Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct vs Veritas Access comparison

Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct vs. Veritas Access

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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 June 2025, in the Software Defined Storage (SDS) category, the mindshare of Pure Storage FlashBlade is 4.2%, down from 4.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct is 7.5%, up from 7.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Veritas Access is 0.9%, up from 0.7% 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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Stanislaw Mielicki

Solution architect at Netland

Achieve cost-effectiveness with superior performance while needing to address cluster support

I am working with Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct for applications, SQL, and VRS. I am an integrator for this solution The price performance is the best advantage of Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct. They introduced the All-Flash array using SSD or NVMe drives without cache drives. It is…

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Jayson Martin

Head IT Data Storage at a insurance company with 5,001-10,000 employees

Provides seamless integration within the existing infrastructure and has an easy deployment process

We leverage Veritas Access for efficient management of our extensive unstructured data. Its cost-effectiveness, notably providing the lowest cost per terabyte, has influenced our decision to use it for extended data retention periods. We aim to minimize yearly expenditure on capacity while ensuring high-performance levels. Despite focusing on long-term retention, it enables direct and efficient data recovery from the client, ensuring that accessibility is maintained. The most essential feature of Veritas Access for our storage needs is its support for both block and object storage. The data tiering capability of Veritas Access has had a positive impact on our storage efficiency by preventing unnecessary expenditures on capacity, especially in terms of backup operations. It provides seamless integration within the existing infrastructure. It helps us meet compliance and data retention requirements, particularly from an insurer's perspective. I rate the product a nine out of ten.

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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

"What I like best about Pure Storage FlashBlade is its object storage functionality, plus it has fast underlying hardware. Pure Storage FlashBlade is also very stable. I find its stability one of its valuable features."

"Speed and ease of use are the two most valuable features."

"It uses the same platform for connectivity so integration is seamless."

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

"The ease of deployment and management has helped us simplify our storage. We also do not have to worry about capacity management as much. A lot of these things are native to Pure Storage."

"The most valuable feature of this solution is performance."

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

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

More Pure Storage FlashBlade pros

"The performance, reliability, and affordability has been most valuable."

"The flash ability, in terms of tiering and caching, is amazing"

"It's mainly about the storage expansion, like in hyper-converged solutions."

"The most valuable feature are the caching capabilities using the storage class memory."

"The price performance is the best advantage of Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct."

"Its technical support is excellent."

"The price performance is the best advantage of Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct."

"The initial setup is straightforward."

More Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct pros

"The product deployment is easy."

"Veritas Access is user-friendly and the NAS and SAN volumes are valuable."

"It has a huge deduplication ratio for backups of long-term archives."

Cons

"The features provided for SMB customers are limited."

"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."

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

"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."

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

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

"I would like to see better integration."

"In terms of technical support, the experience has been mixed. The support is done through email and is not that great, making it a very problematic area I've been dealing with for over four years."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade cons

"Microsoft closed the shared cluster support, which is important for the solution."

"It is difficult to get a hardware compatibility certification for the solution."

"It is scalable, but only beyond two nodes. If I go for two nodes it's not scalable. I need to build a complete cluster from the beginning if I'm going for two nodes."

"The management tool within this solution could be improved. We would also like to be able to access services like Azure when using this solution."

"Documentation management could be improved"

"The integration is not difficult because there is no GUI, but we need to use a PowerShell command. This makes it difficult to monitor and to see the components' statuses."

"Microsoft closed the shared cluster support, which is important for the solution."

"More optimization could be done in terms of mirroring."

More Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct cons

"The downtime of Veritas Access could be improved."

"They could improve additional fees for the platform's data capacity. It could be more cost-effective."

"I would like to see Veritas Access included as an S3 target."

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

"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."

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

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

"I understand that it is competitively priced compared to other brands."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade pricing and cost advice

"With the data center licensing and everything that is connected to that, this solution is relatively costly."

"The solution is expensive."

"Cost-wise the product is one of the more affordable within the category of products."

"This product is not cheap. The only extra cost is the licensing."

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859,129 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

14%

Educational Organization

12%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

15%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Financial Services Firm

No data available

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

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.

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...

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct?

Pricing is an advantage of Storage Spaces Direct. Licenses can be on a monthly or yearly basis, depending on the addi...

What needs improvement with Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct?

Microsoft closed the shared cluster support, which is important for the solution. At the moment, the new version does...

What do you like most about Veritas Access?

The product deployment is easy.

What needs improvement with Veritas Access?

They could improve additional fees for the platform's data capacity. It could be more cost-effective.

What is your primary use case for Veritas Access?

We use the product for long-term data retention.

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Comparisons

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VAST Data vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 10% of the time

Pure Storage FlashArray vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

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VMware vSAN vs Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct

Compared 62% of the time

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct

Compared 14% of the time

StarWind Virtual SAN vs Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct

Compared 7% of the time

Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) vs Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct

Compared 6% of the time

DataCore SANsymphony vs Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct

Compared 4% of the time

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Red Hat Ceph Storage vs Veritas Access

Compared 35% of the time

IBM Spectrum Scale vs Veritas Access

Compared 35% of the time

NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP vs Veritas Access

Compared 30% of the time

More Veritas Access Competitors

Product Reports

Pure Storage FlashBlade

Download Pure Storage FlashBlade product report

Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct

Download Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct product report

Software Defined Storage (SDS)

May 2025

Download Veritas Access product report

Also Known As

No data available

MS Storage Spaces Direct

No data available

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

Storage Spaces Direct uses industry-standard servers with local-attached drives to create highly available, highly scalable software-defined storage at a fraction of the cost of traditional SAN or NAS arrays. Its converged or hyper-converged architecture radically simplifies procurement and deployment, while features like caching, storage tiers, and erasure coding, together with the latest hardware innovation like RDMA networking and NVMe drives, deliver unrivaled efficiency and performance.

Microsoft

Veritas Access is a software-defined, scale-out network-attached storage (NAS) solution for unstructured data that uses intelligent policies to optimize data placement on-premise or on public clouds. Access provides resiliency, multi-protocol access and automated data movement to realize application performance, cost-effectiveness and scalability gains.

Veritas

Sample Customers

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

Acuutech, Quest Technology Management, Bradley, Mead & Hunt

Information Not Available

Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct vs. Veritas Access