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IBM Spectrum Virtualize vs StorPool 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
7.2
Number of Reviews
233
Ranking in other categories
All-Flash Storage (2nd)
IBM Spectrum Virtualize
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
39
Ranking in other categories
Software Defined Storage (SDS) (11th)
StorPool
Average Rating
10.0
Reviews Sentiment
8.0
Number of Reviews
11
Ranking in other categories
Software Defined Storage (SDS) (16th)
 

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.
it_user1721697 - PeerSpot reviewer
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The performance is very good."
"The most valuable feature is replication."
"Provides fast access and is user-friendly."
"We have integrated the solution with VMware, and the process was seamless."
"The deduplication and compression meet all of our system requirements."
"The most valuable features are extremely low latency, high IOPS with VMware, inline deduplication and compression."
"Pure Storage FlashArray has helped us decrease the storage footprint in a significant way; the dedupe and compression that they have is really good, and we're getting about four to ten in the deduplication and compression."
"Data reduction and compression. Sub millisecond latency."
"The ability to have a feature-rich software set which extends the capabilities of the back-end storage arrays."
"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."
"I would recommend IBM Spectrum Virtualize because it is very robust, stable, and affordable, has very good performance, and is relatively easy to implement and use."
"Don't go with EMC. Go with IBM. Go with this product. Absolutely. It's a very good product compared to the competitors."
"In my opinion, the quick restore, the low latency, and the ease of use are some of the most valuable features."
"It improves a lot of functions for our clients, the high availability is the best thing, I have been working with it for 15 years, and it's one of the most stable products that IBM has."
"The scalability is very good. It can handle anywhere from very small to large enterprise class."
"I would recommend it, for sure, because it offers supportability, reliability, and some scalability, and the vendor is there as a partner."
"We would recommend StorPool without reservation, to anyone who needs what they offer."
"StorPool is the solution to storage performance and scalability problems that we’ve been battling with for years."
"We would recommend StorPool without reservation."
"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."
"Using StorPool we had about 15% increase in our gross margin and that is huge for a service provider."
"StorPool’s team has deep understanding about technology and help us tune our system, consult for further vHost.vn growth, and coach our System Engineering to a higher level with more information about tech in this industry."
"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."
"We are very happy with StorPool, performance is impressive and expansion is as simple as adding an additional node."
 

Cons

"I would like FlashArray to add reports that help us forecast our predicted resource needs based on current usage."
"One thing I'd like to see in a future release is integration between their main storage array and what they call their FlashBlade product; to be able to snapshot directly from the primary array into multiple different backup copies on FlashBlade."
"Improved reporting on the deduplication and compression functionality would be beneficial."
"Pure Storage can improve FlashArray by providing more logging visibility to customers. Currently, there is no log visibility."
"The data reduction that we had initially anticipated when we bought Pure and we move over, is way lower than the expected reduction. It depends on the workloads, of course. But that has been a challenge at times."
"It's not so scalable. It's got moderate scaling capabilities right now. The clustering technology needs a bit of work, they need to improve that."
"I can't see where they can make anything better, unless, of course, they lower their prices even more."
"We would like to integrate it more with our backup solutions."
"We are not happy with the technical support. In the last seven or eight years, I honestly think that IBM's technical support has gotten way worse."
"One very important feature is the analysis of the logs which should be there in the system."
"Technical support at IBM is actually not as great as it used to be. It seems like IBM has decreased the number of people who can support this environment."
"They are actually working on one bug we found, which was with flash restore. This was the user interface design for virtual environments."
"I would like to see more baseline replication and integration with the operating system between Vmware and IBMI."
"I had a couple isolated problems with reliability, mostly related to replication, but I have been able to work through them."
"It even has a component, which I would say is a bit lacklustre."
"Because we're so big, they have a little bit of trouble tracking all the products and making sure we get connected with the reports, but, in general, they are very good."
"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."
"There are too many features that we don't know or use yet."
"Live and historical performance statistics would be useful, though my understanding is that this is on the way in a future release."
"The only place we feel they could improve is the time it takes to bring new features to production."
"Although controlling the system from console has lots of capabilities, an interface to view the performance of the StorPool System and control some cases is a need."
"Support for VMware is with iSCSI at this point."
"Monitoring and statistics UI is a bit clumsy, although StorPool is currently working on a new version."
"At times we need to check the disks and do some minor operations. A friendlier user interface would be useful in such cases."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We implemented Pure Storage FlashArray nine years ago when it was new to the market and obtained it at a preferential price."
"There are no fees for licensing. The hardware is paid for only once."
"In comparison to the competitors, Pure is very price-competitive for the future functionality that it provides."
"We have seen a reduction in total cost of ownership (TCO)."
"The pricing is an issue. However, being all-flash, it will always be sort of expensive."
"Price is about the only thing that's wrong with it. A little bit better pricing would be great."
"It is cheaper than NetApp."
"The price, in general, is around $100,000, however, I know it costs more."
"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."
"The entry point of pricing for this product is the most amazing price ever in the industry."
"It has a lot of advanced functions for a reasonable price."
"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."
"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."
"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
Manufacturing Company
13%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Outsourcing Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Construction Company
9%
Performing Arts
9%
Comms Service Provider
17%
Manufacturing Company
13%
Computer Software Company
10%
Outsourcing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business73
Midsize Enterprise38
Large Enterprise161
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business11
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise31
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Large Enterprise1
 

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?
When comparing cost, I find that the cost is either the same or slightly higher, but that is returned by the ease of ...
What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashArray?
The only thing I think could be improved is price. The price is the main concern for our customers.
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 ...
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Also Known As

Pure Storage FlashArray
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Overview

 

Sample Customers

Nielsen, Lamar Advertising, LinkedIn, Betfair, UT-Dallas
Pelephone, Sprint IT Enterprise Services
CloudSigma, Kualo, Togglebox, Neterra, Serveo, Superhosting.bg, GroupOne, DRFortress, Metanet, Dia, Server Storage Solutions
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM Spectrum Virtualize vs. StorPool and other solutions. Updated: October 2026.
920,769 professionals have used our research since 2012.