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IBM Spectrum Virtualize vs Scality RING comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 5, 2024

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

Everpure FlashArray
Sponsored
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
231
Ranking in other categories
All-Flash Storage (3rd)
IBM Spectrum Virtualize
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
39
Ranking in other categories
Software Defined Storage (SDS) (12th)
Scality RING
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.4
Number of Reviews
15
Ranking in other categories
Software Defined Storage (SDS) (8th), File and Object Storage (5th)
 

Featured Reviews

Sowjanya MV - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Lead at Wipro Limited
Has improved performance for mission-critical workloads and enabled seamless non-disruptive upgrades
The availability is 99.99%, which is the main factor any customer would need because their data should be available whenever they want to access it. This is one main critical thing. It is very easy to upgrade since Pure Storage FlashArray handles it well. Everything is non-disruptive now; previously, there were forklift shifts, but now that is not the case. Pure Storage FlashArray says no to forklift upgrades. Usually hardware requires downtime, but Pure Storage FlashArray has improved their footprint so that they are not asking for downtime; everything is just a non-disruptive activity, which is why customers are more inclined towards Pure Storage FlashArray. Customers want more of the models in their environment due to the performance they are giving, and everything is in one Pure1 Array console where we can view all the models on one page or just an orchestration tool. You don't miss anything; you have replication, notifications about replication, and details about which host groups replication is happening in and if that replication is successful or failed. On a daily basis, our purpose is to create volumes for infrastructure; our daily activities include creating volumes and mapping them to the host, doing any migrations from a VM, clearing the data stores, and carving the volumes to those VMs. One key factor is the data compression with a ratio of 5:1, focusing on space efficiency, inline deduplication, and the compression Pure Storage FlashArray works on; that is a major factor we can suggest to any customer. Analytical capabilities are crucial. Daily, we check the throughput and consumption, and Pure Storage FlashArray provides predictions for one year regarding usage. This prediction helps plan updates well ahead. For support, we just raise a case, and they follow up and get it done. There is also AI readiness, but with the model R2, we don't have much of that AI readiness. For others, we do have AI readiness that predicts capacity based on daily or monthly trends, enabling us to analyze how much space we need or if we need to expand the disk shelf. From an operational point of view, a good feature is that if you accidentally delete a volume, it will be retained in the destroyed state for the next twenty-four hours, which is not the same with any other vendor. I have worked in this storage domain for the past fifteen years, and this option is remarkable, benefiting any L1 or L2 engineer. Additionally, from a compliance perspective, Pure Storage FlashArray has REST APIs enabled. I have not explored automation much, but from a security standpoint, it is strong with encryption data. If you want to automate, you can easily integrate with all clouds and explore Pure Cloud for scheduling workloads, including volume creation. Customers find benefit in Pure Storage FlashArray's single management pane of glass due to the dual controller and active-active setup. If one of the controllers goes down, all workloads automatically shift to the other controller, ensuring their data is safe and accessible at all times. This is a highlighted feature that any customer desires because their data should always be accessible. For SAN workloads, we use Pure Storage FlashArray because for SAN FC fiber channel, we don't use it; we use NetApp for NAS activities. We have clearly split this, so SAN is for mission-critical applications, while network-attached storage handles file systems. This architecture helps us maximize the benefit from Pure Storage FlashArray due to the significant workloads from this giant retail client. From a footprint and energy consumption perspective, you can see energy consumption from the Pure1 storage portal on a daily basis, and it is very compact. The three models we use consume only three units, which is quite low. From a footprint and data center perspective, it doesn't occupy much space. As everything moves to cloud, there are requirements to avoid excess spending on data centers, and Pure Storage FlashArray is efficient in energy consumption and is environmentally friendly.
