IBM Spectrum Virtualize vs StorPool comparison

IBM and StorPool are both solutions in the Software Defined Storage (SDS) category. IBM is ranked #14 with an average rating of 8.7, while StorPool is ranked #20. IBM holds a 1.5% mindshare in SDS, compared to StorPool’s 2.7% mindshare. Additionally, 91% of IBM users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of StorPool users who would recommend it.

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 5, 2024

StorPool and IBM Spectrum Virtualize are competing enterprise storage solutions. StorPool appears more attractive in pricing and customer service, while IBM Spectrum Virtualize leads in feature richness, appealing to those seeking comprehensive capabilities.

Features: StorPool offers powerful performance optimization and seamless scalability. Its efficient resource use and cost-effective storage solutions make it ideal for businesses needing high performance. IBM Spectrum Virtualize is notable for robust virtualization capabilities, advanced storage management, and support for diverse environments, offering extensive virtualization features.

Room for Improvement: StorPool could improve in expanding its feature set, increasing compatibility with various systems, and enhancing its management interface for more versatility. IBM Spectrum Virtualize could simplify its complex deployment process, reduce the upfront cost burden, and optimize user interfaces to improve user experience.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: StorPool provides a straightforward deployment model with responsive and personalized customer service. In contrast, IBM Spectrum Virtualize offers extensive support with a more complex deployment due to its wide-ranging functionalities and features.

Pricing and ROI: StorPool's competitive pricing and lower setup cost make it appealing for quick ROI, with a straightforward pricing structure enhancing cost predictability. IBM Spectrum Virtualize offers strong ROI over time due to advanced features, though its higher initial investment targets resource-intensive environments and justifies its premium pricing with comprehensive capabilities.

To learn more, read our detailed IBM Spectrum Virtualize vs. StorPool Report (Updated: August 2025).

Buyer's Guide

IBM Spectrum Virtualize vs. StorPool

August 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 August 2025, in the Software Defined Storage (SDS) category, the mindshare of Pure Storage FlashBlade is 4.4%, up from 4.4% 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 StorPool is 2.7%, 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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reviewer1721697

Managing Director at CloudScale365, Inc.

Great service and support with a constant addition of new features

As of now, the product has been working really well for us. They keep updating and launching new features. Their support has been great and have always been available. I have personally met with multiple Storpool engineers and spoke about different options and features. There are too many features that we don't know or use yet. My recommendation would be to promote the new features and give users different examples of how they can be used and how we can benefit from them. This is a great product.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

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

"It has absolutely simplified our storage because the dashboards on the consoles show a clear understanding of where you are, and it is also very easy to provision. This been a big help for our teams."

"It is very easy to use, and it is very fast."

"The ease of deployment and management has helped us simplify our storage. We also do not have to worry about capacity management as much. A lot of these things are native to Pure Storage."

"Among its most appealing features are its ease of handling and minimal maintenance requirements."

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

"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."

"We have integrated it with VMware. The integration process is pretty good. Especially with VMware, it helps with the capacity of it."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade pros

"The SVC gives excellent performance with tiered storage 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."

"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."

"The biggest benefits of IBM Spectrum Virtualize are its stability, data security, and customer support."

"I like all the features, but the most impressive recently has been the introduction of IBM's Flash Core Modules. They are a form of a flash drive, but they have many more features."

"The ability to add the virtual machine on the Spectrum environment to sort out the data movers(DMs) and their schedules is a valuable feature. You are able to have, for example, four data movers to balance them so you do not have too much work on one data mover."

"IBM offers excellent customer service."

"It has the ability to seamlessly move hardware in and out as we refresh technology."

More IBM Spectrum Virtualize pros

"The team behind it was very engaged and had the skills and ability to support a service provider."

"The speed of the storage solution also allows us to provide service to applications that are very I/O intensive."

"With StorPool we were able to build live failover on top of our LXC infrastructure. This allows us both to live-migrate containers between compute nodes without any downtime and, in case of an entire node suffering any type of failure, we can bring all containers back online within a minute on a spare compute node."

"Creating snapshots within seconds for big disks has helped our different migration projects since it allows us to perform them in a short period of time."

"The two 10GE networks provide redundancy and increased performance as they serve as two separate networks doubling the throughput and doing multipathing and load balancing. We now have a high performance shared storage system which enables us to run on private cloud. Our previous system used bare-metal hardware, which provided high performance but inflexible management. Now we have best of both worlds, SSD-class performance with flexibility of a private cloud system."

"Performance, redundancy, scalability and cost-effectiveness. StorPool delivers superbly in all of these areas."

Cons

"The speed could be improved."

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

"There is some room for new features related to authentication and integration with Kubernetes, and other solution using S3 Bucket."

