IBM Spectrum Virtualize vs Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) comparison

IBM and Nutanix are both solutions in the Software Defined Storage (SDS) category. IBM is ranked #14 with an average rating of 8.7, while Nutanix is ranked #3 with an average rating of 8.7. IBM holds a 1.5% mindshare in SDS, compared to Nutanix’s 5.3% mindshare. Additionally, 91% of IBM users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 98% of Nutanix users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 5, 2024

IBM Spectrum Virtualize and Nutanix Unified Storage compete in the storage solutions market. IBM is advantageous for traditional enterprise environments due to its strong support, while Nutanix offers superior integration for hybrid and multi-cloud applications.

Features: IBM Spectrum Virtualize offers high-performance data compression, advanced data protection, and the virtualization of multiple back-end storage systems into a single management interface. Nutanix Unified Storage provides easy scaling, high availability, and seamless cloud integration capabilities that accommodate modern data requirements.

Room for Improvement: IBM Spectrum Virtualize could improve in simplifying its deployment process and enhancing integration options with cloud platforms. Nutanix Unified Storage could enhance its pricing flexibility further and expand feature sets for traditional storage setups. Both products may benefit from refining their user interfaces for simpler navigation.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Nutanix Unified Storage is known for its easy deployment and intuitive interfaces, facilitating manageability and integration. IBM Spectrum Virtualize requires more detailed planning during setup but is backed by comprehensive customer service once operational. Nutanix focuses on user experience, whereas IBM provides solid ongoing support.

Pricing and ROI: IBM Spectrum Virtualize tends to have higher initial costs due to its extensive features but offers substantial ROI through optimized data management. Nutanix Unified Storage provides a flexible pricing model that scales efficiently, potentially leading to a quicker ROI when leveraging cloud and rapid deployment benefits.

To learn more, read our detailed IBM Spectrum Virtualize vs. Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) Report (Updated: July 2025).

Buyer's Guide

IBM Spectrum Virtualize vs. Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS)

July 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 August 2025, in the Software Defined Storage (SDS) category, the mindshare of Pure Storage FlashBlade is 4.4%, up from 4.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Spectrum Virtualize is 1.5%, up from 1.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) is 5.3%, up from 3.0% 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

MD.Faisal Alam

Manager, Technical Services, IBM Storage & Backup Solutions. at Thakral

Built-in compression enhances data management efficiency

I have noticed that the technical support for software issues, such as with Spectrum Protect, needs improvement. The case logging process is efficient, but resolving software problems takes too much time. This delay can hinder customers and strain vendor relationships. For hardware issues, IBM handles them efficiently, but software-related support requires enhancement. Overall improvement in support for software cases is necessary.

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Amarnath Charugundla

System Engineer at Tata Consultancy

Unified management and cost-effectiveness lead to positive experiences and future savings

Improvement is necessary wherein the memory or storage should not breach 90%, because if breached, it becomes unmanageable. We have to set alerts or CPU triggering for 95% for the first warning. Other activities on nodes or file systems should be properly maintained. We must monitor the dashboard for P1, P2 alerts in the Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) file share system including SMB, NFS, objects, and blocks. Attention should be maintained for any alerts such as CPU, memory, and RAM alerts, as exceeding these creates issues within teams. If triggered to 95% and forgotten, it crosses the SLA breach, causing disturbances to application, web, and platform teams. Continuous monitoring on the Nutanix dashboard is essential. Even a highly experienced person in Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) cannot provide a 10 rating out of 10 because it is a vast system. I would rate it eight from my perspective.

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

"The most valuable features of FlashBlade include its replication capabilities, reports, and easy allocation. Everything is user-friendly."

"The most valuable features of this solution are the rewrite speed and the nonstop services."

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

"It's very easy-to-use."

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

"The initial setup was straightforward. If you know how to plug in power and network you're pretty much qualified. They were on site to configure the network, the box to fit into our network architecture. Other than that, we self-managed from there."

"It uses the same platform for connectivity so integration is seamless."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade pros

"The most valuable feature is its reliability."

"We acquire companies (and things), so we end up with odd hardware. We bring it behind the SVC and it allows us to migrate stuff off of it seamlessly. SVC can also cover up a host of defects of the underlying storage."

"When we add storage behind it, the product is good for the customers because their customers do not notice that anything is happening due to the virtualization."

"It has the ability to seamlessly move hardware in and out as we refresh technology."

"The abstraction flair and the abstraction layer. We had a mixture of different storage arrays, and the wonderful thing about SVC is is that it normalizes all it into a single driver. A single view that all hosts see simultaneously."

"I like all the features, but the most impressive recently has been the introduction of IBM's Flash Core Modules. They are a form of a flash drive, but they have many more features."

"It lowers cost. It does so by getting more efficient use out of the technology behind it."

"Migration from configurations where servers have storage provisioned from older SAN disk systems to newer storage systems is almost seamless using image mode migration techniques, with only a short outage of the servers."

