IBM Spectrum Virtualize vs Red Hat Ceph Storage comparison

IBM and Red Hat are both solutions in the Software Defined Storage (SDS) category. IBM is ranked #12 with an average rating of 9.0, while Red Hat is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.8. IBM holds a 1.5% mindshare in SDS, compared to Red Hat’s 21.1% mindshare. Additionally, 91% of IBM users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 81% of Red Hat users who would recommend it.

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 5, 2024

Red Hat Ceph Storage and IBM Spectrum Virtualize compete in the efficient and scalable data management category. IBM Spectrum Virtualize often has the upper hand for its advanced data virtualization capabilities and comprehensive feature set.

Features: Red Hat Ceph Storage provides scalability, open-source flexibility, and unified storage for cloud environments. It supports seamless integration with OpenStack, delivers block and object storage, and offers a distributed architecture. IBM Spectrum Virtualize allows integration of diverse storage systems into a single platform, improving management and performance. It features a robust virtualization engine, flexible data migration, and unified management across multi-vendor storage.

Room for Improvement: Red Hat Ceph Storage can benefit from easier configuration and better deployment processes. It may also improve its user interface to reduce complexity for tech teams. Enhancing customer support responsiveness would be beneficial. IBM Spectrum Virtualize could improve by offering solutions at a lower cost. Streamlining advanced features for simplicity and further optimizing virtualized environments could also enhance user experience.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Red Hat Ceph Storage may present challenges with its complex open-source setup, potentially requiring experienced teams. IBM Spectrum Virtualize is often praised for its streamlined deployment process and strong customer service, offering a more straightforward experience thanks to its support network.

Pricing and ROI: Red Hat Ceph Storage is generally viewed as cost-effective, providing good ROI by leveraging open-source advantages and reducing external storage costs. IBM Spectrum Virtualize, while more expensive, is justified by its feature-rich offering and long-term benefits of virtualization technologies. The choice centers around Red Hat's affordability versus IBM's higher upfront cost with possible greater long-term returns.

To learn more, read our detailed IBM Spectrum Virtualize vs. Red Hat Ceph Storage Report (Updated: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

IBM Spectrum Virtualize vs. Red Hat Ceph Storage

April 2025

Download the complete report

Helped 849,686 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 May 2025, in the Software Defined Storage (SDS) category, the mindshare of Pure Storage FlashBlade is 4.2%, down from 4.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Spectrum Virtualize is 1.5%, down from 1.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Red Hat Ceph Storage is 21.1%, down from 22.2% 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.

Read full review

ANDRE VINICIUS HAMERSKI

IT Private Cloud & Infrastructure Leader at Sicredi

Offers cost-effective scalability through open-source storage integration

Ceph Storage allows us to add value related to cost and offers a unique experience compared to traditional storage. We appreciate the scalability of the open-source solution, allowing us to address our growing data needs without encountering major issues. Having used it as a pilot system in Brazil, we gained significant knowledge and the ability to manage our infrastructure as code.

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

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

"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."

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

"The main feature I have found to be product replication."

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

"The tool's most valuable features are data warehousing, speedy recovery, and analytics. Its latest release is cost-effective."

"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."

"The product is scalable and easy to expand."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade pros

"The ability to have a feature-rich software set which extends the capabilities of the back-end storage arrays."

"It is a single pane of glass management interface, so once the storage is allocated to SVC, they only have one place to go to manage it for everything."

"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."

"Although the GUI from the XIV was used (in my view), IBM has polished and refined the GUI providing a pleasant and easy to navigate GUI experience."

"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."

"The ease of management, the simplicity of the CLI, the speed of that interface, and the well-architected design of the product in general are valuable features."

"We can failover easily, because a lot of our data is replicated from family to the second replication."

More IBM Spectrum Virtualize pros

"The setup is very easy, deserving a ten out of ten."

"High reliability with commodity hardware."

"The high availability of the solution is important to us."

"Ceph has simplified my storage integration. I no longer need two or three storage systems, as Ceph can support all my storage needs. I no longer need OpenStack Swift for REST object storage access, I no longer need NFS or GlusterFS for filesystem sharing, and most importantly, I no longer need LVM or DRBD for my virtual machines in OpenStack."

"What I found most valuable from Red Hat Ceph Storage is integration because if you are talking about a solution that consists purely of Red Hat products, this is where integration benefits come in. In particular, Red Hat Ceph Storage becomes a single solution for managing the entire environment in terms of the container or the infrastructure, or the worker nodes because it all comes from a single plug."

"Ceph Storage allows us to add value related to cost and offers a unique experience compared to traditional storage."

"The most valuable feature is the stability of the product."

"The community support is very good."

More Red Hat Ceph Storage pros

Cons

"I would like to see more deduplication."

"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."

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

"It usually comes down to just what you hit and the value you're getting when you spend the money and license the products. I would always go, "If you want to make things better, lower your price and make your licensing simpler." There's always an opportunity around that."

"Its configuration should be easier."

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

"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."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade cons

"The only errors I find sometimes is the solution tells me I cannot operate it because a service has turned off, you can just go back to the VM, go to services, and turn back the services. However, this should improve."

