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Dell VPLEX vs IBM Spectrum Virtualize comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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

Dell VPLEX
Average Rating
8.0
Number of Reviews
19
Ranking in other categories
Storage Management (4th)
IBM Spectrum Virtualize
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
39
Ranking in other categories
Software Defined Storage (SDS) (13th)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Storage Management and Software solutions, they serve different purposes. Dell VPLEX is designed for Storage Management and holds a mindshare of 6.6%, down 7.3% compared to last year.
IBM Spectrum Virtualize, on the other hand, focuses on Software Defined Storage (SDS), holds 2.8% mindshare, up 1.5% since last year.
Storage Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Dell VPLEX6.6%
NetApp OnCommand Insight7.9%
SolarWinds Storage Resource Monitor6.9%
Other78.6%
Storage Management
Software Defined Storage (SDS) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
IBM Spectrum Virtualize2.8%
Red Hat Ceph Storage10.5%
DataCore SANsymphony6.6%
Other80.1%
Software Defined Storage (SDS)
 

Featured Reviews

Shailendra Choudhary - PeerSpot reviewer
Solution Architect at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
Has supported enterprise projects consistently but pricing remains a challenge for broader adoption
We are system integrators and resell the HCI solution. We have worked with Dell VPLEX for approximately two to three years. We have been in several RFCs, and Dell VPLEX is implemented in the enterprise segment only. The solution is expensive and requires more budget, so people in the SMB segment do not prefer it. We typically recommend Dell VPLEX for customers who already work with other Dell products.
AS
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.

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 feature is deduplication, as we have no duplication in the snapshots."
"Storage virtualization and geographic resilience for Metro Sans, plus a great performance improvement."
"The best part of the solution is the virtualization layer due to the fact that, for all our pain points during migration, we use the virtualization with VPLEX."
"It’s a great product; very reliable."
"The capacity to migrate machines onto VPLEX is great — it's very clean. We can migrate machines and add arrays easily."
"We have see performance improvement in our databases."
"Due to the large number of models and different brands it is a very good solution to virtualize volumes."
"Mobility enables us to carry out an internal migration of data."
"It makes data migration straightforward, and on the customer side, there is downtime, but it is very minimal."
"I would recommend it, for sure, because it offers supportability, reliability, and some scalability, and the vendor is there as a partner."
"My advice to those wanted to implement this solution would be it is very useful and will give you all the details you need; how to set up the data movers, make sure they are balanced so that the load is distributed evenly, how to set it up and get all the documents in place once you log in."
"Across the industry, nobody matches it."
"So when I say our storage services to our client were provided continuously - non-stop - for 12 months, it means that all customer servers had 100% uninterrupted, online SAN access to their data 24x7x365 (minus the power down)."
"Being able to move things around from one array to the other has been the biggest feature for us."
"The abstraction flair and the abstraction layer. We had a mixture of different storage arrays, and the wonderful thing about SVC is is that it normalizes all it into a single driver. A single view that all hosts see simultaneously."
"We have reduced a lot of power and cooling requirements in the data center."
 

Cons

"The initial setup is complex."
"With Dell VPLEX, there are some bugs with Broadcom."
"Due to the bug with Broadcom, we have had a massive crisis on VPLEX. This little bug has caused roughly one thousand machines to go down."
"Much room for improvement exists."
"Based on our requirements, we bought this product for doing online data migrations without data disruption, but we realized that there is a limit to backend storage that can be encapsulate to it."
"The administration is difficult, so we want to add hyper-converged infrastructure."
"These are all pretty trivial for larger customers but VNXe as a main production storage array running a workload important enough to give it a multi-site stretched vSphere cluster is something I think is unlikely to be present in those customers."
"The price is a problem with EMC due to the fact that it's more expensive than the other vendors."
"NBME support and support for a higher Fibre Channel lengths could be improved, but those are already on the roadmap."
"I have encountered stability issues in situations when the customer-provided AC power has defects."
"I would like to see more baseline replication and integration with the operating system between Vmware and IBMI."
"We've had some issues with the production rate behind SVC."
"For improvement considerations, I would probably say multiple sites."
"Scalability needs some work in some areas. The number of volumes needs to be increased drastically."
"We are not happy with the technical support. In the last seven or eight years, I honestly think that IBM's technical support has gotten way worse."
"The disk reliability is not that good."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"VPLEX is a little bit expensive in my personal opinion."
"We struck a great deal with Dell EMC, so for us, VPLEX was not very expensive."
"I think it is a good value for the 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."
"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."
"Do a proof of concept, if you are not comfortable jumping in, but do it."
"It has a lot of advanced functions for a reasonable price."
"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."
"This solution came as an additional cost for the TSM package we chose."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Healthcare Company
9%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Performing Arts
13%
Marketing Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
10%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise12
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business11
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise31
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Dell VPLEX?
Some of the products are very easy to implement, while others are more difficult, and our team seeks support help when required. Regarding the integration part, the delivery team handles all integr...
What is your primary use case for Dell VPLEX?
We are implementing Cohesity, Hitachi, Dell, and Nutanix, VMware, vSAN; multiple products. We have recently started working with Cohesity because there was not much presence in India for Cohesity, ...
What advice do you have for others considering Dell VPLEX?
Hitachi Systems Microclinic has been renamed to Hitachi Systems India Private Limited. The email address has been changed to shailendra.chaudhry.hd at hitachi-systems.com from shailendra_singh.chau...
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-based or as software. Its costs are competitive compared to other solutions like...
What needs improvement with IBM Spectrum Virtualize?
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. Additionally, it...
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 from various vendors and I want them to act as a unified storage solution. It en...
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Kindred Healthcare, Regis Aged Care, WeBank SpA, Panduit, Munson Healthcare
Pelephone, Sprint IT Enterprise Services
Find out what your peers are saying about NetApp, Dell Technologies, IBM and others in Storage Management. Updated: May 2026.
900,644 professionals have used our research since 2012.