IBM Spectrum Scale vs Zadara comparison

IBM and Zadara are both solutions in the Software Defined Storage (SDS) category. IBM is ranked #10 with an average rating of 9.3, while Zadara is ranked #18 with an average rating of 7.5. IBM holds a 4.7% mindshare in SDS, compared to Zadara’s 1.9% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of IBM users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Zadara users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 5, 2024

Zadara and IBM Spectrum Scale are both popular storage solutions in the data management sector. User reviews suggest that IBM Spectrum Scale holds an edge primarily due to its advanced features and high-performance capabilities.

Features: Zadara stands out for its integration with various cloud solutions, managed service model, and support for diverse workloads with flexible storage options like SSD and NL-SAS. Additionally, it offers low-latency connections and a proactive support system. On the other hand, IBM Spectrum Scale is known for its high performance, file-sharing capabilities across platforms, and robust integration with virtual storage resources.

Room for Improvement: Zadara could improve on patch updates, speed of feature releases, and its reporting tools. Users also noted the need for more compute services and faster rollout of new features. IBM Spectrum Scale users expressed the desire for a more intuitive setup process, simplified licensing model, and improved user experience for smoother management, especially when adding storage.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Zadara supports both hybrid and public cloud environments and is commended for its 24/7 proactive customer support, providing fast response times and effective problem-solving. IBM Spectrum Scale primarily serves on-premises needs and offers responsive support that generally satisfies users, but some seek better deployment flexibility and guidance.

Pricing and ROI: Zadara adopts a straightforward pay-as-you-go pricing model, perceived as flexible and cost-effective, although initially seen as expensive. It offers CapEx savings and integrates well with existing systems. IBM Spectrum Scale combines performance reliability with a conventional pricing model. Despite some users finding it costly, its pricing is considered reasonable compared to alternatives, delivering unique ROI benefits through consistent performance.

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

Buyer's Guide

IBM Spectrum Scale vs. Zadara

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 July 2025, in the Software Defined Storage (SDS) category, the mindshare of Pure Storage FlashBlade is 4.2%, down from 4.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Spectrum Scale is 4.7%, down from 5.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Zadara is 1.9%, up from 1.6% 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.

Read full review

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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Kirubel Behailu

Cloud System Engineer at cloud251

Enhancing storage management efficiency with user-friendly experience

Our customers are using Zadara for their research and development environments. We provide infrastructure for government projects, but we are often not fully aware of their specific usage. I typically use it for our infrastructure and offer both Zadara and Microsoft Azure to our customers Zadara…

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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 of this solution are the rewrite speed and the nonstop services."

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

"The initial setup is pretty quick."

"Pure Storage FlashBlade is user-friendly. It's replication feature is great because it has active replication and active DR. That's the beauty of the product. It's a perfect solution for block storage."

"I would rate this solution an eight plus. It has has good flexibility and stability, it's easy to manage and the response time is good."

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

"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."

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

More Pure Storage FlashBlade pros

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

"It is a scalable solution."

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

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

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

"I rate this product ten out of ten."

"The profile share is a valuable feature."

"Allows us to share files across multiple environments."

More IBM Spectrum Scale pros

"Zadara saves both time and money."

"One of the most valuable features is its integration with other cloud solutions. We have a presence within Amazon EC2 and we leverage compute instances in there. Being able to integrate with compute, both locally within Zadara, as well as with other cloud vendors such as Amazon, is very helpful, while also being able to maintain extremely low latency between those connections."

"The processing is much faster with this product."

"One of the most useful features is that they provide iSCSI as a service."

"Being able to scale on demand, and being able to get out of our security operation center, and not having to purchase hardware upfront, has drastically reduced the overhead that was required to maintain our information. We have also gained additional capabilities in terms of speed of replicating that information."

"The most valuable feature of Zadara is its ease of use and safety. Overall the solution is a complete package, it has all the features needed."

"I find Zadara's user-friendliness from both the customer and engineering perspectives highly appreciated."

"Zadara is a fully-fledged platform, and our customers are happy with its use."

More Zadara pros

Cons

"Recently, while upgrading the version code, one of the controllers failed. Replacing the controller took between 14 to 20 days."

"The speed could be improved."

"Its configuration should be easier."

"It would be nice if you could store file-based in the same box with the same technology."

"There is some room for new features related to authentication and integration with Kubernetes, and other solution using S3 Bucket."

"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."

"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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

More IBM Spectrum Scale cons

"There is room for improvement in pricing as it is currently quite expensive."

"The cost is not favorable as Zadara does not provide competitive rates for regions like South Africa and Ethiopia."

"The range of support of VMware could be better. It can support Windows, however, it cannot support other operating systems like IBM AIX. This needs to improve."

"Having iSCSI over the internet using a VPN, the IPSec tunnel is really the only thing that I find missing from this product."

"In the next release, there can be some improvements to the web console by adding more features because the console is simple. Additionally, the calculator could improve."

"Some of the features are a little bit slow to come to market."

"The initial installation was difficult because many steps required the command line interface (CLI). Maintenance can also be complicated, especially when deeper troubleshooting requires navigating the CLI and searching for logs."

"The management interface is more geared towards end-users rather than a service partner like ourselves, and there are improvements that can be made around that."

More Zadara cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

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

"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."

"The price is a little high."

"Licensing fees are paid yearly."

"Our licensing is renewed annually."

"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 model is complex and depends on factors such as the number of processing cores and the amount of storage."

"The licensing is based on the number of terabytes."

"The solution is costly but reliable."

"For our use, it's appropriately priced and overall, it's proved to be very cost-effective against other tier-one vendors."

"It is a nice licensing model and it makes it quite simple because we just pay for what we use, and the bill that comes shows us exactly what customers are using what resources."

