IBM Spectrum Virtualize vs VMware vSAN comparison

The compared IBM and Broadcom solutions aren't in the same category. IBM is ranked #14 in SDS , with an average rating of 8.7, and holds a 2.1% mindshare in the category. Broadcom is ranked #2 in HCI , with an average rating of 8.9, and holds a 11.4% mindshare. Additionally, 91% of IBM users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 87% of Broadcom users who would recommend it.

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between IBM Spectrum Virtualize and VMware vSAN based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Software Defined Storage (SDS) solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed IBM Spectrum Virtualize vs. VMware vSAN Report (Updated: December 2025).

Buyer's Guide

IBM Spectrum Virtualize vs. VMware vSAN

December 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

Software Defined Storage (SDS) Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
IBM Spectrum Virtualize	2.1%
Red Hat Ceph Storage	14.3%
DataCore SANsymphony	6.3%
Other	77.3%

Software Defined Storage (SDS)

HCI Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
VMware vSAN	11.4%
VxRail	13.8%
Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI)	8.8%
Other	66.0%

HCI

Featured Reviews

MikaelHellström

IT Manager at Regin Dalarna

Has handled backup storage needs reliably and supports seamless upgrades

In environments requiring high throughput and low latency, Pure Storage FlashBlade provides high throughput and normal latency, but we do not have any application that requires low latency right now, so the latency of three to five milliseconds is considered kind of high. Pure Storage FlashBlade's ability to integrate with enterprise applications is not important for us, as we only want to present an S3 bucket for our backup, which we have done, and it works very fast. We use the Purity software's data reduction techniques; we have a backup software that compresses everything before sending it to the S3 bucket, achieving a data reduction of 1.1 to one. I would recommend Pure Storage FlashBlade to other companies because it's a very fast and scalable solution for anyone who needs it. On a scale of 1-10, I rate this solution an 8.

Read full review

AhmedSorour

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.

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ShyamikaThamel

Associate Tech Specialists at Seatrium

Managing mixed RAID workloads has improved data protection and delivers strong performance

VMware vSAN can be improved in certain areas. In cases involving our large data stores with large VMs, we experience some latency, not during normal operation, but during database backup operations. We observed latency due to buffer issues from the top-of-the-rack switches. These issues are mostly network-related because all storage data traffic travels through the network. I have recently used Nutanix, and I observed that Nutanix provides better performance than VMware vSAN due to its data locality features. VMware vSAN is now providing data locality, but we did not use that option. If VMware vSAN provides additional features in the next release, such as the VM balancing feature called DRS on the cluster that VMware previously had, it would be beneficial. With DRS, VMs can move easily from one node to another within the same cluster. Nutanix does not provide that flexibility. When placing a VM on a cluster in Nutanix, the placement uses a balancing component. After that, the VM remains on the same host. If any contention occurs on the CPU or memory side, the VM stays in place until contention happens. If issues occur, the VM migrates to another host while transferring all objects to the same host. This is how their data locality is maintained. When a VM moves to any host, it moves with all VM objects. VMware vSAN does not currently offer this option. If a VM moves to another host, it accesses the disk object through the network, which increases latency. VMware vSAN now offers an option to select data locality, but it does not function like Nutanix. This is why some latency remains. If VMware vSAN can improve this feature, it would be very helpful and VMware would regain its top position.

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

"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."

"I would rate Pure Storage FlashBlade a ten out of ten."

"The solution is able to handle workloads and is easy to use. It allows us to actually manage the boxes in less time."

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

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

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

"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

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

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

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

"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."

"The most valuable feature is its reliability."

"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 lowers cost. It does so by getting more efficient use out of the technology behind it."

More IBM Spectrum Virtualize pros

"I like that we could choose whatever hardware we wanted, rather than having to use one particular vendor."

"This solution has a dashboard that you can log into and control if you need too while the VM is getting created."

"We have found the solution to be very scalable."

"The solution's unified administration is its most valuable aspect."

"IOPS is comparatively best to run VDI solution."

"One of the valuable features for us is the ability to restrict the performance capacity per client. Other solutions don't have this feature."

"A one-stack solution from one vendor is the main benefit here."

"Storage virtualization software with a good storage management feature. It's a scalable and stable software."

More VMware vSAN pros

Cons

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

"It would be nice if you could store file-based in the same box with the same technology."

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

"I would like to see more deduplication."

"File storage needs a lot of improvement. Mainframe connectivity also needs improvement because it requires additional components to be integrated with Pure Storage FlashBlade. If you want to keep your backup data, then this becomes an even more expensive solution because Pure Storage FlashBlade will not be able to meet your backup needs."

"The speed could be improved."

"An area for improvement in Pure Storage FlashBlade is its price. It could be reduced. The technical support for Pure Storage FlashBlade also needs improvement. It used to be good, with more experienced engineers. Nowadays, it isn't, and it takes longer for support to solve problems."

"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."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade cons

"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."

"t is limited in terms of a single system to eight nodes or four, what they call IO groups."

