IBM Spectrum Virtualize vs Zadara comparison

IBM and Zadara are both solutions in the Software Defined Storage (SDS) category. IBM is ranked #14 with an average rating of 8.7, while Zadara is ranked #18 with an average rating of 7.5. IBM holds a 1.6% mindshare in SDS, compared to Zadara’s 2.0% mindshare. Additionally, 91% of IBM users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Zadara users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 5, 2024

Zadara and IBM Spectrum Virtualize compete in the cloud storage and virtualization space. IBM Spectrum Virtualize might have a slight edge due to its comprehensive virtualization and management capabilities.

Features: Zadara offers seamless cloud integration, low-latency connections, and multi-tiered storage options including SSD, NL-SAS, and SSD caches, making it ideal for multi-tenant environments. IBM Spectrum Virtualize excels in managing multiple storage systems, offering strong disaster recovery, non-disruptive data migration, and consistent performance.

Room for Improvement: Zadara faces issues with delayed feature rollouts like auto-tiering, a less service-partner-friendly interface, and lacks comprehensive VMware support. IBM Spectrum Virtualize could improve deduplication and encryption integration, management of large storage environments, and enhance its GUI layout.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Zadara supports hybrid and public cloud deployments with 24/7 management and proactive monitoring, ensuring seamless operations. IBM Spectrum Virtualize focuses on hybrid and on-premises deployments, matching industry standards with robust support and quick response times.

Pricing and ROI: Zadara's pay-as-you-use model offers transparency and avoids upfront costs but may be seen as expensive in some regions, while providing flexible scaling and resource utilization for substantial ROI. IBM Spectrum Virtualize offers cost-effective licensing, especially when bundled with the Spectrum Suite, presenting significant value in multi-vendor integrations and scalable usage.

To learn more, read our detailed IBM Spectrum Virtualize vs. Zadara Report (Updated: September 2025).

Buyer's Guide

IBM Spectrum Virtualize vs. Zadara

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 Zadara is 2.0%, up from 1.7% 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%
Zadara	2.0%
Other	92.3%

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.

Read full review

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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Kirubel Behailu

Cloud System Engineer at cloud251

Enhancing storage management efficiency with user-friendly experience

Our customers are using Zadara for their research and development environments. We provide infrastructure for government projects, but we are often not fully aware of their specific usage. I typically use it for our infrastructure and offer both Zadara and Microsoft Azure to our customers Zadara…

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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

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

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

"The snapshots, replication, and the ability to have immutable blades are the most valuable features. You're putting data snapshots out in those blades, and they cannot be touched. Its performance is great."

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

"We have seen a reduction in the total cost of ownership by around 20%."

"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."

"The most valuable feature is Safe Mode."

"The solution provides many controllers."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade pros

"We acquire companies (and things), so we end up with odd hardware. We bring it behind the SVC and it allows us to migrate stuff off of it seamlessly. SVC can also cover up a host of defects of the underlying storage."

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

"One of the main features of Spectrum Virtualize is it virtualizes the servers from the storage. We have a very large infrastructure. A major advantage is when you get the aged storage arrays and you have to replace all of those."

"IBM provides exceptional technical support, which I rate as the best along with Cisco."

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

"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."

"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."

"The most valuable features are the simplicity of use, the flexibility, and the options included. I mean, it's just a big time saver."

More IBM Spectrum Virtualize pros

"Being able to scale on demand, and being able to get out of our security operation center, and not having to purchase hardware upfront, has drastically reduced the overhead that was required to maintain our information. We have also gained additional capabilities in terms of speed of replicating that information."

"One of the most valuable features is its integration with other cloud solutions. We have a presence within Amazon EC2 and we leverage compute instances in there. Being able to integrate with compute, both locally within Zadara, as well as with other cloud vendors such as Amazon, is very helpful, while also being able to maintain extremely low latency between those connections."

"The most valuable features of Zadara are its visibility and simplicity to use."

