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IBM Spectrum Virtualize vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance 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
7.4
Number of Reviews
211
Ranking in other categories
All-Flash Storage (4th)
IBM Spectrum Virtualize
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
39
Ranking in other categories
Software Defined Storage (SDS) (13th)
StarWind HyperConverged App...
Average Rating
9.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.7
Number of Reviews
66
Ranking in other categories
Software Defined Storage (SDS) (12th), HCI (14th)
 

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.
MD.Faisal Alam - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
Russ Le Puill - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Manager at St Peter's Church of England Aided School
Proactive support with improved speed and resilience
There was a long delay with shipping, which we weren't expecting, but we were kept updated throughout. It wasn't made clear to us that we needed to provide our own SFP modules to connect to our infrastructure, so that could have been a bit clearer. It would be amazing if there was, perhaps, a more automated process for updating the hosts themselves, although the maintenance mode works well. Our StarWind command center doesn't seem to have all the options available currently, which support is investigating for us.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"We transferred our old architecture from hyper storage to all-flash storage, which made our business faster and more connected to our customers."
"I am very satisfied with this solution and I would recommend it to others."
"Manageability is its most valuable feature; it is simplified storage, as we don't have to maintain or administer it on a daily basis, which is good, and we can depend on the solution's ability to phone home and leverage the built-in support function of the product."
"My favorite feature about Pure Storage FlashArray is definitely the simplicity; in one word, it's simple to install, simple to upgrade, simple to maintain, and simple to manage."
"When we needed to replace the other arrays, we went straight to Pure and life-cycled them into Pure in every segment we have."
"It has improved my organization because now have lower latency, we get fewer complaints from customers, and we see a constant response time."
"The availability and ease of use are the big features."
"They can provide a lot of performance, so there is not a lot of difference, but efficiency is something customers value because the compression can be up to twice of the second competitor."
"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."
"The most valuable feature is its reliability."
"I think probably one of the biggest benefits of this solution is that it is relatively easy to use and easy to understand."
"It helps us to reduce time, reduce complexity, and be more responsive to requests instead of taking an hour to do one volume; now I can do one volume in less than two minutes."
"It makes data migration straightforward, and on the customer side, there is downtime, but it is very minimal."
"It has significantly lowered management cost, overhead, and everything else."
"We look for reliability of the product itself."
"The biggest benefits of IBM Spectrum Virtualize are its stability, data security, and customer support."
"Being able to upgrade machines and software during business operations just by switching nodes has been a huge improvement."
"From a small-shop perspective, this is probably the best experience I've ever had in terms of the backing hardware for the services we provide."
"We successfully migrated to a virtualized environment, storage performance was increased, and now we have a redundant, failure-tolerant infrastructure."
"We no longer need multiple staff members performing small, mundane tasks."
"The biggest thing we were looking for was redundancy, with both the compute and the storage, so that way we could lose a full node and still keep everything up and running, and not have to worry about it... StarWind was able to provide a solution for what we wanted, - to provide for redundancy."
"The most valuable features of the solution are the redundancy and its cost. I used to have a SAN, a Dell EMC EqualLogic. Unfortunately, it was they call an "inverted pyramid of doom." It was two or three hosts, two switches, and one storage array at the very bottom. But the SAN, the storage array at the very bottom, is a single point of failure..."
"Compared to before, our downtimes have decreased substantially and maintenance windows have almost been eliminated."
"We were looking for a solution that would allow live migration, however, we didn't want to spend a lot of money."
 

