."
"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 initial setup is complex, especially if trying to avoid erasure coding, as it requires more discs. Avoiding erasure coding can significantly increase costs."
"I believe there is no graphic user interface, so they should include it."
"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."
"I wish there were some graphical user interface to access the GPFS file system creation and monitoring."
"The solution's pricing could be better."
"We do not feel as a company that the product can grow with us anymore, so we are not going to use it anymore."
"It is scalable, but only beyond two nodes. If I go for two nodes it's not scalable. I need to build a complete cluster from the beginning if I'm going for two nodes."
"The main reason that we have not implemented this solution or put it into production is because of the pricing."
"It is difficult to get a hardware compatibility certification for the solution."
"The integration is not difficult because there is no GUI, but we need to use a PowerShell command. This makes it difficult to monitor and to see the components' statuses."
"I think the online documentation needs a lot of work and so do the sizing tools."
"The performance of Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct is challenging when trying to support both NVMe and SATA SSDs, and there are problems regarding performance that need to be addressed."
"The management tool within this solution could be improved. We would also like to be able to access services like Azure when using this solution."
"On a scale of one to ten, I would rate the customer service and technical support of Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct a three, as there were issues that the Microsoft team could not pinpoint, leading to delays in finding solutions."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Price per terabyte is substantially higher than their competition. We would like to see it drop."
"They have a standardized fee; it's been the same price for 10 years straight. I am happy with the price — I think it's good."
"The price of Pure Storage FlashArray could always improve. They are still more expensive than some alternative offerings. Cost is always a concern and when there is a battle they tend to be more expensive."
"I would rate the pricing of Pure Storage FlashArray a five out of ten. It is expensive but not too much."
"I don't know the exact cost but it's around $1,000."
"Cost-wise, I imagine that the product's price would probably give you a nosebleed if you were a younger company."
"In the beginning, we saw that the price is not very good. When we made some compilations about the deduplication and the compression and what the equipment does, including the differentiation of upper management of the storage, the price was not so bad. However, in the beginning, the price was very difficult to justify."
"Pure Storage has not helped to reduce our HANA licensing costs."
"The licensing model is complex and depends on factors such as the number of processing cores and the amount of storage."
"The solution is costly but reliable."
"The licensing is based on the number of terabytes."
"With the data center licensing and everything that is connected to that, this solution is relatively costly."
"The solution is expensive."
"Cost-wise the product is one of the more affordable within the category of products."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Construction Company
10%
Computer Software Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Construction Company
7%
Government
6%
Computer Software Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business71
Midsize Enterprise38
Large Enterprise159
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Large Enterprise8
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise3
 

Questions from the Community

Which should I choose: HPE 3PAR StoreServ or Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform F Series?
Both are great platforms, but if you are considering all flash solutions, I would recommend you to consider Pure Stor...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pure Storage FlashArray?
I have knowledge about the licensing part, which we obtained for around 10 years from the time of deployment, but I d...
What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashArray?
When it comes to Everpure FlashArray ports shown in the GUI, it would be better if, when one of the Pure array ports ...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IBM Spectrum Scale?
IBM Spectrum Scale functions as software-based storage, allowing users to utilize any hardware supported or defined b...
What needs improvement with IBM Spectrum Scale?
The system relies heavily on ethernet networking, and when issues occur, we must consult with the network team to inv...
What is your primary use case for IBM Spectrum Scale?
My personal use of this product is for parallel writing or reading files.
How does VMware vSAN compare with Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct?
We found VMware’s vSAN was easy to set up, configure, and manage compared to other solutions we considered. It is bes...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct?
Overall, I find the cost of Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct to be affordable for the on-prem Windows pure solution, b...
What needs improvement with Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct?
The performance of Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct is challenging when trying to support both NVMe and SATA SSDs, and...
 

Also Known As

Pure Storage FlashArray
No data available
MS Storage Spaces Direct
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Nielsen, Lamar Advertising, LinkedIn, Betfair, UT-Dallas
Information Not Available
Acuutech, Quest Technology Management, Bradley, Mead & Hunt
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM Spectrum Scale vs. Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
902,270 professionals have used our research since 2012.