IBM Spectrum Scale vs VMware vSAN comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between IBM Spectrum Scale and VMware vSAN based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Software Defined Storage (SDS) solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.
To learn more, read our detailed IBM Spectrum Scale vs. VMware vSAN Report (Updated: March 2024).
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"The high performance of the solution is its most valuable aspect. If you compare it to other storage solutions, it's much better.""It has been pretty reliable throughout the years. As far as capacity is concerned, it can handle most heavy loads.""We can have multiple systems within the same file system.""Allows us to share files across multiple environments.""It is a scalable solution.""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.""Its great servicing high availability. That is what it is used for."

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"The technical support is good.""VMware vSAN is compatible with the legacy hypervisor solutions and most of the features are good.""It is simple to manage, very easy to implement and troubleshoot in case of any failures.""VMware vSAN is easy to implement in a VMware environment and it is not expensive.""The solution is simple to use compared to other solutions, such as Hyperflex, VxRail, and Nutanix""In my opinion, vSAN is the most natural way to migrate to a fully hyperconverged solution. If a customer needs a more scalable solution with consolidated management, vSAN is excellent.""Stretched Cluster is one of the big features that we use across multiple data centers.""VMware vSAN is easy to configure, with basic functionality and the customer can maintain the solution."

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Cons
"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 biggest problem is that it is not able to provide block storage.""The solution's pricing could be better.""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.""Integration with other vendors is not available.""I believe there is no graphic user interface, so they should include it.""The pricing and licensing model for this solution are complex and it is sometimes difficult to explain it to customers.""They should probably simply the Red Hat implementation portion. This portion was not as straightforward as I would like it to be."

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"The customer service is good but there is a cost for it. It does not come free.""Reporting currently depends on third party applications and that could be improved.""Dedupe in non flash drives can be improved.""I am looking for more of a software-defined storage platform that uses different protocols, such as iSCSI, NFS, and CIS, and maybe also has an object as part of that. They should 100% make it more of a storage-based product where it is not linked just to VMware, and it also has NFS and iSCSI built-in at a scalable level. They should turn it more into a dedicated storage-as-a-service platform instead of just being built into the VMware kernel. Their level one and level two support is not at all good, and it should be improved.""There could be more features with the automatic backup.""This solution is not great for large file shares/object/rich media repository.""There needs to be an increase in the supported memory and hard disk space, as it is an area where the product currently has certain shortcomings.""VMware vSAN could improve by having faster reload time and a single point of failure. Resynchronization of many hardware could be better. If you have an outage of a disc or a full system, the replication time is too slow. This has room for improvement."

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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."
  • More IBM Spectrum Scale Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "The first 1-2 years of purchasing vSAN will be expensive. Thereafter, the longer you are running it, the more cost savings you will have."
  • "Its reasonable, compare with other storage vendors"
  • "Basically, vSAN is a license in addition to that of the classic VMware Vsphere, which is also mandatory."
  • "​I would like to see this technology be made available to smaller businesses, who might benefit from high availability but struggle with the entry fee.​"
  • "Perhaps a bundle, like Essentials, would allow more businesses to make the leap to the product."
  • "We have increased our user productivity."
  • "What made us go with this solution was price point. When you can utilize existing storage infrastructure, and not have to continually purchase new SAN products out there that are going up in price as time goes by, then it's a wonderful thing."
  • "We did consider other hyperconverged solutions. It usually came down to price. vSan was the most cost effective thing."
  • More VMware vSAN Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:While both run on the vSAN technology from VMware, vSAN needs to be deployed on vSAN ready nodes while VxRail is an engineered system. The choice to choose which technology depends on two major… more »
    Top Answer:We found the reduced power consumption with Nutanix Acropolis AOS a very attractive feature. We also like the interface that allows you to talk directly to your VM from the present software. We found… more »
    Top Answer:HPE SimpliVity is a hyper-converged infrastructure solution that is primarily geared to mid-sized companies. We researched VMware vSAN but found HPE was a better option for us HPE SimpliVity has… more »
    Ranking
    Views
    1,702
    Comparisons
    1,409
    Reviews
    3
    Average Words per Review
    197
    Rating
    9.0
    3rd
    out of 39 in HCI
    Views
    25,743
    Comparisons
    19,117
    Reviews
    8
    Average Words per Review
    556
    Rating
    8.9
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    vSAN
    Learn More
    IBM
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    Overview
    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.

