IBM Spectrum Virtualize vs Portworx Enterprise comparison

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

"The snapshots, replication, and the ability to have immutable blades are the most valuable features. You're putting data snapshots out in those blades, and they cannot be touched. Its performance is great."

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

"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."

"The most valuable feature is Safe Mode."

"The tool's most valuable feature is its fast performance, especially in handling snapshots. It helps during power outages when we need to quickly move data between different data centers. It ensures efficient replication and helps maintain our data centers' uptime."

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

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

"It's got full features, so we can compress volumes. We can do thin volumes and we can change them on the fly."

"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."

"The ability to add the virtual machine on the Spectrum environment to sort out the data movers(DMs) and their schedules is a valuable feature. You are able to have, for example, four data movers to balance them so you do not have too much work on one data mover."

"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."

"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."

"The most valuable feature is its reliability."

"IBM provides exceptional technical support, which I rate as the best along with Cisco."

"There are many benefits to this solution. Storage virtualization and the ability to migrate massive amounts of data to other systems without impacting your client are the most valuable. It is non-disruptive for my users. We migrated 350 terabytes of data in one night to a new machine without a small system going down and a single user complaining about the performance. You have to fine-tune a lot of storage machines constantly for performance and for making sure that they are optimal, but IBM Spectrum Virtualize does this by itself. It does the adjustment on its own, and it does it right. That's what makes it different. I had a huge VSP from Hitachi, which is also a type of virtualization-based engine but with a decent size. It was a continuous performance-tuning exercise. I never had that issue with IBM Spectrum Virtualize."

"A custom IBM script is designed to tackle the storage management challenges within containerized environments, providing crucial data services and features required for enterprise applications."

"Portworx virtualizes the aspects of the underlying block storage. That is good because they can also use block storage for their future deployment instead of just NFS."

"The solution is user-friendly."

"Portworx is a simple solution. It's similar to Pure Storage products. They're all easy to use and install. You need to have a little expertise with containers to use Portworx, but it will be no problem for you if you understand containers."

"The best thing about Portworx is the Stork, they have called the VPS (Volume Replacement Strategy) and they also have topology awareness, and these are the three features I like."

"I like that you have a small dedicated file system that is fast and resilient for containerized workloads."

"It's on the expensive side, as expected for a niche product."

"I would like to have Snapshots and Snapmail in the next release. People who came from a NetApp background, especially expect these features."

"I have not seen ROI."

"The speed could be improved."

"The Pure Storage Orchestrator is our biggest pain point at the moment. If we can have more say in future developments of feature sets that we will need to support for our use case, that would be pretty beneficial to us."

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

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

"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 hate I/O groups. If you start swapping I/O groups, they can be potentially risky. If they could get rid of the whole I/O group principle, the risk is not there anymore. I understand the fundamental thing about I/O groups, but they are risky."

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

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

"I would like to see them provide a unified platform that offers block, file, and object-based protocol access."

"t is limited in terms of a single system to eight nodes or four, what they call IO groups."

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

"The integration would be an option that we would like, but I understand that's not how it's going to be implemented."

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

"The documentation could be better."

"I would like to see a more native mapping to mainframe-type systems."

"I think the vendor could provide more training for new users who may not be familiar with containers."

"It would be highly advantageous to include an integrated backup solution within the same license, rather than purchasing backup separately."

"The integration has room for improvement."

"They have not integrated Portworx with Ondat since they are too focused now on Pure Storage APIs and not on users like us."

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

"Licensing fees are paid yearly."

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

"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 product is very expensive."

"The price could be cheaper."

"The price is a little high."

"Our customers have seen a reduction in TCO."

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

"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."

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

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

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

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

"The price of Portworx Enterprise is high."

"I'm not sure how the licensing was broken out, but I don't think our offering of the Portworx was more than USD $20,000."

"It has two offerings. One is free, which is limited to only five nodes. The other is enterprise, which is a bit pricier."

"The price is competitive, but it is too expensive when paired with Red Hat IBM."