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HPE StoreVirtual vs IBM Spectrum Scale comparison

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 5, 2024

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

Everpure FlashArray
Sponsored
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
231
Ranking in other categories
All-Flash Storage (3rd)
HPE StoreVirtual
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
50
Ranking in other categories
Software Defined Storage (SDS) (15th)
IBM Spectrum Scale
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
14
Ranking in other categories
Software Defined Storage (SDS) (10th), Cloud Software Defined Storage (1st)
 

Featured Reviews

Sowjanya MV - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Lead at Wipro Limited
Has improved performance for mission-critical workloads and enabled seamless non-disruptive upgrades
The availability is 99.99%, which is the main factor any customer would need because their data should be available whenever they want to access it. This is one main critical thing. It is very easy to upgrade since Pure Storage FlashArray handles it well. Everything is non-disruptive now; previously, there were forklift shifts, but now that is not the case. Pure Storage FlashArray says no to forklift upgrades. Usually hardware requires downtime, but Pure Storage FlashArray has improved their footprint so that they are not asking for downtime; everything is just a non-disruptive activity, which is why customers are more inclined towards Pure Storage FlashArray. Customers want more of the models in their environment due to the performance they are giving, and everything is in one Pure1 Array console where we can view all the models on one page or just an orchestration tool. You don't miss anything; you have replication, notifications about replication, and details about which host groups replication is happening in and if that replication is successful or failed. On a daily basis, our purpose is to create volumes for infrastructure; our daily activities include creating volumes and mapping them to the host, doing any migrations from a VM, clearing the data stores, and carving the volumes to those VMs. One key factor is the data compression with a ratio of 5:1, focusing on space efficiency, inline deduplication, and the compression Pure Storage FlashArray works on; that is a major factor we can suggest to any customer. Analytical capabilities are crucial. Daily, we check the throughput and consumption, and Pure Storage FlashArray provides predictions for one year regarding usage. This prediction helps plan updates well ahead. For support, we just raise a case, and they follow up and get it done. There is also AI readiness, but with the model R2, we don't have much of that AI readiness. For others, we do have AI readiness that predicts capacity based on daily or monthly trends, enabling us to analyze how much space we need or if we need to expand the disk shelf. From an operational point of view, a good feature is that if you accidentally delete a volume, it will be retained in the destroyed state for the next twenty-four hours, which is not the same with any other vendor. I have worked in this storage domain for the past fifteen years, and this option is remarkable, benefiting any L1 or L2 engineer. Additionally, from a compliance perspective, Pure Storage FlashArray has REST APIs enabled. I have not explored automation much, but from a security standpoint, it is strong with encryption data. If you want to automate, you can easily integrate with all clouds and explore Pure Cloud for scheduling workloads, including volume creation. Customers find benefit in Pure Storage FlashArray's single management pane of glass due to the dual controller and active-active setup. If one of the controllers goes down, all workloads automatically shift to the other controller, ensuring their data is safe and accessible at all times. This is a highlighted feature that any customer desires because their data should always be accessible. For SAN workloads, we use Pure Storage FlashArray because for SAN FC fiber channel, we don't use it; we use NetApp for NAS activities. We have clearly split this, so SAN is for mission-critical applications, while network-attached storage handles file systems. This architecture helps us maximize the benefit from Pure Storage FlashArray due to the significant workloads from this giant retail client. From a footprint and energy consumption perspective, you can see energy consumption from the Pure1 storage portal on a daily basis, and it is very compact. The three models we use consume only three units, which is quite low. From a footprint and data center perspective, it doesn't occupy much space. As everything moves to cloud, there are requirements to avoid excess spending on data centers, and Pure Storage FlashArray is efficient in energy consumption and is environmentally friendly.