AS
IT Specialist at Saudi Business Machines - SBM
Unified storage solution supports cross-vendor replication and diverse industries
One of the most valuable features of IBM Spectrum Virtualize is its virtualization capability. It allows for the creation of stretched clusters, which are crucial for running Linux-based workloads that need mirroring for boot disks. The solution also provides asynchronous and synchronous replication, supporting operations across different data centers. Its deployment options across public, private, and hybrid clouds add to its versatility.
Nourreddine AISSAOUI - PeerSpot reviewer
Dev Ops Engineer at Transactis France
Object storage has transformed backup capacity management and supports modern AI-ready workloads
The separation of metadata from object data significantly influences storage performance, as metadata uses NVMe flash storage, serving as an accelerator for accessing data. While data resides on traditional spinning hard disk drives, using NVMe storage for metadata allows for fast access to data, especially for large volumes and a large number of objects. The performance regarding metadata is particularly vital when managing a high number of objects; thus, dedicating servers and fast storage to metadata improves handling those large object counts, which we optimized during our operations, resulting in satisfactory outcomes. The improvement with Scality RING is the ability to manage huge volumes and the easy scalability when dealing with capacity growth and management. We can buy servers, install them, and hot upgrade the capacity without requiring downtime. Everything is available through an API, allowing end users to manage their storage conveniently without needing requests or tickets; they can allocate, delete, and move storage as required, making operations easier for the end user.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The tool has reduced our power consumption."
"Non-disruptive upgrades: You can upgrade at anytime without worry."
"After switching to Everpure FlashArray, we saw significant results, as whatever hardware we used before is now compressed to 80%, maximizing space utilization in a single system."
"Once it's set up, it just runs on its own and only requires the occasional checkup."
"It's very fast and very easy to use. It performs well and is both flexible and compatible. We like it because it's easy to use."
"As we needed to grow in capacity, we were able to do so without increasing footprint by replacing smaller devices with larger ones."
"With Pure Storage FlashArray we have been able to deploy several thousand VDI servers, virtual machines, very quickly and efficiently."
"Pure support is very proactive, they monitor our infrastructure in real-time, so they respond before we even open a ticket."
"The versatility is the main benefit, since it virtualizes everything, they use it for so many different things."
"I think Spectrum Visualize is a very good product to address a lot of problems."
"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."
"It's got full features, so we can compress volumes. We can do thin volumes and we can change them on the fly."
"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."
"One of the main features of Spectrum Virtualize is it virtualizes the servers from the storage. We have a very large infrastructure. A major advantage is when you get the aged storage arrays and you have to replace all of those."
"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."
"We have reduced a lot of power and cooling requirements in the data center."
"The most valuable feature of Scality RING8 is its performance and good interface."
"The best functionality in Scality RING is the ability to handle three interfaces over a single infrastructure: S3, NFS, and SMB."
"The best features of Scality RING include multiple aspects, but a few that we specifically appreciate are the scalability platform, which allows us to scale our growth; second is metadata indexing and S3 API capabilities that allow us to access the data from one source."
"The best features of Scality RING are its object storage solution, scalability, and durability."
"Scality RING is more stable and performs better than before; we don't experience issues from mechanical failures, only from human intervention."
"We have virtually zero data loss thanks to this resilience."
"S3 and CDMI, restful API for object access, are useful for deploying standard S3 or CDMI-based applications such as cloud backup, email."
"I would give customer service and technical support a 10 on a scale from 1 to 10 based solely on my own experience."
 