Cons

"We understand that they're thinking about it, but one of the things that would be nice is if they added some basic file-level capabilities to the platform."
"We would like more extended historical data to help with some of the capacity planning."
"The only time that we had problems with it was that there was a bug in the VVol implementation but, outside of that, it has been flawless."
"Reports of performance and LUN utilization could be improved."
"I would like to see active replication. I know that it's available now but I haven't tried it yet."
"This product has only two active controllers, whereas other solutions can have more. This is something that needs to improve."
"They could improve the price."
"They are doing some stuff with containers and an object search. These could be improved, because containers is one of the main topics that we are talking with our customers about."
"I hate I/O groups. If you start swapping I/O groups, they can be potentially risky."
"Sometimes IBM documents something, but in the real world, it doesn't work."
"Tighter integration with cloud storage might be useful as a target for a variety of use cases."
"I have encountered stability issues in situations when the customer-provided AC power has defects."
"GUI should be developed in HTML5 as opposed to Java."
"In general, the migration is complicated. Though, it is case-by-case."
"It even has a component, which I would say is a bit lacklustre."
"The feature that's kind of missing is getting us up to the point where we can help the application owners see where their data is at, understand it, and potentially help us breakout."
"We did have some issues with shipping the product to one our sites."
"One area for improvement of the solution is that I had to get the HCAs with Windows Server installed to install the StarWind SAN software on, which I really didn't want because of the extra maintenance or overhead, as well as viruses, etc."
"CSVs require the storage to be configured through iSCSI, even though the storage is local."
"A possible thing is perhaps a customer portal to schedule a time with support online via a calendar."
"Multi cluster support for their Command Console would be very beneficial."
"I would request that the terms and conditions be reviewed and made more acceptable to corporate security so that we could finally turn on the proactive support feature, as it is included with our support agreement."
"Multi cluster support for their Command Console would be very beneficial. Currently, you can only work with a single cluster at a time. The console is new so I expect much growth in this area in the near future. The other area that could be improved is the tech support locale."
"Possible new features could be CSV-level snapshot capability, Veeam integration, and maybe a more straightforward setup. Granted, you don't have to worry about setups with the HCA, but if you want to implement StarWind vSAN in a lab to test it is a tedious setup process."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price of the solution is not expensive."
"For pricing, you have to take into account their performance on deduplication and compression in a $/GB comparison."
"The price of Pure Storage FlashArray could always improve. They are still more expensive than some alternative offerings. Cost is always a concern and when there is a battle they tend to be more expensive."
"We lost a lot of customers because we couldn't compete on price with other vendors."
"Pure Storage is expensive. It comes with features, so you get what you pay for. It is expensive compared to our old storage systems, but from the amount of human effort that you have to pay to babysit a storage system, it reduces that. I don't know if the TCO is reduced, but it's not a concern for us."
"We have seen a reduction in TCO."
"The price is reasonable."
"There is always room for negotiation."
"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."
"It has a lot of advanced functions for a reasonable price."
"Do a proof of concept, if you are not comfortable jumping in, but do it."
"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."
"We would like the CPU cycle to save more on the licensing costs for us."
"The entry point of pricing for this product is the most amazing price ever in the industry."
"This solution came as an additional cost for the TSM package we chose."
"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."
"We didn't have any issue with pricing or any of the sales process."
"This was all completed at an affordable price point for an SMB, which was also a key element for an NPO."
"It's an all in one package, making it very easy."
"In terms of cost, a storage array is more expensive... For half the cost of Compellent, I got two hosts, more storage, and redundancy."
"The other solutions we were looking at were priced much higher than this and they didn't necessarily have full redundancy... Nutanix and VxRail were in the final running... but it came down to our price point."
"Our entire package was around $35,000 for everything, including three years of support."
"The Nutanix piece was about $45,000, getting close to $50,000 with all the licensing involved, whereas the StarWind was less than half of that, after Microsoft licensing and such."
"I was able to bring the price per year down by going out to a five-year plan."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Construction Company
8%
Performing Arts
15%
Marketing Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Construction Company
8%
Educational Organization
14%
Marketing Services Firm
10%
Construction Company
10%
Outsourcing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business63
Midsize Enterprise36
Large Enterprise143
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business11
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise31
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business50
Midsize Enterprise22
Large Enterprise8
 

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 don't really know much about the pricing for Pure Storage FlashArray in terms of the absolute cost. Regarding Everg...
What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashArray?
Despite liking Pure Storage FlashArray, there is room for improvement in automation. Pure Storage FlashArray needs to...
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 is your experience regarding pricing and costs for StarWind HyperConverged Appliance?
It's not the cheapest, however, the solution works incredibly well and is so simple to licence and maintain.
What needs improvement with StarWind HyperConverged Appliance?
There was a long delay with shipping, which we weren't expecting, but we were kept updated throughout. It wasn't made...
What is your primary use case for StarWind HyperConverged Appliance?
We desperately needed to update yet downsize our data centre. We had six hosts for only approximately 14 or so Virtua...
 

Also Known As

Pure Storage FlashArray
No data available
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Nielsen, Lamar Advertising, LinkedIn, Betfair, UT-Dallas
Pelephone, Sprint IT Enterprise Services
Sears Home and Franchise Business
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM Spectrum Virtualize vs. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.
885,376 professionals have used our research since 2012.