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 Cloud Software Defined Storage solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.
"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."
"There are many benefits to this solution. Storage virtualization and the ability to migrate massive amounts of data to other systems without impacting your client are the most valuable. It is non-disruptive for my users. We migrated 350 terabytes of data in one night to a new machine without a small system going down and a single user complaining about the performance. You have to fine-tune a lot of storage machines constantly for performance and for making sure that they are optimal, but IBM Spectrum Virtualize does this by itself. It does the adjustment on its own, and it does it right. That's what makes it different. I had a huge VSP from Hitachi, which is also a type of virtualization-based engine but with a decent size. It was a continuous performance-tuning exercise. I never had that issue with IBM Spectrum Virtualize."
"I like that it can virtualize more than three hundred storage providers."
"Stretched Cluster is one of the big features that we use across multiple data centers."
"If we decide to expand, vSAN could offer us some flexibility. We are researching ways to set this up from a new data center, which is located somewhere different from the current location right now."
"The vSAN features we've found most helpful are live application migrations and storage policies. It has storage, policies, application, and DRS policies. Automation is there."
"There is not a lot of maintenance required."
"We find it easy to deliver this solution."
"vSAN is very integrated."
"When we do to do more scaled load testing, we can run more dense workloads and still have the same results across all specific nodes"
"The most valuable features are Erasure Coding, Deduplication and Compression, and the advancement in stretching regarding replication."
"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."
"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."
"I would like to see more baseline replication and integration with the operating system between Vmware and IBMI."
"t is limited in terms of a single system to eight nodes or four, what they call IO groups."
"The solution could maybe improve failure protection."
"Troubleshooting tools could be improved."
"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."
"The technical support, it's not satisfactory. Whenever we raise a ticket it takes a lot of time to have an engineer get involved sometimes, or we receive a less experienced engineer. We then have to repeat the situation to the next engineer which all takes time."
"They should make the software updates easier. We should be able to upgrade it more easily."
"We would like to see additional backup and recovery options added. In particular, integration with popular applications like databases."
"They should provide Deduplication and Compression over the hybrid drives."
IBM Spectrum Virtualize is ranked 8th in Software Defined Storage (SDS) with 4 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 2nd in HCI with 87 reviews. IBM Spectrum Virtualize is rated 8.8, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of IBM Spectrum Virtualize writes "Enables us to build an infrastructure and replace storage with no disruption to our hosts whatsoever". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSAN writes "Gives us a lot of advantages when we need to expand resources". IBM Spectrum Virtualize is most compared with Dell VPLEX, IBM Spectrum Scale, DataCore SANsymphony, HPE StoreVirtual and NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP, whereas VMware vSAN is most compared with VxRail, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, HPE SimpliVity and Red Hat Ceph Storage. See our IBM Spectrum Virtualize vs. VMware vSAN report.
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