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 1.6% mindshare in SDS, compared to StorPool’s 2.8% 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: September 2025).

Buyer's Guide

IBM Spectrum Virtualize vs. StorPool

September 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 October 2025, in the Software Defined Storage (SDS) category, the mindshare of Pure Storage FlashBlade is 4.1%, down from 4.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Spectrum Virtualize is 1.6%, up from 1.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of StorPool is 2.8%, up from 1.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Software Defined Storage (SDS) Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Pure Storage FlashBlade	4.1%
IBM Spectrum Virtualize	1.6%
StorPool	2.8%
Other	91.5%

Software Defined Storage (SDS)

Featured Reviews

Parul-Patel

Senior Network Engineer at Holy Redeemer Health System, Inc.

High performance and throughput enhance IT backup management

The multi-dimensional scale-out design feature of Pure Storage FlashBlade is not in use in our environment. Regarding data reduction technologies, we don't get much deduplication because the data is already deduplicated from our FlashArray before we get to backup, so there is no benefit of deduplication. Regarding the integration with cloud-native ecosystem tools, we are not on cloud; we are strictly an on-premises solution. Pure Storage FlashBlade is not used by any end-user; it's used only for IT backup, with only about four people in our group managing it. I cannot recommend Pure Storage FlashBlade to other users depending upon their financial situation because it's an expensive solution, and the cost is very high, including licensing and renewal every year. I rate Pure Storage FlashBlade an eight out of ten.

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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 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."

"It helps simplify our storage, because the user interface is very simple and the installation is easy."

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

"The initial setup is pretty easy and simple."

"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."

"The onboarding and integrated monitoring tools are pretty good."

"The tool's most valuable feature is its fast performance, especially in handling snapshots. It helps during power outages when we need to quickly move data between different data centers. It ensures efficient replication and helps maintain our data centers' uptime."

"We can capacity plan at a greater level than we used to."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade pros

"In my opinion, the quick restore, the low latency, and the ease of use are some of the most valuable features."

"Using SBC, a valuable feature is the mirroring, which is the virtualization of the disk between disparate places."

"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's got full features, so we can compress volumes. We can do thin volumes and we can change them on the fly."

"The SVC gives excellent performance with tiered storage behind it."

"I like that it can virtualize more than three hundred storage providers."

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

"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."

More IBM Spectrum Virtualize pros

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

Cons

"Pure Storage FlashBlade should improve on more cloud integration."

"I have not seen ROI."

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

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

"I would like to see more monitoring capability included in the next release of this solution."

"It usually comes down to just what you hit and the value you're getting when you spend the money and license the products. I would always go, "If you want to make things better, lower your price and make your licensing simpler." There's always an opportunity around that."

"The feature that we're waiting on is better integration with the cell services."

"Its configuration should be easier."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade cons

"IBM could improve IBM Spectrum Virtualize by bundling Storage Scale and Storage Virtualize into a single appliance. This would provide a more appealing and cost-effective solution."

"The training program could be improved."

"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."

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

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

"The Storwize port is not so stable."

"Anything which improves performance and the ability of our systems would be a nice."

"The disk reliability is not that good."

More IBM Spectrum Virtualize cons

"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."

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

"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."

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

"Monitoring and statistics UI is a bit clumsy."

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

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

"Licensing fees are paid yearly."

"The price is a little high."

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

"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."

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

"I understand that it is competitively priced compared to other brands."

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

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."

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

"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."

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

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

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'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."

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

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

12%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Government

Computer Software Company

15%

Performing Arts

14%

Financial Services Firm

Government

Computer Software Company

17%

Performing Arts

17%

Manufacturing Company

16%

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	11
Midsize Enterprise	11
Large Enterprise	20

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	11
Midsize Enterprise	4
Large Enterprise	31

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	6
Large Enterprise	1

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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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...

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...

See all answers

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

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 19% of the time

Pure Storage FlashArray vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 11% of the time

MinIO vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 10% of the time

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 9% of the time

VAST Data vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 7% of the time

More Pure Storage FlashBlade Competitors

IBM Spectrum Scale vs IBM Spectrum Virtualize

Compared 21% of the time

Dell VPLEX vs IBM Spectrum Virtualize

Compared 17% of the time

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs IBM Spectrum Virtualize

Compared 16% of the time

VxRail vs IBM Spectrum Virtualize

Compared 16% of the time

VMware vSAN vs IBM Spectrum Virtualize

Compared 15% of the time

More IBM Spectrum Virtualize Competitors

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs StorPool

Compared 59% of the time

LINBIT SDS vs StorPool

Compared 20% of the time

StarWind Virtual SAN vs StorPool

Compared 11% of the time

VMware vSAN vs StorPool

Compared 9% of the time

More StorPool Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Pure Storage FlashBlade

September 2025

Download Pure Storage FlashBlade product report

Buyer's Guide

IBM Spectrum Virtualize

September 2025

Download IBM Spectrum Virtualize product report

Buyer's Guide

StorPool

September 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

September 2025

Free Report: IBM Spectrum Virtualize vs. StorPool

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