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

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

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

"I already discussed possible improvements with some of the guys from Hearnsley. One of our frustrations is when you go to expand volumes in a global mirror environment, you have to stop everything in order to expand. So that's one of the things."

"Tighter integration with cloud storage might be useful as a target for a variety of use cases."

"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."

"There are big arrays now, and if a customer wants add more disks to it, you have to have another array. Adding disks to existing arrays is one of the most demanded things from our customers."

More IBM Spectrum Virtualize cons

"I have not identified any drawbacks, however, the response to public platform inquiries could be faster."

"Ceph does not deal very well with, or takes a long time to recover from, certain kinds of network failures and individual storage node failures."

"This product uses a lot of CPU and network bandwidth. It needs some deduplication features and to use delta for rebalancing."

"The product lacks RDMA support for inter-OSD communication."

"It took me a long time to get the storage drivers for the communication with Kubernetes up and running. The documentation could improve it is lacking information. I'm not sure if this is a Ceph problem or if Ceph should address this, but it was something I ran into. Additionally, there is a performance issue I am having that I am looking into, but overall I am satisfied with the performance."

"The licensing cost is excessively high. This is a significant issue from my perspective."

"Ceph is not a mature product at this time. Guides are misleading and incomplete. You will meet all kind of bugs and errors trying to install the system for the first time. It requires very experienced personnel to support and keep the system in working condition, and install all necessary packets."

"Rebalancing and recovery are a bit slow."

More Red Hat Ceph Storage 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."

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

"We used a reseller for the purchase."

"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."

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

"Our licensing is renewed annually."

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

More Pure Storage FlashBlade pricing and cost advice

"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."

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

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

"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."

"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."

"Generally the bundled licensing is more cost effective and gives flexibility to the solution. Linking into the Spectrum Suite can also be advantageous, but depends on the scale of the enterprise."

More IBM Spectrum Virtualize pricing and cost advice

"The price of this product isn't high."

"The operational overhead is higher compared to Azure because we own the hardware."

"The price of Red Hat Ceph Storage is reasonable."

"If you can afford a product like Red Hat Ceph Storage then go for it. If you cannot, then you need to test Ceph and get your hands dirty."

"The other big advantage is that Ceph is free software. Compared to traditional SAN based storage, it is very economical."

"Most of time, you can get Ceph with the OpenStack solution in a subscription as a bundle."

"There is no cost for software."

"We never used the paid support."

More Red Hat Ceph Storage pricing and cost advice

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

849,686 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

29%

Computer Software Company

12%

Financial Services Firm

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

21%

Financial Services Firm

15%

Government

12%

Real Estate/Law Firm

Computer Software Company

18%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Government

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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashBlade?

Its configuration should be easier. There should be easier language for the configuration.

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-...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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 ...

See all answers

How does Red Hat Ceph Storage compare with MiniO?

Red Hat Ceph does well in simplifying storage integration by replacing the need for numerous storage solutions. This ...

See all answers

What do you like most about Red Hat Ceph Storage?

The high availability of the solution is important to us.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Red Hat Ceph Storage?

I have not identified any drawbacks, however, the response to public platform inquiries could be faster.

See all answers

Comparisons

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 21% of the time

VAST Data vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 11% of the time

MinIO vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 11% of the time

Pure Storage FlashArray vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 8% of the time

Dell ECS vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 6% of the time

More Pure Storage FlashBlade Competitors

VxRail vs IBM Spectrum Virtualize

Compared 32% of the time

Dell VPLEX vs IBM Spectrum Virtualize

Compared 26% of the time

VMware vSAN vs IBM Spectrum Virtualize

Compared 21% of the time

IBM Spectrum Scale vs IBM Spectrum Virtualize

Compared 21% of the time

More IBM Spectrum Virtualize Competitors

MinIO vs Red Hat Ceph Storage

Compared 40% of the time

VMware vSAN vs Red Hat Ceph Storage

Compared 6% of the time

NetApp StorageGRID vs Red Hat Ceph Storage

Compared 6% of the time

Dell PowerFlex vs Red Hat Ceph Storage

Compared 4% of the time

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs Red Hat Ceph Storage

Compared 3% of the time

More Red Hat Ceph Storage Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Pure Storage FlashBlade

April 2025

Download Pure Storage FlashBlade product report

Buyer's Guide

IBM Spectrum Virtualize

April 2025

Download IBM Spectrum Virtualize product report

Buyer's Guide

Software Defined Storage (SDS)

April 2025

Download Red Hat Ceph Storage product report

Also Known As

No data available

Ceph

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

Red Hat Ceph Storage is an enterprise open source platform that provides unified software-defined storage on standard, economical servers and disks. With block, object, and file storage combined into one platform, Red Hat Ceph Storage efficiently and automatically manages all your data.

Red Hat

Sample Customers

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

Pelephone, Sprint IT Enterprise Services

Dell, DreamHost

Buyer's Guide

IBM Spectrum Virtualize vs. Red Hat Ceph Storage

April 2025

Free Report: IBM Spectrum Virtualize vs. Red Hat Ceph Storage

Find out what your peers are saying about IBM Spectrum Virtualize vs. Red Hat Ceph Storage and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.

DOWNLOAD NOW

849,686 professionals have used our research since 2012.

See our IBM Spectrum Virtualize vs. Red Hat Ceph Storage report.

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