"One of the most useful features is that they provide iSCSI as a service."

"The processing is much faster with this product."

"The most valuable feature is the flexibility in terms of deployment options."

"Zadara is a fully-fledged platform, and our customers are happy with its use."

"It provides very satisfactory storage performance."

More Zadara pros

Cons

"I would like to see more VM-Aware features in the next release of this solution."

"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."

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

"There is some room for new features related to authentication and integration with Kubernetes, and other solution using S3 Bucket."

"To improve FlashBlade, some analysts suggest enhancing its handling of relational database management systems and SQL queries."

"Commvault has mainly driven the Analytics, providing data and reports. However, the product has room for improvement, especially regarding storage analytics. Upgrading firmware has caused issues, requiring feature disabling to revert to traditional backups. The firmware upgrades sometimes affect Commvault backups."

"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."

"I have not seen ROI."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade cons

"The Storwize port is not so stable."

"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."

"Tighter integration with cloud storage might be useful as a target for a variety of use cases."

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

"Level 1 technical support needs improvement."

"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."

"I would like to see them provide a unified platform that offers block, file, and object-based protocol access."

More IBM Spectrum Virtualize cons

"The initial setup of the solution is complex."

"I would like to see them be a little bit more proactive in terms of the patches and updates that are available. I would like to see more disclosure and information around what fixes or what enhancements are available within a patch, and help in coordinating and scheduling that. Right now, it's driven more by the customer in reaching out via a support ticket."

"The initial installation was difficult because many steps required the command line interface (CLI). Maintenance can also be complicated, especially when deeper troubleshooting requires navigating the CLI and searching for logs."

"There is room for improvement in pricing as it is currently quite expensive."

"The management interface is more geared towards end-users rather than a service partner like ourselves, and there are improvements that can be made around that."

"The range of support of VMware could be better. It can support Windows, however, it cannot support other operating systems like IBM AIX. This needs to improve."

"Some of the features are a little bit slow to come to market."

"Currently, when we do firmware upgrades, it sometimes causes issues and is not as nondisruptive as desired."

More Zadara cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price is a little high."

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

"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."

"We used a reseller for the purchase."

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

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

"The pricing for FlashBlade is between cheap and moderate."

"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

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"Do a proof of concept, if you are not comfortable jumping in, but do it."

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

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

More IBM Spectrum Virtualize pricing and cost advice

"For our use, it's appropriately priced and overall, it's proved to be very cost-effective against other tier-one vendors."

"The pricing and licensing are very simple and the cost is predictable, although, like everything that you pay for as you use, you have to be mindful of what you're using."

"It is a nice licensing model and it makes it quite simple because we just pay for what we use, and the bill that comes shows us exactly what customers are using what resources."

"The price of Zadara is very good and it covers everything. There is no subscription needed."

"The pricing is very competitive and the fact that they have very compelling discounts for multi-year commitments is great."

"If you just take the street price of Zadara Storage Cloud and look up the price or cost per hour, then you could think that Zadara Storage Cloud is extremely expensive or a solution only for enterprise use. That is not true. You need to compare the entire system. This means that you don't stop looking at just the street price, but you need to consider all the features, requirements, and costs of support as well as the extra cost that other vendors have. Other players just play with hidden, additional costs. Everything is included in Zadara Storage Cloud's licensing cost; what you get is what you pay for."

"One of the factors that ruled out several providers was cost. They were way too expensive for the volume of data that we needed and the speed at which we needed to be able to manage it. There aren't a lot of providers that can do that."

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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

20%

Manufacturing Company

16%

Government

Comms Service Provider

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	12
Large Enterprise	3

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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What needs improvement with Zadara?

The initial installation was difficult because many steps required the command line interface (CLI). Maintenance can ...

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What is your primary use case for Zadara?

I use this product as storage. Specifically, I use it as big storage. That's the main use case for Zadara ( /products...

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What advice do you have for others considering Zadara?