"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 Storwize port is not so stable."

"The disk reliability is not that good."

"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."

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

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

More IBM Spectrum Virtualize cons

"The platform’s pricing needs improvement. Additionally, there should be an appliance module included in it."

"It could be cheaper."

"It doesn't seem like it gives the performance that an actual SAN would give for heavy IOPS, read/writes."

"VMware vSAN could improve by having faster reload time and a single point of failure. Resynchronization of many hardware could be better. If you have an outage of a disc or a full system, the replication time is too slow. This has room for improvement."

"When we talk about improvements for vSAN, there is some way to go from a at least stability perspective. Adding all these new features is nice, but we are now at the level that most of the features you need in production are there."

"It can be very expensive."

"If one node out of your ten nodes fails, it takes a lot of time to replicate and rebalance VMware vSAN. This time can be reduced. When a node fails and the data is not accessible, vSAN has to be rebalanced to make the redundancy level of two again. However, if it is taking a lot of time and any other hardware fails during that time, then we have a problem. Two disk failures mean that all data will be lost, and we may have to recover it from the backup. So, the number of threads that run to do the rebalancing could be more so that the time taken to make it fully redundant again is not so much."

"They can improve the manageability of the solution to make it more simple. It is not that complicated, but it will be good if they can make it more simple."

More VMware vSAN cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Our customers have seen a reduction in TCO."

"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 price could be cheaper."

"Support is a separate line item. Support is a different cost, but whatever your support is now, that's what you're going to pay forever. If your support's $100 today, six years from now it's $100. It doesn't fluctuate unless you upgrade it, or change it, etc."

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

"The product is very expensive."

"It is within reason for what you get. From what we have found comparing it to other vendors, it is in the same range as others. Given the choice, we would definitely redeploy it based on the cost."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade pricing and cost advice

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

More IBM Spectrum Virtualize pricing and cost advice

"The vSAN is somewhat expensive to license."

"The price is okay."

"It is too expensive."

"It is expensive. It should be cheaper. It has a perpetual license as well as a subscription-based license, but they are moving towards subscription-based licenses."

"We did consider other hyperconverged solutions. It usually came down to price. vSan was the most cost effective thing."

"Enterprise customers can customize their licenses according to their own needs and budget."

"If they could reduce the cost, it would be better. Licensing costs are something that they could take care of. If you are a smaller and strong IT team, then VMware vSAN is a very good product. If you want to expand in the service provider space, then you will have to go for an open-source solution like OpenStack. We are now looking at OpenStack because we sell licensing costs. We are a service provider, so the IT component data is a substantial component in our overall costing. We feel that OpenStack might help us to cut down the licensing cost. Therefore, we are looking at SAS storage instead of vSAN. SAS is open source, but it is not wise to have open source without having the backend support. We are using RedHat SAS, and it is an open-source solution. You can also have a free version, but we are using it with support from RedHat so that we have somebody to back us up in case we have a problem. If you do normal business, then IT expense is 1% or 2% of the total turnover. The higher licensing costs sometimes don't make difference to the big companies who are not service providers and are using it only for their internal use. For them, the IT cost is 1% or 2%, but for an IT service provider, the IT costs will go up to 15% to 16% of the total cost of the operations. This is where the licensing costs become irrelevant. For example, the licensing cost of using VMware, VC, and vSAN is 8% of my monthly revenue. Every month, I pay about $35,000, and, with the revised plan, it will be something like $50,000 or revenue of 600k per month, which means almost 8% of the revenue is going into VMware licensing. In a very competitive world, 8% as a cost element is huge. So, if I can bring it down to 2%, I save 6% in revenue expenditure. In terms of profit, 6% of 30% is something like another 25% increase in my profit. My profit can be almost 25%. It would be 20% to 25% in case I am able to handle the licensing costs and bring them to a very low level. Because these IT costs are substantial for us, that is why we are going with OpenStack. OpenStack has a limitation that it requires more hardware. There will be some increase in the hardware cost, but overall we will save 5% to 6% of our licensing cost by using OpenStack."

"I would like to see this technology be made available to smaller businesses, who might benefit from high availability but struggle with the entry fee."

More VMware vSAN pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

11%

Computer Software Company

10%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Government

Performing Arts

16%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Computer Software Company

10%

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

13%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	11
Midsize Enterprise	11
Large Enterprise	21

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

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	100
Midsize Enterprise	58
Large Enterprise	129

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?

Regarding pricing, it is okay; we needed exactly this in size, and the price was a lot lower than competitors, making...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashBlade?

In my opinion, one way Pure Storage FlashBlade can be improved is by having more compatibility between the FlashArray...

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-...

See all answers

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 ...

See all answers

What Is The Biggest Difference Between vSAN And VxRail?

While both run on the vSAN technology from VMware, vSAN needs to be deployed on vSAN ready nodes while VxRail is an e...

See all answers

How does HPE Simplivity compare with VMware vSAN?

HPE SimpliVity is a hyper-converged infrastructure solution that is primarily geared to mid-sized companies. We resea...

