IBM Spectrum Scale vs StorPool comparison

IBM and StorPool are both solutions in the Software Defined Storage (SDS) category. IBM is ranked #10 with an average rating of 9.0, while StorPool is ranked #20. IBM holds a 3.9% mindshare in SDS, compared to StorPool’s 2.8% 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: September 2025).

Buyer's Guide

IBM Spectrum Scale vs. StorPool

September 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 October 2025, in the Software Defined Storage (SDS) category, the mindshare of Pure Storage FlashBlade is 4.1%, down from 4.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Spectrum Scale is 3.9%, down from 4.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of StorPool is 2.8%, up from 1.9% 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	4.1%
IBM Spectrum Scale	3.9%
StorPool	2.8%
Other	89.2%

Software Defined Storage (SDS)

Featured Reviews

Parul-Patel

Senior Network Engineer at Holy Redeemer Health System, Inc.

High performance and throughput enhance IT backup management

The multi-dimensional scale-out design feature of Pure Storage FlashBlade is not in use in our environment. Regarding data reduction technologies, we don't get much deduplication because the data is already deduplicated from our FlashArray before we get to backup, so there is no benefit of deduplication. Regarding the integration with cloud-native ecosystem tools, we are not on cloud; we are strictly an on-premises solution. Pure Storage FlashBlade is not used by any end-user; it's used only for IT backup, with only about four people in our group managing it. I cannot recommend Pure Storage FlashBlade to other users depending upon their financial situation because it's an expensive solution, and the cost is very high, including licensing and renewal every year. I rate Pure Storage FlashBlade an eight out of ten.

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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

"The onboarding and integrated monitoring tools are pretty good."

"Using this solution has made our backups more reliable."

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

"The initial setup is pretty quick."

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

"The most valuable feature is Safe Mode."

"The snapshots, replication, and the ability to have immutable blades are the most valuable features. You're putting data snapshots out in those blades, and they cannot be touched. Its performance is great."

"The initial setup is pretty easy and simple."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade pros

"It is incredibly scalable and stable."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"It is a scalable solution."

More IBM Spectrum Scale pros

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

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

"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."

"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."

Cons

"Pure Storage FlashBlade should improve on more cloud integration."

"The features provided for SMB customers are limited."

"The documentational aspect of FlashBlade needs improvement."

"In the realm of micro-services, I think that Pure Storage can do well if they start getting in there and making their arrays more micro-services ready."

"Its configuration should be easier."

"I would like to see more deduplication."

"Commvault has mainly driven the Analytics, providing data and reports. However, the product has room for improvement, especially regarding storage analytics. Upgrading firmware has caused issues, requiring feature disabling to revert to traditional backups. The firmware upgrades sometimes affect Commvault backups."

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

More Pure Storage FlashBlade cons

"The solution's pricing could be better."

"Integration with other vendors is not available."

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

"The main issue that we have now is with the encryption. They want to use more metrics in encryption, which is not working very well."

"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."

"The pricing and licensing model for this solution are complex and it is sometimes difficult to explain it to customers."

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

More IBM Spectrum Scale cons

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product is very expensive."

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

"Licensing fees are paid yearly."

"Our licensing is renewed annually."

"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."

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

"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 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."

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

"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."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

12%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Government

Financial Services Firm

18%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Computer Software Company

10%

Government

Computer Software Company

17%

Performing Arts

17%

Manufacturing Company

16%

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	6
Large Enterprise	1

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

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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

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Comparisons

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 19% of the time

Pure Storage FlashArray vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 11% of the time

MinIO vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 10% of the time

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 9% of the time

VAST Data vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 7% of the time

More Pure Storage FlashBlade Competitors

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs IBM Spectrum Scale

Compared 19% of the time

Portworx Enterprise vs IBM Spectrum Scale

Compared 12% of the time

DDN IME vs IBM Spectrum Scale

Compared 11% of the time

Red Hat Gluster Storage vs IBM Spectrum Scale

Compared 9% of the time

VMware vSAN vs IBM Spectrum Scale

Compared 8% of the time

More IBM Spectrum Scale Competitors

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs StorPool

Compared 59% of the time

LINBIT SDS vs StorPool

Compared 20% of the time

StarWind Virtual SAN vs StorPool

Compared 11% of the time

VMware vSAN vs StorPool

Compared 9% of the time

More StorPool Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Pure Storage FlashBlade

September 2025

Download Pure Storage FlashBlade product report

Buyer's Guide

IBM Spectrum Scale

September 2025

Download IBM Spectrum Scale product report

Buyer's Guide

StorPool

September 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

September 2025

Free Report: IBM Spectrum Scale vs. StorPool

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