Vebjorn Nergaard - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior IT Engineer at Guard Automation AS
Reliable with helpful support and good replication
The setup is okay, however, it comes with a moderate amount of difficulty. If you are new to the product, it is difficult. You do get used to the process over time and it gets easier. A company just needs one person to maintain the solution as it just runs. You don't need any support staff. It's very, very hands-off except when you do updates. The product is living its own life.
Sachin Prakash - PeerSpot reviewer
Assistant Consultant at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Has optimized performance using cluster deployment and distributed file access but needs better visibility into network dependencies
IBM Spectrum Scale being software-based storage allows users to utilize any hardware supported or defined by IBM without dependency on physical hardware provided by IBM. This is one of the features I appreciate most because if you have existing infrastructure at your site but don't want to reinvest in hardware, you can purchase IBM Spectrum Scale software and deploy it as software-defined storage. Users can comfortably access data from their host to the storage host without relying on new network setup when deploying GPFS as it uses the existing corporate network. However, high-speed ethernet network is required. By adding switches to the same network where client hosts reside and deploying GPFS storage array, any file system created on the storage cluster can grant export permissions determining which hosts can access specific file systems. These hosts can directly mount them as remote file systems. The process is simpler compared to defining IQN for providing access to client hosts. Creating a cluster for clients with virtual machines or physical Linux/Windows machines requires installing GPFS services on client nodes, which creates a client cluster. Access is defined on the storage cluster for the particular client cluster, allowing all hosts in that client cluster to mount file systems with granted permissions.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"I have never experienced an outage with the product or had any support that was below excellent."
"This storage has to be the most well thought out and effective storage that I have had the privilege to work with."
"This solution is very scalable."
"We find the ease of usability and setup valuable."
"The support team is available all the time and they seem to know what they are doing."
"The most valuable features are the ease of use and support."
"Remote assist is a valuable feature that supports customers and engineers in troubleshooting and resolving issues, allowing for easy problem identification and repair."
"The Pure Storage customer service is by far the best part of the product and organization."
"StoreVirtual has been great; we haven't had a failure in all the years I have run it, and we went through a reconfiguration about three months ago to add some solid state drives to improve the performance, and it works fantastic."
"While it's a simple system to work with, at the same time it gives a high level of data availability and resilience."
"The Veeam snapshot integration plus the hypervisor integration with vSphere VAAI and VASA as well as the Microsoft VSS integration is second to none."
"Maintenance and support is easy to do."
"The solution is stable, and whatever implementation we've done, we've been very satisfied with the solution and haven't experienced any bugs or glitches."
"The solution is very stable."
"It allows compute and storage to operate separately, and has the ability to take SAN nodes out of production for maintenance with little effort and zero downtime."
"Data is stored in two different places, leveraging more security and availability. Therefore, network problems are having less affect on iSCSI."
"There is nothing else that even compares to Spectrum Scale."
"Spectrum Scale is one of the most important products in our environment now."
"It is a scalable solution."
"Technical support has been very helpful, and they provide us with pretty good solutions that we can implement moving forward."
"It is incredibly scalable and stable."
"IBM Spectrum Scale being software-based storage allows users to utilize any hardware supported or defined by IBM without dependency on physical hardware provided by IBM."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to share files across different platforms."
"Its great servicing high availability. That is what it is used for."
 