"The Pure Storage Orchestrator is our biggest pain point at the moment. If we can have more say in future developments of feature sets that we will need to support for our use case, that would be pretty beneficial to us."

"The technical support needs to improve. When we open a case, it is auto assigned to a support tech person. Nine out of ten times, we get an email right back saying that person is off until tomorrow. I cannot handle that. They just did this over the weekend to us, too. I had to call our rep and have them do something about it."

"The solution is expensive."

"I would like to see more VM-Aware features in the next release of this solution."

"I have not seen ROI."

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."

"Level 1 technical support needs improvement."

"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."

"For improvement considerations, I would probably say multiple sites."

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

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

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

More IBM Spectrum Virtualize cons

"he only place we feel they could improve is the time it takes to bring new features to production."

"Monitoring and statistics UI is a bit clumsy."

"At times we need to check the disks and do some minor operations. A friendlier user interface would be useful in such cases."

"I have personally met with multiple Storpool engineers and spoke about different options and features. There are too many features that we don't know or use yet. My recommendation would be to promote the new features and give users different examples of how they can be used and how we can benefit from them."

"Live and historical performance statistics would be useful, though my understanding is that this is on the way in a future release."

"It would be good if, with next releases, StorPool provide a better GUI for monitoring and statistics. This would make our experience even better and complete."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I feel that the price could always be lowered."

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

"The pricing is relatively expensive due to the FlashBlade technology. However, for companies needing quick and reliable data access, the cost is justified."

"Our licensing is renewed annually."

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

"The product is very expensive."

"Our customers have seen a reduction in TCO."

"We used a reseller for the purchase."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade pricing and cost advice

"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 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."

"It has a lot of advanced functions for a reasonable price."

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

"Do a proof of concept, if you are not comfortable jumping in, but do it."

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

"We would like the CPU cycle to save more on the licensing costs for us."

More IBM Spectrum Virtualize pricing and cost advice

"It provides us with a significant reduction in TCO due to their pay-as-you-grow licensing model, which means we don’t have to pay upfront for hardware and licensing for capacity thStorPoolat we don’t yet need to use."

"StorPool software is cost-effective and gives us a pricing advantage over our competitors."

"StorPool's pricing and licensing model is very transparent. As always, one has to due his due diligence when choosing a product like distributed storage solutions."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

13%

Financial Services Firm

12%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Government

Computer Software Company

14%

Performing Arts

13%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Government

Performing Arts

19%

Manufacturing Company

19%

Computer Software Company

17%

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...

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pure Storage FlashBlade?

The pricing of Pure Storage FlashBlade is expensive compared to other products I used from other companies in the pas...

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What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashBlade?

I believe there is not much improvement needed because they have everything we need, but the interface is a little bi...

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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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Comparisons

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Compared 19% of the time

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Compared 10% of the time

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

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Compared 10% of the time

VAST Data vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 9% of the time

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VxRail vs IBM Spectrum Virtualize

Compared 25% of the time

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Compared 23% of the time

Dell VPLEX vs IBM Spectrum Virtualize

Compared 21% of the time

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs IBM Spectrum Virtualize

Compared 16% of the time

VMware vSAN vs IBM Spectrum Virtualize

Compared 15% of the time

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Red Hat Ceph Storage vs StorPool

Compared 55% of the time

LINBIT SDS vs StorPool

Compared 21% of the time

StarWind Virtual SAN vs StorPool

Compared 16% of the time

VMware vSAN vs StorPool

Compared 8% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Pure Storage FlashBlade

August 2025

Download Pure Storage FlashBlade product report

Buyer's Guide

IBM Spectrum Virtualize

August 2025

Download IBM Spectrum Virtualize product report

Buyer's Guide

StorPool

July 2025

Download StorPool 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

StorPool is intelligent storage software that runs on standard servers and builds scalable, high-performance storage system out of these servers (software-defined storage). It focuses on the block-level storage and excels at it. It is incredibly flexible and can be deployed in both converged setups (on compute nodes, alongside VMs and applications) or on separate storage nodes.

StorPool has advanced fully-distributed architecture and is arguably the fastest and most efficient block-storage software on the market today. It is the best storage system when building a cloud.

StorPool

Sample Customers

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

Pelephone, Sprint IT Enterprise Services

CloudSigma, Kualo, Togglebox, Neterra, Serveo, Superhosting.bg, GroupOne, DRFortress, Metanet, Dia, Server Storage Solutions

Buyer's Guide

IBM Spectrum Virtualize vs. StorPool

August 2025

Free Report: IBM Spectrum Virtualize vs. StorPool

Find out what your peers are saying about IBM Spectrum Virtualize vs. StorPool and other solutions. Updated: August 2025.

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