As for the pros and cons, the main concerns are the complexity of the initial installation and the complicated mainte...

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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

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs Zadara

Compared 19% of the time

Amazon S3 vs Zadara

Compared 19% of the time

MinIO vs Zadara

Compared 17% of the time

Amazon EC2 vs Zadara

Compared 14% of the time

Google Cloud Storage vs Zadara

Compared 12% of the time

More Zadara 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

Zadara

September 2025

Download Zadara 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

Zadara is a powerful enterprise-level storage solution whose design enables it to handle every aspect of a user’s data storage needs. It can be deployed in any location, using any protocol, and storing any data type that an organization requires. With Zadara, organizations can do everything that they were able to do with more traditional systems in a cheaper and more efficient way.

Zadara Benefits

Some of the ways that organizations can benefit by choosing to deploy Zadara include:

Security. Zadara is built with data security in mind. All of a user’s data is heavily encrypted by Zadara’s software so that it is safe both while it is in storage and while it is being transferred somewhere else. It comes with role-based access controls that prevent a user’s data from being seen by those who lack the proper level of authorization. It also comes with dual-factor authentication and other similar methods of identity management.

Reduced costs. While Zadara offers enterprise-level storage capabilities, the costs associated with utilizing it are far less than those of similar solutions. Some of the resources that it offers are totally free of cost. The model that it utilizes is a pay-as-you-go model. Organizations only pay for the resources that they use and nothing more. Users are not required to sign up for any particular period of time. They are in complete and total control of what they spend on the solution.

Storage efficiency. Zadara ensures that users are able to store their data in the most efficient way possible. It takes a number of approaches that prevent insufficient data storage. These approaches are:

1. Thin-provision volumes. This method only allows actually written data to be counted toward the storage capacity that is consumed.

2. Pattern removal. Zadara searches a user’s stored data for repetitive binary sequences. Once it identifies the repetitive binary sequences, it deletes them.

3. Inline deduplication (all-flash only). This method ensures that Zadara only stores unique data blocks in its system.

4. Inline compression. Zadara takes data that is stored in its system and compresses it. This keeps larger blocks of data from taking up too much room.

Zadara Features

Centralized management. Zadara comes with a centralized dashboard that enables organizations to monitor and control their storage operations from a single location.

File analytics. Organizations can leverage a powerful analytics package that can provide them with critical insights. These tools can help users sort through their data and make more informed data management decisions.

Remote mirroring. This feature enables users to replicate data in two remote locations at the same time. This makes it easy for data to be recovered in the event of an unexpected loss. It also aids remote teams in their collaboration efforts by giving them access to the same data at the same time.

Reviews from Real Users

Zadara is a highly effective solution that stands out when compared to many of its competitors. Two major advantages it offers are its extensive suite of cloud solution integrations and its object storage capability.

Steve H., the chief technology officer at Pratum, writes, “One of the most valuable features is its integration with other cloud solutions. We have a presence within Amazon EC2 and we leverage computer instances there. Being able to integrate with computing, both locally within Zadara, as well as with other cloud vendors such as Amazon, is very helpful, while also being able to maintain extremely low latency between those connections.”

Mauro R., the CEO of Momit SRL, says, “The object storage feature is wonderful. With traditional storage, you have a cost per gigabyte that is extremely high or related to the number of disks. With Zadara Storage Cloud, you have a cost per gigabyte that you can cut and tailor to your needs independent of the number or size of the disks.”

Zadara

Sample Customers

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

Pelephone, Sprint IT Enterprise Services

Time, Inc. A&E Network, The Washington Post, News UK, McGraw Hill, Gilt, Toshiba, Deloitte, VMware

Buyer's Guide

IBM Spectrum Virtualize vs. Zadara

September 2025

Free Report: IBM Spectrum Virtualize vs. Zadara

Find out what your peers are saying about IBM Spectrum Virtualize vs. Zadara and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.

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