"The pricing is very competitive and the fact that they have very compelling discounts for multi-year commitments is great."

"If you just take the street price of Zadara Storage Cloud and look up the price or cost per hour, then you could think that Zadara Storage Cloud is extremely expensive or a solution only for enterprise use. That is not true. You need to compare the entire system. This means that you don't stop looking at just the street price, but you need to consider all the features, requirements, and costs of support as well as the extra cost that other vendors have. Other players just play with hidden, additional costs. Everything is included in Zadara Storage Cloud's licensing cost; what you get is what you pay for."

"One of the factors that ruled out several providers was cost. They were way too expensive for the volume of data that we needed and the speed at which we needed to be able to manage it. There aren't a lot of providers that can do that."

"The price of Zadara is very good and it covers everything. There is no subscription needed."

"The pricing and licensing are very simple and the cost is predictable, although, like everything that you pay for as you use, you have to be mindful of what you're using."

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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

19%

Computer Software Company

13%

Manufacturing Company

13%

Educational Organization

Computer Software Company

22%

Manufacturing Company

12%

Financial Services Firm

Real Estate/Law Firm

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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What needs improvement with Zadara?

The initial installation was difficult because many steps required the command line interface (CLI). Maintenance can ...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Zadara?

I use this product as storage. Specifically, I use it as big storage. That's the main use case for Zadara ( /products...

See all answers

What advice do you have for others considering Zadara?

As for the pros and cons, the main concerns are the complexity of the initial installation and the complicated mainte...

See all answers

Comparisons

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 20% of the time

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 11% of the time

MinIO vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 11% of the time

VAST Data vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 10% of the time

Pure Storage FlashArray vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 9% of the time

More Pure Storage FlashBlade Competitors

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs IBM Spectrum Scale

Compared 27% of the time

DDN IME vs IBM Spectrum Scale

Compared 14% of the time

Portworx Enterprise vs IBM Spectrum Scale

Compared 12% of the time

Red Hat Gluster Storage vs IBM Spectrum Scale

Compared 8% of the time

VMware vSAN vs IBM Spectrum Scale

Compared 7% of the time

More IBM Spectrum Scale Competitors

MinIO vs Zadara

Compared 20% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs Zadara

Compared 18% of the time

Amazon S3 vs Zadara

Compared 15% of the time

Wasabi vs Zadara

Compared 10% of the time

Google Cloud Storage vs Zadara

Compared 8% of the time

More Zadara Competitors

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

Zadara

June 2025

Download Zadara 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

Zadara is a powerful enterprise-level storage solution whose design enables it to handle every aspect of a user’s data storage needs. It can be deployed in any location, using any protocol, and storing any data type that an organization requires. With Zadara, organizations can do everything that they were able to do with more traditional systems in a cheaper and more efficient way.

Zadara Benefits

Some of the ways that organizations can benefit by choosing to deploy Zadara include:

Security. Zadara is built with data security in mind. All of a user’s data is heavily encrypted by Zadara’s software so that it is safe both while it is in storage and while it is being transferred somewhere else. It comes with role-based access controls that prevent a user’s data from being seen by those who lack the proper level of authorization. It also comes with dual-factor authentication and other similar methods of identity management.

Reduced costs. While Zadara offers enterprise-level storage capabilities, the costs associated with utilizing it are far less than those of similar solutions. Some of the resources that it offers are totally free of cost. The model that it utilizes is a pay-as-you-go model. Organizations only pay for the resources that they use and nothing more. Users are not required to sign up for any particular period of time. They are in complete and total control of what they spend on the solution.

Storage efficiency. Zadara ensures that users are able to store their data in the most efficient way possible. It takes a number of approaches that prevent insufficient data storage. These approaches are:

1. Thin-provision volumes. This method only allows actually written data to be counted toward the storage capacity that is consumed.

2. Pattern removal. Zadara searches a user’s stored data for repetitive binary sequences. Once it identifies the repetitive binary sequences, it deletes them.

3. Inline deduplication (all-flash only). This method ensures that Zadara only stores unique data blocks in its system.

4. Inline compression. Zadara takes data that is stored in its system and compresses it. This keeps larger blocks of data from taking up too much room.

Zadara Features

Centralized management. Zadara comes with a centralized dashboard that enables organizations to monitor and control their storage operations from a single location.

File analytics. Organizations can leverage a powerful analytics package that can provide them with critical insights. These tools can help users sort through their data and make more informed data management decisions.

Remote mirroring. This feature enables users to replicate data in two remote locations at the same time. This makes it easy for data to be recovered in the event of an unexpected loss. It also aids remote teams in their collaboration efforts by giving them access to the same data at the same time.

Reviews from Real Users

Zadara is a highly effective solution that stands out when compared to many of its competitors. Two major advantages it offers are its extensive suite of cloud solution integrations and its object storage capability.

Steve H., the chief technology officer at Pratum, writes, “One of the most valuable features is its integration with other cloud solutions. We have a presence within Amazon EC2 and we leverage computer instances there. Being able to integrate with computing, both locally within Zadara, as well as with other cloud vendors such as Amazon, is very helpful, while also being able to maintain extremely low latency between those connections.”

Mauro R., the CEO of Momit SRL, says, “The object storage feature is wonderful. With traditional storage, you have a cost per gigabyte that is extremely high or related to the number of disks. With Zadara Storage Cloud, you have a cost per gigabyte that you can cut and tailor to your needs independent of the number or size of the disks.”

Zadara

Sample Customers

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

Information Not Available

Time, Inc. A&E Network, The Washington Post, News UK, McGraw Hill, Gilt, Toshiba, Deloitte, VMware

Buyer's Guide

IBM Spectrum Scale vs. Zadara

May 2025

Free Report: IBM Spectrum Scale vs. Zadara

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

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