    VMware vSAN is a software-defined storage product that is used in collaboration with VMware ESXi hypervisor and that provisions and manages storage based on policies, regardless of the underlying hardware. The solution enables you to prime your business for growth through its seamless evolution (it is integrated with vSphere and requires no new tools), its flexibility, and its multi-cloud capabilities. As an industry-leading software, VMware vSAN provides high levels of performance with minimal impact on CPU and memory.

    VMware vSAN Features

    VMware vSAN has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

    • Storage policy-based management (SPBM): VMware vSAN supports storage policy-based management for automated management of storage profiles.
    • Software-defined data-at-rest encryption: With this VMware vSAN feature, you can prevent unauthorized access of data at rest.
    • Multiple nodes: VMware vSAN provides clusters that can include as few as 2 nodes or as many as 64 nodes.
    • High security and availability: VMware vSAN offers stretched clusters, allowing more than one virtualization host server to be used in the same setup, promoting higher security as well as availability.
    • Deduplication: VMware vSAN’s deduplication compresses data to ensure efficient storage management and security.
    • HCI mesh updates: VMware vSAN clusters can share storage capacity with non-HCI Sphere clusters and can adopt HCI without having to scale computing resources and storage or replace existing servers.
    • Simplified file services: With VMware vSAN’s file services, backup of file shares is simplified. You can use APIs that allow backup and recovery software vendors to integrate with your VMware vSAN file services, which enables backup software to track new data and add scalability enhancements to files.

    VMware vSAN Benefits

    There are many benefits to implementing VMware vSAN. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

    • Reduced total cost of ownership (TCO): VMware vSAN helps you reduce upfront costs for businesses because it can be easily deployed on inexpensive x86 servers. In addition, its highly scalable infrastructure and quick deployment also save organizations time and money, making it an efficient storage solution. 
    • Good manageability: VMWare vSAN is easy to set up, manage, and provision, without sacrificing performance. 
    • Scalability: VMware vSAN is agile and allows administrators to scale storage on demand, quickly, and efficiently via policies and rules.
    • Simplicity: VMWare vSAN is simple to configure since it is embedded in the vSphere hypervisor. Installing it using the vSphere Web Client can be done quickly. 
    • Reduced risk: VMWare vSAN reduces the risk associated with digital transformations by utilizing existing tools, skill sets, and solutions.

    Reviews from Real Users

    Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by PeerSpot users currently using the VMware vSAN solution.

    PeerSpot user Yves S., CEO, Cloud Evangelist at Comdivision Consulting GmbH, says, “vSAN gives us a lot of advantages when we need to expand resources. We have an overall larger host infrastructure, and we split that up for specific customer test and use cases. In that specific scenario, we can easily add more hosts or reduce the number of hosts in the environment.”

    A reviewer who works in Infrastructure Security explains, “The ease of use is great. The initial setup and upgrade process was pretty straightforward. And, technical support is great.”

    Laurent N., Director at Softlogic, comments, "The feature that I have found most valuable is that it is easy to deploy. It is easy to create and delete virtual servers. It is easy to create the load balancing and the clustering."

    Sample Customers
    Information Not Available
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    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm63%
    Computer Software Company25%
    Comms Service Provider13%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Financial Services Firm19%
    Computer Software Company14%
    Manufacturing Company10%
    Government8%
    REVIEWERS
    Computer Software Company16%
    Comms Service Provider12%
    Financial Services Firm11%
    Healthcare Company9%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization45%
    Computer Software Company9%
    Manufacturing Company6%
    Financial Services Firm5%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business30%
    Large Enterprise70%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business19%
    Midsize Enterprise11%
    Large Enterprise71%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business34%
    Midsize Enterprise22%
    Large Enterprise44%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business13%
    Midsize Enterprise53%
    Large Enterprise34%
    Buyer's Guide
    IBM Spectrum Scale vs. VMware vSAN
    March 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about IBM Spectrum Scale vs. VMware vSAN and other solutions. Updated: March 2024.
    765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    IBM Spectrum Scale is ranked 7th in Software Defined Storage (SDS) with 10 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 3rd in HCI with 219 reviews. IBM Spectrum Scale is rated 8.6, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of IBM Spectrum Scale writes "A stable solution with valuable profile-sharing features". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSAN writes "Very stable, easy to set up, and easy to use". IBM Spectrum Scale is most compared with Red Hat Ceph Storage, Portworx Enterprise, DDN IME, NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP and Red Hat Gluster Storage, whereas VMware vSAN is most compared with VxRail, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, HPE SimpliVity, Red Hat Ceph Storage and Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI). See our IBM Spectrum Scale vs. VMware vSAN report.

    See our list of 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.