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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
7.3
Number of Reviews
213
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.
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.
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

"The most valuable feature of this solution is the support."
"The deduplication in the array combined with its snap technologies allows the product to be remotely/manually controlled or scheduled."
"This solution has improved our organization. In the past, we had reports that were taking up to two hours and after switching to SSD storage the overall processing power dropped to half an hour. The end users saw an immediate performance gain."
"Both the ease of setup and the reliability of the array makes it quite simple to manage for the customer."
"When we needed to replace the other arrays, we went straight to Pure and life-cycled them into Pure in every segment we have."
"Data deduplication features make it easier to manage storage and forecast growth."
"VMware has benefited our IT organization because we're 100% VMware, everything is running on it."
"It simplifies building out the storage."
"Using SBC, a valuable feature is the mirroring, which is the virtualization of the disk between disparate places."
"It enabled us to build an infrastructure and replace storage with no disruption to our hosts whatsoever."
"Being able to move things around from one array to the other has been the biggest feature for us."
"Stability has been outstanding."
"In my opinion, the quick restore, the low latency, and the ease of use are some of the most valuable features."
"It's the best mainframe storage available."
"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."
"It improved all services running on the new cluster and took up less space and less energy."
"StarWind HCA is much more reliable than our original failover cluster solution, the virtual SAN allowed us to dramatically decrease our footprint and power consumption in our data center, and it is much simpler to manage."
"The appliance support goes beyond my expectations by helping with some Hyper-V issues that may not be directly related to the StarWind services."
"The option to deploy a hyper-converged system without an expensive storage switch was a benefit."
"We are very happy and the number of incidents and stress has been greatly reduced."
"It's trouble-free, it's very clear to use."
"Their support team is extremely helpful, and they are pretty friendly and knowledgeable."
"The presence of built-in storage saved the company from having to purchase a separate storage array and related network equipment."
 

Cons

"The pricing needs to be improved as they offer very high budgeting prices. Searching is a big challenge in Pure Storage FlashArrays, especially when trying to restore a VM."
"In the next release I would like to see integration into other third-party player providers like Google."
"I feel like there is too much automation; the user doesn't have any manual input."
"I had to contact customer support when a drive failed as I was doing a couple of OS upgrades."
"It took us a year to get it to stabilize and to get the best out of Pure."
"I would rate this solution an eight because we have had outages. The commit times went very high in the database. The whole array went down so our customers were down for around eight hours. This was a very big outage which could have been our fault because we didn't do the upgrade in time."
"They have a product, FlashBlade, which is their object storage integration, and that's something that we haven't integrated with yet."
"I like what they're doing, but some of my customers complain that they do not have all the bells and whistles and knobs to fine-tune workloads that some of the competitors have. In my opinion, that's good. All customers don't have dedicated storage gurus, and they can get themselves into trouble if they fine-tune too many of those high-performance knobs, but they do get knocked down. Pure Storage takes a hit in the minds and opinions of some of the customers because they cannot customize things as much as compared to a legacy storage provider's appliance such as NetApp, Dell EMC, or even HPE. I personally think 95% of my customers are better off letting the system fine-tune itself. That was something that you needed to do 12 or 15 years ago, but now with all-flash, the technology can handle what it needs to handle. Customers just end up shooting themselves in the foot if they are tweaking too many default settings."
"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."
"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."
"The disk reliability is not that good."
"I would like to see more baseline replication and integration with the operating system between Vmware and IBMI."
"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."
"The case logging process is efficient, but resolving software problems takes too much time."
"In general, the migration is complicated. Though, it is case-by-case."
"NBME support and support for a higher Fibre Channel lengths could be improved, but those are already on the roadmap."
"I had some initial difficulties understanding the solution which could have been solved via additional documentation aimed at newcomers."
"The overall product documentation and knowledgebase articles could use some rewriting and clarification."
"At times there has been a language barrier when communicating issues."
"If you are hard of hearing some of their team has strong accents, but I have never had an issue understanding them, nor has any of my team that had a bad interaction with them."
"What would have to be done urgently, however, is the adaptation of the hardware to the configuration."
"This product is not one hundred percent enterprise-ready, so it is more suitable for SMB."
"We were slightly disappointed with the hardware footprint. We were led to believe, and all the pre-sales tech information requirements pointed to the fact, that it was coming on Dell hardware. Then it came on bulk servers."
"I think some performance metrics would be nice to see, especially on the storage side."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Pure Storage has not helped us to reduce our licensing costs."
"Pure Storage FlashArray is expensive."
"The solution is expensive."
"It's expensive, but you get what you pay for."
"For pricing, you have to take into account their performance on deduplication and compression in a $/GB comparison."
"Pure is not a cheap product. It is not something that is inexpensive. But, the total cost of ownership tends to be lower than with other solutions, because you don't need a lot of expertise, you don't need a lot of training or very expensive engineers or very expensive consultants."
"It is not the cheapest one out there. We're paying yearly, but I'm not 100% sure."
"Price is about the only thing that's wrong with it. A little bit better pricing would be great."
"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."
"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."
"It has a lot of advanced functions for a reasonable price."
"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."
"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."
"There is a bit of a start-up cost. Having never used HCAs before, I was reluctant to buy it. I would suggest that you jump in and do it, as I wish I hadn't wasted so much time."
"Our entire package was around $35,000 for everything, including three years of support."
"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."
"We didn't have any issue with pricing or any of the sales process."
"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."
"When I researched they came the most cost-effective."
"The HCA price is all-inclusive (setup, hardware, support, warranty), except for your standard Microsoft Server licensing."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
12%
Computer Software Company
9%
Construction Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Performing Arts
14%
Marketing Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Construction Company
8%
Educational Organization
12%
Construction Company
10%
Marketing Services Firm
9%
Outsourcing Company
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business64
Midsize Enterprise36
Large Enterprise149
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: April 2026.
891,869 professionals have used our research since 2012.