Cons

"The backend of this solution utilizes an Active/Passive architecture, rather than an Active/Active architecture, which is a disadvantage, when compared to some of its competitors. Its storage capacity should be expanded in the next release."
"It's too early to tell if we've seen a reduction in total cost of ownership. The solution is expensive."
"Price is about the only thing that's wrong with it."
"Self-backup is the only feature lacking in this solution."
"The solution is not cheap."
"I would rate this solution an eight. There's always room for improvement, nobody is perfect to get a ten out of ten. They do what they do well. It's not cheap but we it's for uses that we needed."
"There are many features which need to be added, particularly on the replication side."
"Pure Storage will have issues with positioning in the near future since its a relatively new company. For now, customers need a PoC to trust using the solution, as it can't stand on its brand name alone. They need to improve Pure Storage's marketing."
"The training program could be improved."
"Level 1 technical support needs improvement."
"I would like to see more baseline replication and integration with the operating system between Vmware and IBMI."
"I have encountered stability issues in situations when the customer-provided AC power has defects."
"Scalability needs some work in some areas. The number of volumes needs to be increased drastically."
"It's been pretty stable, but we've had some issues. I wouldn't say it's poor, but the resiliency has been less than what we expect from an enterprise class product."
"Sometimes IBM documents something, but in the real world, it doesn't work."
"The integration would be an option that we would like, but I understand that's not how it's going to be implemented."
"When considering the initial setup of Scality RING in 2015, it was, at first, very complicated. Installation and documentation were still being finalized."
"They should prioritize quality over timeliness to minimize customer disruptions and not force customers into a cycle of fixes that interfere with daily work."
"When we used this solution in 2015, it was not scalable at all. I don't know if they have improved on that, but at the time, scalability was just horrible."
"Scality RING8 could improve by having more features. We have to use two automation tools to meet our needs. We would prefer to use only one."
"While Scality claims to be 100% compatible with Amazon S3, it seems this isn't entirely true; there are instances where specific backup tools require S3 to create checksums over written backups, which Scality does not support, unlike Amazon S3."
"I would like to see more possibilities in the UI for managing aspects of the RING as indicated in the roadmap for the next version of their product. Apart from the UI improvements, I would like to see more features implemented with S3 since not all features are implemented in Scality RING, particularly features such as the S3 select in AWS and the possibility to manage all RINGs with one portal."
"Scality RING is not easy to learn for someone new. It is a little bit difficult. There are a lot of components to it, and you also need to understand them to work with it effectively."
"Scality RING has contributed to overall company costs in that it has not reduced costs but rather increased them because we are now using this product as an additional protection mechanism for the backup."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"No storage device is cheap, but Pure Storage is fairly priced and offers what you pay for. You get all the licenses in the future when you purchase a license."
"While more expensive than NetApp, Pure Storage FlashArray offers superior performance that often justifies the higher cost and adds value overall."
"Once you purchase Pure Storage FlashArray it is all-inclusive, you receive all the licenses needed."
"We lost a lot of customers because we couldn't compete on price with other vendors."
"There are no fees for licensing. The hardware is paid for only once."
"You can pay extra for Evergreen support, which gives you free upgrades when new features are introduced."
"Its price is almost double than any other flash storage solution."
"Because the price is a bit higher than other products, the data reduction equalizes the price with amount of the data reduction."
"We would like the CPU cycle to save more on the licensing costs for us."
"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."
"Do a proof of concept, if you are not comfortable jumping in, but do it."
"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."
"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."
"I think it is a good value for the price."
"The initial cost (CAPEX) to set up the infrastructure is expensive due to the specific hardware required."
"The cost of Scality RING8 could be less expensive. It is difficult for smaller businesses to afford it."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Construction Company
10%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Outsourcing Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Construction Company
11%
Performing Arts
11%
Construction Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
9%
Computer Software Company
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business71
Midsize Enterprise38
Large Enterprise159
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business11
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise31
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise12
 

Questions from the Community

Which should I choose: HPE 3PAR StoreServ or Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform F Series?
Both are great platforms, but if you are considering all flash solutions, I would recommend you to consider Pure Stor...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pure Storage FlashArray?
I find the pricing of Everpure FlashArray to be quite high compared to other storage solutions; however, the reliabil...
What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashArray?
I believe we have covered the most important features; the architecture of Pure Storage is essential, and features su...
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-...
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...
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 ...
What needs improvement with Scality RING8?
Scality RING has room for improvement, particularly in having a supervisor external to Scality RING, which is key for...
What is your primary use case for Scality RING8?
Scality RING is used exclusively for S3 object storage. Scality RING is an alternative to Amazon S3, allowing custome...
What advice do you have for others considering Scality RING8?
I assess the simplicity of managing large volumes of data with Scality RING's interface as feasible, but it requires ...
 

Also Known As

Pure Storage FlashArray
No data available
Scality RING, RING8
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Nielsen, Lamar Advertising, LinkedIn, Betfair, UT-Dallas
Pelephone, Sprint IT Enterprise Services
Comcast, TimeWarner Cable, EuroSport, Orange, Deluxe, DailtMotion, SFR, RTL, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Telstra
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM Spectrum Virtualize vs. Scality RING and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
909,725 professionals have used our research since 2012.