IBM Spectrum Scale vs StorPool comparison

IBM and StorPool are both solutions in the Software Defined Storage (SDS) category. IBM is ranked #9 with an average rating of 9.3, while StorPool is ranked #20. IBM holds a 4.6% mindshare in SDS, compared to StorPool’s 2.5% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of IBM users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of StorPool users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 5, 2024

StorPool and IBM Spectrum Scale are competing in the software-defined storage domain. StorPool seems to have an edge with competitive pricing and strong customer support, making it a preferred choice for budget-conscious companies. However, IBM Spectrum Scale is favored for its extensive feature set, offering more robust scalability and advanced functionality for enterprises.

Features: StorPool focuses on streamlined operations, high performance, and efficiency in managing block storage systems. Its edge lies in simplicity and effectiveness. IBM Spectrum Scale is known for its scalability, global file system capabilities, and integrated multi-cloud management, making it suitable for complex, large-scale deployments.

Room for Improvement: StorPool could enhance its multi-cloud management capabilities and scalability for larger enterprise needs. Another area is improving integration options for diverse environments. IBM Spectrum Scale could work on simplifying its deployment process to reduce the learning curve. Enhancements in user interface and direct customer support accessibility could make it more attractive to a broader range of users.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: StorPool is known for its straightforward deployment and responsive customer service, leading to a faster time-to-value. IBM Spectrum Scale, while offering extensive documentation and robust support, presents a steeper learning curve due to its complex architecture. StorPool is favored for its ease and direct support, whereas IBM Spectrum Scale suits enterprises with specialized support needs.

Pricing and ROI: StorPool offers lower setup costs and focuses on operational efficiency, providing attractive ROI for organizations aiming to maximize budget utility. IBM Spectrum Scale requires a higher initial investment but delivers substantial ROI through enhanced scalability and functionality, making it beneficial for large-scale operations.

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

Buyer's Guide

IBM Spectrum Scale vs. StorPool

May 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 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 IBM Spectrum Scale is 4.6%, down from 5.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of StorPool is 2.5%, up from 1.8% 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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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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reviewer1721697

Managing Director at CloudScale365, Inc.

Great service and support with a constant addition of new features

As of now, the product has been working really well for us. They keep updating and launching new features. Their support has been great and have always been available. I have personally met with multiple Storpool engineers and spoke about different options and features. There are too many features that we don't know or use yet. My recommendation would be to promote the new features and give users different examples of how they can be used and how we can benefit from them. This is a great product.

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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

"It performs well and it is also very fast."

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

"It has also helped to simplify storage for us in the way that it's easy to manage. Their automatic monitoring really helps when things break or are about to break. They see a problem coming and alert us even before our own system does."

"It helps simplify our storage, because the user interface is very simple and the installation is easy."

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

"It has absolutely simplified our storage because the dashboards on the consoles show a clear understanding of where you are, and it is also very easy to provision. This been a big help for our teams."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade pros

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

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

"GPFS monitoring is the best feature."

"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."

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

"It has been pretty reliable throughout the years. As far as capacity is concerned, it can handle most heavy loads."

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

"The high performance of the solution is its most valuable aspect. If you compare it to other storage solutions, it's much better."

More IBM Spectrum Scale pros

"The two 10GE networks provide redundancy and increased performance as they serve as two separate networks doubling the throughput and doing multipathing and load balancing. We now have a high performance shared storage system which enables us to run on private cloud. Our previous system used bare-metal hardware, which provided high performance but inflexible management. Now we have best of both worlds, SSD-class performance with flexibility of a private cloud system."

"Performance, redundancy, scalability and cost-effectiveness. StorPool delivers superbly in all of these areas."

"Creating snapshots within seconds for big disks has helped our different migration projects since it allows us to perform them in a short period of time."

"The speed of the storage solution also allows us to provide service to applications that are very I/O intensive."

