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 8.5, while Zadara is ranked #17 with an average rating of 7.5. IBM holds a 3.7% mindshare in SDS, compared to Zadara’s 2.1% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of IBM users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Zadara users who would recommend it.

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

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: December 2025).

Buyer's Guide

IBM Spectrum Scale vs. Zadara

December 2025

Download the complete report

Helped 879,853 peers since 2012

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 January 2026, in the Software Defined Storage (SDS) category, the mindshare of Pure Storage FlashBlade is 3.3%, down from 4.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Spectrum Scale is 3.7%, down from 4.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Zadara is 2.1%, up from 1.5% 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	3.3%
IBM Spectrum Scale	3.7%
Zadara	2.1%
Other	90.9%

Software Defined Storage (SDS)

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.

Read full review

Sachin Prakash

Assistant Consultant at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

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.

Read full review

KirillKolesnikov

IT Technical Architect at AVALIS

Troubleshooting becomes more accessible and management improves over time

I use this product as storage. Specifically, I use it as big storage. That's the main use case for Zadara Zadara's troubleshooting feature is very valuable for me. After the last update, managing the product became easier. Management is more straightforward and useful. These improvements are…

Read full review

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"The solution provides many controllers."

"Speed and ease of use are the two most valuable features."

"The ease of deployment and management has helped us simplify our storage. We also do not have to worry about capacity management as much. A lot of these things are native to Pure Storage."

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

"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."

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

"The most valuable features include the ease of implementation, ease of use and the speed that you can do backup and recovery on."

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

More Pure Storage FlashBlade pros

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

"GPFS monitoring is the best feature."

"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."

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

"It is incredibly scalable and stable."

"The profile share is a valuable feature."

"I rate this product ten out of ten."

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

More IBM Spectrum Scale pros

"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."

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

"Zadara Storage Cloud having 24/7 management saves me support and engineering costs because the storage and computing are managed by a third-party. We are able to focus more attention on the customer, which is truly our core business. Even at 1:00 AM or 2:00 AM at night, someone will answer, which is important."

"Zadara saves both time and money."

"It's very easy to expand and compared to other storage systems that we've used, it's a lot more expandable and a lot more flexible in how it's deployed."

"The processing is much faster with this product."

"The most valuable feature is the flexibility in terms of deployment options."

"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."

More Zadara pros

Cons

"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."

"They need better integration with public clouds along with a better hybrid solution."

"The technical support needs to improve. When we open a case, it is auto assigned to a support tech person. Nine out of ten times, we get an email right back saying that person is off until tomorrow. I cannot handle that. They just did this over the weekend to us, too. I had to call our rep and have them do something about it."

"I want efficiency. FlashBlade doesn't have efficiency now."

"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."

"I would like to see better integration."

"File storage needs a lot of improvement. Mainframe connectivity also needs improvement because it requires additional components to be integrated with Pure Storage FlashBlade. If you want to keep your backup data, then this becomes an even more expensive solution because Pure Storage FlashBlade will not be able to meet your backup needs."

"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

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

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

"The solution's pricing could be better."

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

"Integration with other vendors is not available."

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

"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."

"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."

More IBM Spectrum Scale cons

"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."

"Cost-wise, because it's a pay-per-use model, it may ultimately end up costing us more in the long run than something we developed ourselves."

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

"The initial setup of the solution is complex."

"Currently, when we do firmware upgrades, it sometimes causes issues and is not as nondisruptive as desired."

"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."

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

"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."

More Zadara cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

"We used a reseller for the purchase."

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

"I rate the tool's pricing a seven to eight out of ten."

"The price of this solution could be made more affordable."

"The price is a little high."

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

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

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

"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 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."

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

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

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Software Defined Storage (SDS) solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

879,853 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

12%

Computer Software Company

10%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Government

Financial Services Firm

18%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Computer Software Company

Government

Computer Software Company

19%

Manufacturing Company

12%

Comms Service Provider

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	12
Large Enterprise	4

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?

Regarding pricing, it is okay; we needed exactly this in size, and the price was a lot lower than competitors, making...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashBlade?

In my opinion, one way Pure Storage FlashBlade can be improved is by having more compatibility between the FlashArray...

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 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 17% of the time

Pure Storage FlashArray vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 10% of the time

MinIO vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 10% of the time

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 7% of the time

VAST Data vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 6% of the time

More Pure Storage FlashBlade Competitors

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs IBM Spectrum Scale

Compared 15% of the time

NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP vs IBM Spectrum Scale

Compared 10% of the time

Portworx Enterprise vs IBM Spectrum Scale

Compared 10% of the time

DDN IME vs IBM Spectrum Scale

Compared 9% of the time

IBM Spectrum Virtualize vs IBM Spectrum Scale

Compared 7% of the time

More IBM Spectrum Scale Competitors

Amazon S3 vs Zadara

Compared 11% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs Zadara

Compared 11% of the time

Amazon EC2 vs Zadara

Compared 9% of the time

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs Zadara

Compared 7% of the time

DataCore SANsymphony vs Zadara

Compared 6% of the time

More Zadara Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Pure Storage FlashBlade

December 2025

Download Pure Storage FlashBlade product report

Buyer's Guide

IBM Spectrum Scale

December 2025

Download IBM Spectrum Scale product report

Buyer's Guide

Zadara

December 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

December 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: December 2025.

DOWNLOAD NOW

879,853 professionals have used our research since 2012.

See our IBM Spectrum Scale vs. Zadara report.

See our list of best Software Defined Storage (SDS) vendors, 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.