See all answers

How does VMware vSAN compare with Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct?

We found VMware’s vSAN was easy to set up, configure, and manage compared to other solutions we considered. It is bes...

See all answers

Comparisons

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 17% of the time

Pure Storage FlashArray vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 10% of the time

MinIO vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 9% of the time

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 7% of the time

VAST Data vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 6% of the time

More Pure Storage FlashBlade Competitors

IBM Spectrum Scale vs IBM Spectrum Virtualize

Compared 16% of the time

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs IBM Spectrum Virtualize

Compared 11% of the time

Dell VPLEX vs IBM Spectrum Virtualize

Compared 10% of the time

DataCore SANsymphony vs IBM Spectrum Virtualize

Compared 10% of the time

IBM Spectrum Accelerate vs IBM Spectrum Virtualize

Compared 10% of the time

More IBM Spectrum Virtualize Competitors

VxRail vs VMware vSAN

Compared 20% of the time

Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct vs VMware vSAN

Compared 12% of the time

HPE SimpliVity vs VMware vSAN

Compared 7% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs VMware vSAN

Compared 6% of the time

Dell PowerFlex vs VMware vSAN

Compared 6% of the time

More VMware vSAN Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Pure Storage FlashBlade

December 2025

Download Pure Storage FlashBlade product report

Buyer's Guide

IBM Spectrum Virtualize

December 2025

Download IBM Spectrum Virtualize product report

Buyer's Guide

VMware vSAN

December 2025

Download VMware vSAN product report

Also Known As

No data available

vSAN

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 vSAN is a software-defined storage product that is used in collaboration with VMware ESXi hypervisor and that provisions and manages storage based on policies, regardless of the underlying hardware. The solution enables you to prime your business for growth through its seamless evolution (it is integrated with vSphere and requires no new tools), its flexibility, and its multi-cloud capabilities. As an industry-leading software, VMware vSAN provides high levels of performance with minimal impact on CPU and memory.

VMware vSAN Features

VMware vSAN has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

Storage policy-based management (SPBM): VMware vSAN supports storage policy-based management for automated management of storage profiles.

Software-defined data-at-rest encryption: With this VMware vSAN feature, you can prevent unauthorized access of data at rest.

Multiple nodes: VMware vSAN provides clusters that can include as few as 2 nodes or as many as 64 nodes.

High security and availability: VMware vSAN offers stretched clusters, allowing more than one virtualization host server to be used in the same setup, promoting higher security as well as availability.

Deduplication: VMware vSAN’s deduplication compresses data to ensure efficient storage management and security.

HCI mesh updates: VMware vSAN clusters can share storage capacity with non-HCI Sphere clusters and can adopt HCI without having to scale computing resources and storage or replace existing servers.

Simplified file services: With VMware vSAN’s file services, backup of file shares is simplified. You can use APIs that allow backup and recovery software vendors to integrate with your VMware vSAN file services, which enables backup software to track new data and add scalability enhancements to files.

VMware vSAN Benefits

There are many benefits to implementing VMware vSAN. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

Reduced total cost of ownership (TCO): VMware vSAN helps you reduce upfront costs for businesses because it can be easily deployed on inexpensive x86 servers. In addition, its highly scalable infrastructure and quick deployment also save organizations time and money, making it an efficient storage solution.

Good manageability: VMWare vSAN is easy to set up, manage, and provision, without sacrificing performance.

Scalability: VMware vSAN is agile and allows administrators to scale storage on demand, quickly, and efficiently via policies and rules.

Simplicity: VMWare vSAN is simple to configure since it is embedded in the vSphere hypervisor. Installing it using the vSphere Web Client can be done quickly.

Reduced risk: VMWare vSAN reduces the risk associated with digital transformations by utilizing existing tools, skill sets, and solutions.

Reviews from Real Users

Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by PeerSpot users currently using the VMware vSAN solution.

PeerSpot user Yves S., CEO, Cloud Evangelist at Comdivision Consulting GmbH, says, “vSAN gives us a lot of advantages when we need to expand resources. We have an overall larger host infrastructure, and we split that up for specific customer test and use cases. In that specific scenario, we can easily add more hosts or reduce the number of hosts in the environment.”

A reviewer who works in Infrastructure Security explains, “The ease of use is great. The initial setup and upgrade process was pretty straightforward. And, technical support is great.”

Laurent N., Director at Softlogic, comments, "The feature that I have found most valuable is that it is easy to deploy. It is easy to create and delete virtual servers. It is easy to create the load balancing and the clustering."

Broadcom

Sample Customers

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

Pelephone, Sprint IT Enterprise Services

Read Some Case Studies At Home Cloud CaribCINgroupDiscovery Check out the Rest of our Customer Stories Here

Buyer's Guide

IBM Spectrum Virtualize vs. VMware vSAN

December 2025

Free Report: IBM Spectrum Virtualize vs. VMware vSAN

Find out what your peers are saying about IBM Spectrum Virtualize vs. VMware vSAN and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.

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