"With StorPool we were able to build live failover on top of our LXC infrastructure. This allows us both to live-migrate containers between compute nodes without any downtime and, in case of an entire node suffering any type of failure, we can bring all containers back online within a minute on a spare compute node."

"The team behind it was very engaged and had the skills and ability to support a service provider."

Cons

"There could be improvements in public cloud integration."

"I would like to have Snapshots and Snapmail in the next release. People who came from a NetApp background, especially expect these features."

"We haven't been able to use much of the cloud area of Pure Storage. We have a storage server and it would be better if it could integrate with other cloud features of this solution."

"An area for improvement in Pure Storage FlashBlade is its price. It could be reduced. The technical support for Pure Storage FlashBlade also needs improvement. It used to be good, with more experienced engineers. Nowadays, it isn't, and it takes longer for support to solve problems."

"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."

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

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

"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."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade cons

"The solution's pricing could be better."

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

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

"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."

"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."

"The initial setup is complex, especially if trying to avoid erasure coding, as it requires more discs. Avoiding erasure coding can significantly increase costs."

"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."

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

More IBM Spectrum Scale cons

"I have personally met with multiple Storpool engineers and spoke about different options and features. There are too many features that we don't know or use yet. My recommendation would be to promote the new features and give users different examples of how they can be used and how we can benefit from them."

"he only place we feel they could improve is the time it takes to bring new features to production."

"Monitoring and statistics UI is a bit clumsy."

"At times we need to check the disks and do some minor operations. A friendlier user interface would be useful in such cases."

"Live and historical performance statistics would be useful, though my understanding is that this is on the way in a future release."

"It would be good if, with next releases, StorPool provide a better GUI for monitoring and statistics. This would make our experience even better and complete."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"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."

"The price is a little high."

"Our customers have seen a reduction in TCO."

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

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

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

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."

"It provides us with a significant reduction in TCO due to their pay-as-you-grow licensing model, which means we don’t have to pay upfront for hardware and licensing for capacity thStorPoolat we don’t yet need to use."

"StorPool's pricing and licensing model is very transparent. As always, one has to due his due diligence when choosing a product like distributed storage solutions."

"StorPool software is cost-effective and gives us a pricing advantage over our competitors."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

14%

Educational Organization

12%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

20%

Computer Software Company

14%

Manufacturing Company

13%

Educational Organization

Computer Software Company

25%

Manufacturing Company

14%

Performing Arts

12%

Government

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...

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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.

See all answers

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...

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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

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VAST Data vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

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Red Hat Ceph Storage vs IBM Spectrum Scale

Compared 27% of the time

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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

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Red Hat Ceph Storage vs StorPool

Compared 56% of the time

LINBIT SDS vs StorPool

Compared 22% of the time

StarWind Virtual SAN vs StorPool

Compared 14% of the time

VMware vSAN vs StorPool

Compared 9% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Pure Storage FlashBlade

June 2025

Download Pure Storage FlashBlade product report

Buyer's Guide

IBM Spectrum Scale

June 2025

Download IBM Spectrum Scale product report

Buyer's Guide

StorPool

May 2025

Download StorPool 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

StorPool is intelligent storage software that runs on standard servers and builds scalable, high-performance storage system out of these servers (software-defined storage). It focuses on the block-level storage and excels at it. It is incredibly flexible and can be deployed in both converged setups (on compute nodes, alongside VMs and applications) or on separate storage nodes.

StorPool has advanced fully-distributed architecture and is arguably the fastest and most efficient block-storage software on the market today. It is the best storage system when building a cloud.

StorPool

Sample Customers

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

Information Not Available

CloudSigma, Kualo, Togglebox, Neterra, Serveo, Superhosting.bg, GroupOne, DRFortress, Metanet, Dia, Server Storage Solutions

Buyer's Guide

IBM Spectrum Scale vs. StorPool

May 2025

Free Report: IBM Spectrum Scale vs. StorPool

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

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