IBM Spectrum Virtualize vs VMware Software Defined Storage comparison

IBM Spectrum Virtualize vs. VMware Software Defined Storage

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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 VMware Software Defined Storage is 1.0%, up from 1.0% 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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Achilles Lobo

Infrastructure Architect at Grupo Protege

Simple to configure and provides good performance

The solution is simple to configure and provides good performance and less footprint. Dell deployed the solution, and it's very simple to use. VMware software is widely used by IT administrators VMware Software Defined Storage can be improved in the replication area. The solution has some…

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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

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

"The initial setup was straightforward. If you know how to plug in power and network you're pretty much qualified. They were on site to configure the network, the box to fit into our network architecture. Other than that, we self-managed from there."

"The most valuable features are the Metro clustering, and disaster recovery."

"The initial setup is pretty easy and simple."

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

"The initial setup is pretty quick."

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

"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."

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."

"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."

"We can failover easily, because a lot of our data is replicated from family to the second replication."

"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."

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

"The scalability is very good. It can handle anywhere from very small to large enterprise class."

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

"The most valuable feature is its reliability."

More IBM Spectrum Virtualize pros

"The most valuable features of the solution are that it is easy to deploy and the support is really good."

"The single management panel is the main feature that is wonderful for the customer."

"The best part of the solution is that you can actually scale up to a large number of operating systems without additional hardware."

"The most valuable features of VMware Software Defined Storage are scalability, high availability, and performance."

"This is an easy-to-use product for adding flexibility to your storage solution."

"VMware Software Defined Storage gives higher availability against data corruption."

"The solution is simple to configure and provides good performance and less footprint."

Cons

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

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

"In the realm of micro-services, I think that Pure Storage can do well if they start getting in there and making their arrays more micro-services ready."

"In terms of scalability, it doesn't expand out quite as robustly as some of the others, but it covers 90% of the market in what it does."

"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."

"We initially encountered challenges with the assembly process due to issues with the documentation required during setup, an area where Pure Storage needs improvement."

"The features provided for SMB customers are limited."

"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."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade cons

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

"They are actually working on one bug we found, which was with flash restore. This was the user interface design for virtual environments."

"The integration would be an option that we would like, but I understand that's not how it's going to be implemented."

"There are things that occur when you get to this size and capacity. We're very large, i.e., petabytes. When you get to that sheer volume of the numbers of things, it is too big for people to keep track of."

"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."

"In general, the migration is complicated. Though, it is case-by-case."

"The case logging process is efficient, but resolving software problems takes too much time."

More IBM Spectrum Virtualize cons

"There is room for more integrations and plugins into more storages."

"The license model of the product is an area of concern where improvements are required."

"VMware Software Defined Storage should include a shared database on a standard version."

"The solution has some limitations in terms of replication to remote sites or cloud infrastructure, which need improvement."

"I'd like to see improved hardware compatibility"

"Simplifying the licensing model and making it cheaper would improve the solution."

"It doesn't have the ability to be deployed on any kind of hardware and network connectors."

"The performance is not as good as some competing products and reporting can be improved."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price could be cheaper."

"Our customers have seen a reduction in TCO."

"In my opinion, we have paid the right price for the product. I don't think that it is too much or too little."

"We used a reseller for the purchase."

"I rate the tool's pricing a seven to eight out of ten."

"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."

"The product is very expensive."

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

More Pure Storage FlashBlade pricing and cost advice

"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."

"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."

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

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

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

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

"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."

More IBM Spectrum Virtualize pricing and cost advice

"VMware Software Defined Storage is a slightly expensive solution."

"A single socket costs you around US $6,000 for three years. At a minimum, you have a three load cluster for a medium or enterprise-scale company. It can get quite expensive because you're likely to need four to six sockets on the other side. It comes to around $30,000."

"I believe there is a yearly licensing fee of around $2000 - $5000. I don't think there are additional costs above that but it depends on the type of infrastructure you're booting."

"The solution is very expensive."

"The product is quite expensive and is among the most expensive for this type of solution."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

14%

Educational Organization

12%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

20%

Financial Services Firm

15%

Real Estate/Law Firm

Manufacturing Company

No data available

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...

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...

What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashBlade?

Its configuration should be easier. There should be easier language for the configuration.

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 do you like most about VMware Software Defined Storage?

VMware Software Defined Storage gives higher availability against data corruption.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for VMware Software Defined Storage?

The price of VMware Software Defined Storage is on the pricey side, rated four out of five in cost. There is room for...

What needs improvement with VMware Software Defined Storage?

There is room for more integrations and plugins into more storages. More automation, such as using Playbook on Ansibl...

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Comparisons

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

More Pure Storage FlashBlade Competitors

VxRail vs IBM Spectrum Virtualize

Compared 30% of the time

Dell VPLEX vs IBM Spectrum Virtualize

Compared 28% of the time

IBM Spectrum Scale vs IBM Spectrum Virtualize

Compared 22% of the time

VMware vSAN vs IBM Spectrum Virtualize

Compared 20% of the time

More IBM Spectrum Virtualize Competitors

DataCore SANsymphony vs VMware Software Defined Storage

Compared 38% of the time

IBM Spectrum Scale vs VMware Software Defined Storage

Compared 32% of the time

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs VMware Software Defined Storage

Compared 30% of the time

More VMware Software Defined Storage Competitors

Product Reports

Pure Storage FlashBlade

Download Pure Storage FlashBlade product report

IBM Spectrum Virtualize

Download IBM Spectrum Virtualize product report

VMware Software Defined Storage

Download VMware Software Defined Storage product report

Also Known As

No data available

VMware SDS

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

VMware software-defined storage is a simple, yet intelligent, storage data center architecture that aligns with business and application demands—eliminating static, purpose-built and inefficient hardware with dynamic, agile and automated solutions.

VMware

Sample Customers

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

Pelephone, Sprint IT Enterprise Services

Helse Nord, Sky

IBM Spectrum Virtualize vs. VMware Software Defined Storage