IBM Spectrum Virtualize vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance comparison

IBM and StarWind are both solutions in the Software Defined Storage (SDS) category. IBM is ranked #14 with an average rating of 8.7, while StarWind is ranked #11 with an average rating of 10.0. IBM holds a 1.5% mindshare in SDS, compared to StarWind’s 2.2% mindshare. Additionally, 91% of IBM users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 98% of StarWind users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 5, 2024

StarWind HyperConverged Appliance and IBM Spectrum Virtualize compete in the hyperconverged and storage virtualization solutions category. StarWind seems to have the upper hand in customer support and cost-effectiveness, while IBM Spectrum Virtualize stands out in storage and data migration capabilities.

Features: StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is notable for its flexibility, high availability, and proactive support. Users appreciate its ease of deployment and ability to consolidate storage and compute resources. The appliance includes turnkey solutions for seamless integration into existing infrastructure. IBM Spectrum Virtualize offers unparalleled storage virtualization capabilities, with robust data migration and disaster recovery features. It provides a powerful abstraction layer for managing diverse back-end storage options.

Room for Improvement: StarWind users seek an advanced GUI, improved monitoring tools, and better third-party software integration. Enhanced documentation and improvements in communication during support requests are also noted. For IBM Spectrum Virtualize, suggested improvements include more advanced GUI features, detailed reporting, and enhanced cognitive IT capabilities. Users desire data deduplication functionality and comprehensive multi-site support.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: StarWind is recognized for straightforward installation and minimal setup time, supported by proactive monitoring and a responsive support team. IBM Spectrum Virtualize offers seamless deployment but lacks StarWind's hands-on customer interaction, as evidenced by user experiences.

Pricing and ROI: StarWind HyperConverged Appliance offers an affordable solution with flexible financing options, making high availability accessible for small and medium enterprises. Users report significant ROI and competitive pricing compared to alternatives like Nutanix. IBM Spectrum Virtualize is valued for offering strong enterprise features at competitive prices but does not match StarWind’s upfront cost benefits. Its bundled licensing offers flexibility, beneficial for large-scale deployments, resulting in a solid ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed IBM Spectrum Virtualize vs. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance Report (Updated: May 2025).

Buyer's Guide

IBM Spectrum Virtualize vs. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

May 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 July 2025, in the Software Defined Storage (SDS) category, the mindshare of Pure Storage FlashBlade is 4.2%, down from 4.5% 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 StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is 2.2%, up from 1.7% 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.

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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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Russ Le Puill

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.

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

"The initial setup is pretty quick."

"Using this solution has made our backups more reliable."

"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."

"Pure Storage FlashBlade is user-friendly. It's replication feature is great because it has active replication and active DR. That's the beauty of the product. It's a perfect solution for block storage."

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

"I would rate Pure Storage FlashBlade a ten out of ten."

"It has also helped to simplify storage for us in the way that it's easy to manage. Their automatic monitoring really helps when things break or are about to break. They see a problem coming and alert us even before our own system does."

"The most valuable features include the ease of implementation, ease of use and the speed that you can do backup and recovery on."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade pros

"We are happy with the support that IBM provides us."

"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 most valuable features are the simplicity of use, the flexibility, and the options included. I mean, it's just a big time saver."

"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."

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

"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 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."

More IBM Spectrum Virtualize pros

"The most valuable aspect of StarWind is the all-in-one solution that they provide."

"The full suite of redundancy gives a nice sense of security for the whole environment."

"We opted for 24-hour monitoring and support, which has already paid for itself."

"Their support team is extremely helpful, and they are pretty friendly and knowledgeable."

"It did not hurt that the price for the hardware and three years of support cost less than the disparate hardware the cluster used to run on."

"The setup was easy to deploy, and management is simplified compared with traditional SAN solutions."

"The initial setup seems to be very straightforward."

"It is a safe, fast, and cost-effective storage system that improved our systems to have zero downtime."

More StarWind HyperConverged Appliance pros

Cons

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

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

"The features provided for SMB customers are limited."

"It would be beneficial if the layer could support the S3 protocol and be container ready in the next release."

"Commvault has mainly driven the Analytics, providing data and reports. However, the product has room for improvement, especially regarding storage analytics. Upgrading firmware has caused issues, requiring feature disabling to revert to traditional backups. The firmware upgrades sometimes affect Commvault backups."

"It would be nice if you could store file-based in the same box with the same technology."

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

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

More Pure Storage FlashBlade cons

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

"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."

"Level 1 technical support needs improvement."

"GUI should be developed in HTML5 as opposed to Java."

"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."

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

"The training program could be improved."

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

More IBM Spectrum Virtualize cons

"The monitoring and report software is a bit hit and miss."