Cons

"I would love to see a true one click upgrade solution."
"I would like to see the NAS add-on component become more fault-tolerant than just a single virtual machine running inside the array. I'm unwilling to use it for that reason."
"We did have one hiccup with the integration of vCenter. When we were installing Pure Storage, we were using vCenter 6.7, which defaults to the HTML5 Web Client. The current plugin for Pure Storage doesn't show up in that client at all. You have to go and use the legacy FlexFlash client to see the Pure Storage plugin in vCenter."
"In the next version of this program, I would like to see increased security, higher encryption, and faster throughput."
"The credentials on the iSCSI interface are only available to type in with the Chrome browser, and not with the Firefox browser."
"I would like some performance analytics which go deeper than today. It should be specific to some hosts and applications. This would be good."
"I would like to have an easy way to determine the cost per VM so that I can present a solution to our customers."
"I like what they're doing, but some of my customers complain that they do not have all the bells and whistles and knobs to fine-tune workloads that some of the competitors have. In my opinion, that's good. All customers don't have dedicated storage gurus, and they can get themselves into trouble if they fine-tune too many of those high-performance knobs, but they do get knocked down. Pure Storage takes a hit in the minds and opinions of some of the customers because they cannot customize things as much as compared to a legacy storage provider's appliance such as NetApp, Dell EMC, or even HPE. I personally think 95% of my customers are better off letting the system fine-tune itself. That was something that you needed to do 12 or 15 years ago, but now with all-flash, the technology can handle what it needs to handle. Customers just end up shooting themselves in the foot if they are tweaking too many default settings."
"f you're doing the 10Gb adapters, SFPs don't come with it, but it doesn't say that. It might say that somewhere else, but it's not clear."
"I would like to have the option to configure and get detailed alerts from the Centralized Management Console."
"I don't think, however, it would be suitable for our actual production environments because we need something much more sophisticated and expandable."
"The new Quorum Witness function is promising for easier deployment but needs better reliability."
"It would be nice if there were more parts available in Brazil and HPE could swap out faulty equipment quicker."
"As for features that can be improved, it is a costly solution."
"It would be nice to have deduplication or compression, things that you have in some of the higher end products."
"The solution needs to ensure it is on par with the industry in terms of availability of features and various other options."
"Making it a little easier to add bad file sets would help. There is a transition to how you add storage and how you add a file set, so making that a little smoother would probably be my recommendation."
"I wish there were some graphical user interface to access the GPFS file system creation and monitoring."
"Integration with other vendors is not available. This feature would be very helpful."
"The pricing and licensing model for this solution are complex and it is sometimes difficult to explain it to customers."
"It would be helpful if there was a graphical user interface that could walk you through the deployment process. The instructions surrounding setup aren't the best. They need to be more step-by-step."
"The biggest problem is that it is not able to provide block storage."
"We do have some issues where Spectrum Scale does not work as expected. We have seen our Spectrum Scale servers go down unexpectedly, but because we have a cluster, it does not take out the entire organization."
"We do have some issues where Spectrum Scale does not work as expected."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It's expensive, but you get what you pay for."
"My organization has a yearly license, but I believe that Pure Storage FlashArray has capacity-based licenses as well. I'm definitely happy with the pricing."
"No storage device is cheap, but Pure Storage is fairly priced and offers what you pay for. You get all the licenses in the future when you purchase a license."
"The price of Pure Storage FlashArray is expensive."
"Cost-wise, I imagine that the product's price would probably give you a nosebleed if you were a younger company."
"We have seen a reduction in TCO."
"The cost of Pure Storage is subjective and determined by your environment. Pure Storage tends to be more expensive than NetApp, but it is cheaper than EMC. Performance varies with data workload, making cost considerations complex."
"Pricing is very competitive, and it's better than other competitors."
"The prices are OK, so we don't have much difficulty selling HPE in Brazil."
"Licensing is not exactly straightforward, but not the worst I have ever seen."
"One of the key features about it is that when you buy either a VSA license or a StoreVirtual appliance, all your software's included."
"If you buy a five-year license, not only does the technical support expire after five years, but you also lose the ability to change and expand the VSA, and the systems won't go down."
"It costs less than $10,000 for one machine. If it costs more than 15% higher than this, then the customer may change to another solution."
"For our organization, I believe the cost is 16,000 Euros for a three-year license. It costs a bit more to do the maintenance on our servers as well. It's also on an HP ProLiant server and an organization will need to do the maintenance there also. I believe the price for that is around 2000 Euros a year."
"The licensing is based on the number of terabytes."
"The solution is costly but reliable."
"The licensing model is complex and depends on factors such as the number of processing cores and the amount of storage."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Construction Company
9%
Construction Company
19%
Outsourcing Company
18%
Marketing Services Firm
8%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Construction Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Educational Organization
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business71
Midsize Enterprise38
Large Enterprise159
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business19
Midsize Enterprise15
Large Enterprise19
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Large Enterprise8
 

Questions from the Community

Which should I choose: HPE 3PAR StoreServ or Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform F Series?
Both are great platforms, but if you are considering all flash solutions, I would recommend you to consider Pure Stor...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pure Storage FlashArray?
I find the pricing of Everpure FlashArray to be quite high compared to other storage solutions; however, the reliabil...
What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashArray?
I believe we have covered the most important features; the architecture of Pure Storage is essential, and features su...
Ask a question
Earn 20 points
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IBM Spectrum Scale?
IBM Spectrum Scale functions as software-based storage, allowing users to utilize any hardware supported or defined b...
What needs improvement with IBM Spectrum Scale?
The system relies heavily on ethernet networking, and when issues occur, we must consult with the network team to inv...
What is your primary use case for IBM Spectrum Scale?
My personal use of this product is for parallel writing or reading files.
 

Also Known As

Pure Storage FlashArray
HPE StoreVirtual, HPE VSA
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Nielsen, Lamar Advertising, LinkedIn, Betfair, UT-Dallas
NBrIX, WIND Telecom, Netrics
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about HPE StoreVirtual vs. IBM Spectrum Scale and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
913,683 professionals have used our research since 2012.