IBM Spectrum Scale vs VMware vSAN comparison

IBM and Broadcom are both solutions in the Software Defined Storage (SDS) category. Additionally, 100% of IBM users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 87% of Broadcom users who would recommend it.

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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: September 2025).

Buyer's Guide

IBM Spectrum Scale vs. VMware vSAN

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

Featured Reviews

MikaelHellström

IT Manager at Regin Dalarna

Has handled backup storage needs reliably and supports seamless upgrades

In environments requiring high throughput and low latency, Pure Storage FlashBlade provides high throughput and normal latency, but we do not have any application that requires low latency right now, so the latency of three to five milliseconds is considered kind of high. Pure Storage FlashBlade's ability to integrate with enterprise applications is not important for us, as we only want to present an S3 bucket for our backup, which we have done, and it works very fast. We use the Purity software's data reduction techniques; we have a backup software that compresses everything before sending it to the S3 bucket, achieving a data reduction of 1.1 to one. I would recommend Pure Storage FlashBlade to other companies because it's a very fast and scalable solution for anyone who needs it. On a scale of 1-10, I rate this solution an 8.

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Sachin Prakash

Assistant Consultant at Tata Consultancy

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.

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Pramod-Talekar

Sr Service Engineer at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Enables efficient multi-environment cluster deployment and resource management with versatile features

While VMware vSAN is quite comprehensive, if we are running multiple infrastructures, applications, databases, and other elements, having a diagnostic tool to identify the actual problem area, whether application-side or infrastructure-side, would be beneficial. A proper monitoring tool that encompasses both applications and infrastructure would help in quickly resolving issues.

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

"The solution provides many controllers."

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

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

"The most valuable feature of this solution is performance."

"Approximately 40% to 50% of my time is saved using Pure Storage FlashBlade compared to different products."

"We have seen a reduction in the total cost of ownership by around 20%."

"The product is scalable and easy to expand."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade pros

"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."

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

"I rate this product ten out of ten."

"The profile share is a valuable feature."

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

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

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

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

More IBM Spectrum Scale pros

"It's very scalable. I like that. Adding a node is easy. Adding a disk group is easy."

"The most important feature to me, in my role, is cost. In the renewal cycle for storage, it was about a 40 percent saving compared to going to an all-flash array, which is what we first looked at doing. Secondly, performance: we need clinical data access in five seconds and need to do everything we can to retain that metric. Thirdly, I was really pleasantly surprised during the data migration across to vSAN, that it happened almost instantly whereas, in the past, migrating from array to array was an arduous and fraught process."

"Data management and recovery processes are the most valuable features."

"Stretched Cluster is one of the big features that we use across multiple data centers."

"The ease of use is great."

"The simplicity, as well as the integration with virtualization."

"The most valuable features of VMware vSAN are that it receives updates frequently, has good compression, optimized storage, and they provide webinars on what is new. Additionally, the integration with third-party products is good and it is easy to manage."

"One of the most valuable features of this solution is that it is stable."

More VMware vSAN pros

Cons

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

"I would like to see more VM-Aware features in the next release of this solution."

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

"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."

"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 see more deduplication."

"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."

"It would be beneficial if the layer could support the S3 protocol and be container ready in the next release."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade cons

"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."

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

"Maybe it needs integration with HA."

"Initially, stability was a concern as we encountered numerous issues and errors."

"I believe there is no graphic user interface, so they should include it."

"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."

"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."

More IBM Spectrum Scale cons

"The stability needs to be improved."

"Better options would be clustered nodes, or even cloud configuration. There is room for improvement in cloud configuration, we typically do web browsing for management."

"The only thing that can be improved is the cost."

"It needs to be vanilla. There shouldn't be any custom drivers, any custom anything. It should just be, "Hey, you know what? These drivers are going to work for this version, the next version, and the following version after that." That's the difficulty in this. It takes too much upkeep... The main issue is drivers. Every time we move to a new vSAN version, we're having problems finding the correct drivers for the vendor."

"In a future release, they could add micro-segmentation or security level features integrated into vSAN."

"They should make the software updates easier. We should be able to upgrade it more easily."

"In a future release, they can bring in the object storage capabilities to this solution. Currently, there is not any compatibility."

"More focus has to be put on deduplication and compression with a hybrid architecture."

More VMware vSAN cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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 of this solution could be made more affordable."

"The pricing is relatively expensive due to the FlashBlade technology. However, for companies needing quick and reliable data access, the cost is justified."

"Our customers have seen a reduction in TCO."

"I understand that it is competitively priced compared to other brands."

"The price could be cheaper."

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

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

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."

"The product is quite expensive, regarding the open source solution."

"It is too expensive."

"It could be cheaper."

"We did consider other hyperconverged solutions. It usually came down to price. vSan was the most cost effective thing."

"It is expensive. It should be cheaper. It has a perpetual license as well as a subscription-based license, but they are moving towards subscription-based licenses."

"I would like to use more advanced models of the solution but the price needs to be reduced. There are some extra costs for this solution including a license."

"The cost of the solution is high and if it could be reduced the customers would be very happy."

"VMware vSAN is a little bit expensive and we pay annually. We have an educational institute where we receive discount prices from VMware. We do receive a reasonable discount but it's still expensive."

More VMware vSAN pricing and cost advice

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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

10%

Computer Software Company

10%

Government

Computer Software Company

14%

Manufacturing Company

10%

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	21

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	6
Large Enterprise	8

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	98
Midsize Enterprise	58
Large Enterprise	128

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 functions as software-based storage, allowing users to utilize any hardware supported or defined b...

See all answers

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...

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 The Biggest Difference Between vSAN And VxRail?

While both run on the vSAN technology from VMware, vSAN needs to be deployed on vSAN ready nodes while VxRail is an e...

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How does HPE Simplivity compare with VMware vSAN?

HPE SimpliVity is a hyper-converged infrastructure solution that is primarily geared to mid-sized companies. We resea...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

Comparisons

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 18% 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 8% 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 18% of the time

Portworx Enterprise vs IBM Spectrum Scale

Compared 12% of the time

DDN IME vs IBM Spectrum Scale

Compared 10% of the time

VMware Software Defined Storage vs IBM Spectrum Scale

Compared 8% of the time

IBM Spectrum Virtualize vs IBM Spectrum Scale

Compared 8% of the time

More IBM Spectrum Scale Competitors

VxRail vs VMware vSAN

Compared 18% of the time

Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct vs VMware vSAN

Compared 14% of the time

HPE SimpliVity vs VMware vSAN

Compared 8% of the time

Dell PowerFlex vs VMware vSAN

Compared 6% of the time

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs VMware vSAN

Compared 6% of the time

More VMware vSAN Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Pure Storage FlashBlade

October 2025

Download Pure Storage FlashBlade product report

Buyer's Guide

IBM Spectrum Scale

October 2025

Download IBM Spectrum Scale product report

Buyer's Guide

VMware vSAN

October 2025

Download VMware vSAN product report

Also Known As

No data available

vSAN

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

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."

Broadcom

Sample Customers

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

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Buyer's Guide

IBM Spectrum Scale vs. VMware vSAN

September 2025

Free Report: IBM Spectrum Scale vs. VMware vSAN

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