More IBM Spectrum Virtualize pros

"What I found most valuable in Nutanix Files Storage is its high availability and ability to scale out with many VMs."

"The benefit that our clients see is the security of the whole Nutanix platform where they have simplified usage."

"Nutanix's analytics provide better insights into all of our files."

"The benefit for our customers is cost effectiveness. The customer is spending substantial money refreshing NetApp storage. We identified a use case from a NAS point of view. Using Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) helps in reducing costs, as they are not spending a dedicated cost for storage procurement."

"Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) has definitely helped reduce our total cost of ownership, as centralizing that storage allowed us to eliminate all the other players we had on our premises and NASes, bringing everything under one roof."

"On a scale of one to ten, I rate this solution a seven."

"The most valuable feature is the unified dashboard, as it allows us to easily observe everything from a single location."

"The initial setup is pretty straightforward. With a few clicks, you can stand up your storage. It reduces the overall life cycle of deployment within the ecosystem."

More Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) pros

Cons

"I would like to see more monitoring capability included in the next release of this solution."

"The speed could be improved."

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

"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."

"Compared to, for example, Hitachi NAS, the solution is not mature at all. It's just in its infancy as far as technology goes."

"I would like to see more deduplication."

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

"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 disk reliability is not that good."

"NBME support and support for a higher Fibre Channel lengths could be improved, but those are already on the roadmap."

"Anything which improves performance and the ability of our systems would be a nice."

"They are actually working on one bug we found, which was with flash restore. This was the user interface design for virtual environments."

"In general, the migration is complicated. Though, it is case-by-case."

"There are things that occur when you get to this size and capacity. We're very large, i.e., petabytes. When you get to that sheer volume of the numbers of things, it is too big for people to keep track of."

"I would like to see more baseline replication and integration with the operating system between Vmware and IBMI."

"Adding features for data deduplication is one area of improvement."

More IBM Spectrum Virtualize cons

"The pricing can be quite high."

"Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) needs improvement, particularly for firmware upgrades, as sometimes updates take a whole day and it can be unclear whether the issue is with Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) or the hardware, requiring us to reconfigure everything, which is a main point we want consolidated into one solution."

"The training programs could be improved. It's quite challenging to find adequate learning resources online, as there isn’t much available on the internet or YouTube."

"There are some techniques that need to be improved because sometimes, during processes, it gets stuck on the console, requiring command line interventions, indicating gaps between the GUI and command lines."

"Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) can be improved involve the limitations I've seen in Files Analytics, specifically to the number of FSVMs today that File Analytics can analyze."

"The analytics part of Nutanix Unified Storage is too big and should be made smaller and less resource-hungry."

"The biggest thing for me, which is a pet peeve of mine, is the integration with the hardware platforms."

"The graphical user interfaces could benefit from more attention to detail."

More Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

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

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

"It is within reason for what you get. From what we have found comparing it to other vendors, it is in the same range as others. Given the choice, we would definitely redeploy it based on the cost."

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

"Our licensing is renewed annually."

"Our customers have seen a reduction in TCO."

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

More Pure Storage FlashBlade pricing and cost advice

"We have struggled with Pure Storage, but people are understanding that much of Pure has been consumer grade SSDs. Therefore, when the customer is really understands what they are getting, they realize that IBM presents the same sort of value as existing vendors."

"I am very happy with the pricing. There is no comparison when it comes to pricing. I have looked at all solutions from EMC, Veritas, Hitachi, Dell, etc. None of them compares to IBM when it comes to pricing. I get great pricing from them."

"Do a proof of concept, if you are not comfortable jumping in, but do it."

"The entry point of pricing for this product is the most amazing price ever in the industry."

"I think it is a good value for the price."

"This solution came as an additional cost for the TSM package we chose."

"We would like the CPU cycle to save more on the licensing costs for us."

"It has a lot of advanced functions for a reasonable price."

More IBM Spectrum Virtualize pricing and cost advice

"The solution's pricing is fair."

"The licensing model the tool has is cheaper than an HCI storage solution."

"The solution's pricing is better compared to other products."

"If we compare the cost of Nutanix Objects Storage to other solutions such as VMware licenses, our current choice is Nutanix Objects Storage. This solution is more cost-effective. However, adding VMware to Nutanix would not be a cost-efficient decision, which is why we do not use it anymore."

"Nutanix is priced a bit higher than some of its competitors. A lot of Chinese companies like Huawei are entering the Saudi Arabian market trying to provide similar solutions for a lower price. It offers a good value, especially the support. Nutanix has a highly competent team. The after-sales support is excellent."

"Nutanix Unified Storage was cheaper than other solutions we evaluated."

"It's definitely a lot cheaper than buying a new EMC array. We bought a five-year commitment on all the hardware and software. I don't know what the cost was back then, but I do remember it was cheaper."