"The only thing I have run into is that I did want to add more hard drives into the host, so that we could look at doing a RAID 10, and the hard drive prices were pretty expensive... that's pretty nit-picky and I don't think it has anything to do with StarWind itself. I think it's more on whomever they work with for their hardware."

"The truth is that the operation and support offered is good, but we consider that the product's usability could improve, as well as the data resynchronization time after an unexpected closure."

"I think some performance metrics would be nice to see, especially on the storage side."

"We'd like an easier setup for Windows updates on the Hyper-V servers so you don't have to use a script to ensure auto-updating is done."

"The web-managed interface (a separate VM) could be better."

"The only issues are when Hyper V itself has limitations and I'd love to see support or enhancement in the area of direct-attached GPU cards."

"We struggle a little with capacity management with the StarWind Hyperconverged appliance."

More StarWind HyperConverged Appliance cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price is a little high."

"We used a reseller for the purchase."

"Licensing fees are paid yearly."

"I have seen ROI. It has allowed me to increase the density of my VMs without having to purchase anything additional."

"The price could be cheaper."

"Pure Storage FlashBlade is a hardware appliance, and it's very expensive if you compare its price with other solutions. You can get the same features and benefits from its competitor, VAST Data, but for half the price of Pure Storage FlashBlade."

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

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

More Pure Storage FlashBlade pricing and cost advice

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

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

"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."

More IBM Spectrum Virtualize pricing and cost advice

"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."

"It's an all in one package, making it very easy."

"I honestly feel that there's no one else in the market doing what they're doing for the price point that they're doing it at. That's why I asked them about investing in their company. I think that the options they're providing and the software that they have is sort of revolutionary for the price point... The total cost was $24,400."

"A desired feature or service would be the ability to have a hardware subscription plan that ensures routine hardware updates in conjunction with hyper-converged software."

"Its cost was reasonable."

"Our entire package was around $35,000 for everything, including three years of support."

"The HCA price is all-inclusive (setup, hardware, support, warranty), except for your standard Microsoft Server licensing."

"In terms of cost, a storage array is more expensive... For half the cost of Compellent, I got two hosts, more storage, and redundancy."

More StarWind HyperConverged Appliance pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

14%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Educational Organization

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

19%

Financial Services Firm

15%

Performing Arts

10%

Real Estate/Law Firm

Educational Organization

14%

Computer Software Company

13%

Manufacturing Company

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 for FlashBlade is between cheap and moderate. FlashBlade is worth the money due to the experience and per...

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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-...

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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 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.

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

Comparisons

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 20% of the time

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 11% of the time

MinIO vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 11% of the time

VAST Data vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 10% of the time

Pure Storage FlashArray vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 9% of the time

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VxRail vs IBM Spectrum Virtualize

Compared 31% of the time

Dell VPLEX vs IBM Spectrum Virtualize

Compared 28% of the time

IBM Spectrum Scale vs IBM Spectrum Virtualize

Compared 21% of the time

VMware vSAN vs IBM Spectrum Virtualize

Compared 20% of the time

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Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

Compared 26% of the time

StorMagic SvSAN vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

Compared 22% of the time

VxRail vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

Compared 14% of the time

DataCore SANsymphony vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

Compared 11% of the time

Azure Stack HCI vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

Compared 11% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Pure Storage FlashBlade

June 2025

Download Pure Storage FlashBlade product report

Buyer's Guide

IBM Spectrum Virtualize

June 2025

Download IBM Spectrum Virtualize product report

Buyer's Guide

StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

June 2025

StarWind HyperConverged Appliance report

Download StarWind HyperConverged Appliance product report

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

For SMB, ROBO and Enterprises, who look to bring in quick deployment and operation simplicity to virtualization workloads and reduce related expenses, our solution is StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA). It unifies commodity servers, disks and flash, hypervisor of choice, StarWind Virtual SAN, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct or VMware Virtual SAN and associated software into a single manageable layer. The HCA supports scale-up by adding disks and flash, and scale-out by adding extra nodes.

StarWind HyperConverged Appliance consists of StarWind Virtual SAN, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct or VMware Virtual SAN “Ready Nodes”, targeting those, who are building their virtualization infrastructure from scratch. In case there is an existing set of servers, we offer a “software only version”, which is essentially our years proven StarWind Virtual SAN. Basically, it’s the fuel powering StarWind HCA.

StarWind

Sample Customers

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

Pelephone, Sprint IT Enterprise Services

Sears Home and Franchise Business

Buyer's Guide

IBM Spectrum Virtualize vs. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

May 2025

Free Report: IBM Spectrum Virtualize vs. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

Find out what your peers are saying about IBM Spectrum Virtualize vs. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance and other solutions. Updated: May 2025.

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