"The product is pricey."

More Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

13%

Financial Services Firm

12%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Government

Computer Software Company

14%

Performing Arts

13%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Government

Computer Software Company

30%

Manufacturing Company

Educational Organization

Financial Services 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 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 Virtualize?

IBM Spectrum Virtualize is not an expensive product. It offers flexibility with different flavors, whether appliance-...

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What needs improvement with IBM Spectrum Virtualize?

IBM could improve IBM Spectrum Virtualize by bundling Storage Scale and Storage Virtualize into a single appliance. T...

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What is your primary use case for IBM Spectrum Virtualize?

I primarily use IBM Spectrum Virtualize ( /products/ibm-spectrum-virtualize-reviews ) when I have different hardware ...

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What do you like most about Nutanix Unified Storage?

Nutanix has excellent product documentation available on their portals, written in simple, easy-to-understand language.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Nutanix Unified Storage?

I have no idea about the pricing of Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) as I'm not the decision authority for pricing. Gene...

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What needs improvement with Nutanix Unified Storage?

While there are good aspects, I would like to see improvements in networking configuration, particularly regarding ov...

See all answers

Comparisons

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 19% of the time

MinIO vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 10% of the time

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 10% of the time

Pure Storage FlashArray vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 10% of the time

NetApp AFF vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 3% of the time

More Pure Storage FlashBlade Competitors

VxRail vs IBM Spectrum Virtualize

Compared 25% of the time

IBM Spectrum Scale vs IBM Spectrum Virtualize

Compared 23% of the time

Dell VPLEX vs IBM Spectrum Virtualize

Compared 21% of the time

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs IBM Spectrum Virtualize

Compared 16% of the time

VMware vSAN vs IBM Spectrum Virtualize

Compared 15% of the time

More IBM Spectrum Virtualize Competitors

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS)

Compared 13% of the time

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS)

Compared 13% of the time

Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct vs Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS)

Compared 9% of the time

MinIO vs Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS)

Compared 9% of the time

VAST Data vs Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS)

Compared 4% of the time

More Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Pure Storage FlashBlade

August 2025

Download Pure Storage FlashBlade product report

Buyer's Guide

IBM Spectrum Virtualize

August 2025

Download IBM Spectrum Virtualize product report

Buyer's Guide

Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS)

August 2025

Download Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) product report

Also Known As

No data available

Nutanix Files Storage, Nutanix Volumes Block Storage, Nutanix Objects Storage

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 Virtualize is a dependable solution that improves data value, security, and simplicity for new and existing storage infrastructure. Proven over 12 years in thousands of deployments, its innovative virtualization capabilities help organizations achieve better data economics by supporting new workloads that are critical to their success. IBM Spectrum Virtualize software helps make new and existing storage more effective and standardizes functions traditionally deployed separately in disk systems for greater flexibility and potentially lower costs.

IBM

Nutanix Unified Storage provides high availability and seamless cloud platform integration, ensuring robust redundancy, scalability, and streamlined management. It supports hybrid cloud connectivity, enhancing storage security and performance.

Nutanix Unified Storage is designed for effective data protection across block, file, and object storage, offering features like ransomware detection and a centralized management interface through Prism Central. Users gain improved SLAs and IT cost savings through its efficient performance. Despite its user-friendly interface, there is a demand for enhanced security measures such as Multi-Factor Authentication and DLP. While its resilience is notable, users seek improvements in protocol compatibility, storage capabilities, pricing, and support processes.

What are the most important features of Nutanix Unified Storage?

User-Friendly Interface: Simplifies storage management and monitoring.
High Availability: Ensures continuous operation and reliability.
Seamless Cloud Integration: Compatible with platforms like Azure and AWS.
Robust Redundancy: Protects data against hardware failures.
Scalable Architecture: Easily adapts to growing data storage needs.
Ransomware Detection: Enhances data protection measures.

What benefits and ROI might users find in reviews?

Improved SLAs: Increased service reliability and performance.
IT Cost Savings: Reduces expenses through efficient resource use.
Enhanced Security: Stronger data protection and reduced risk.
Centralized Management: Easier control and monitoring from one dashboard.

Industries implement Nutanix Unified Storage for tasks such as file storage, database performance improvement, and storage solution consolidation. Companies deploying virtual machines, securing against ransomware, connecting hybrid clouds, and backing up data find it useful. It supports workloads like Citrix VDI, Kubernetes, and research data, assisting many organizations migrating from legacy storage for better cost efficiency and reduced data center footprints.

Nutanix

Sample Customers

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

Pelephone, Sprint IT Enterprise Services

JetBlue, International Speedway Corporation, Volkswagen SAIC, Brighton and Hove City Council, Foresters Financial, Janus International Group, Cloud Comrade, Serco

Buyer's Guide

IBM Spectrum Virtualize vs. Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS)

July 2025

Free Report: IBM Spectrum Virtualize vs. Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS)

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