HPE StoreVirtual vs IBM Spectrum Virtualize comparison

Hewlett Packard Enterprise and IBM are both solutions in the Software Defined Storage (SDS) category. Hewlett Packard Enterprise is ranked #20, while IBM is ranked #12 with an average rating of 9.0. Additionally, 94% of Hewlett Packard Enterprise users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 91% of IBM users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 5, 2024

HPE StoreVirtual and IBM Spectrum Virtualize compete in the storage virtualization market. IBM Spectrum Virtualize has the upper hand with its advanced features and flexibility in licensing, catering to both entry-level and high-end configurations effectively.

Features: HPE StoreVirtual provides seamless storage management, high availability, and comprehensive integration with existing hardware. It simplifies the configuration process and ensures storage redundancy, making it a fit for straightforward deployments. IBM Spectrum Virtualize, on the other hand, offers powerful data migration capabilities, flexible operational management, and a unified view across different storage systems, enhancing appeal with its versatility and advanced disaster recovery features.

Room for Improvement: HPE StoreVirtual could improve in reducing latency issues and simplifying management, especially during firmware updates. The solution also requires better SSD integration. IBM Spectrum Virtualize could benefit from enhanced scalability and management intricacies, with improved reporting and cloud integration for advanced utilization.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Both systems offer robust on-premises capabilities. HPE StoreVirtual is noted for its easy deployment and generally effective technical support, though experiences with support vary. IBM Spectrum Virtualize is recognized for its technical competence and helpful support team, ensuring a smooth deployment process.

Pricing and ROI: HPE StoreVirtual is valued for its affordable high availability, with pricing that includes all features but is often critiqued for its complex licensing. It is particularly attractive to SMBs due to its cost-effectiveness. IBM Spectrum Virtualize offers cost-efficient bundled licensing and broad scalability, being competitive in high-end configurations. It offers significant ROI potential through its flexible and comprehensive suite, being economically favorable in certain scenarios.

To learn more, read our detailed HPE StoreVirtual vs. IBM Spectrum Virtualize Report (Updated: February 2025).

Buyer's Guide

HPE StoreVirtual vs. IBM Spectrum Virtualize

February 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

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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Vebjorn Nergaard

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.

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EdwinVan Halm

Virtualization Architect at Halm-IT

Enterprise product that delivers high performance features

The primary use case is high availability and disaster recovery. They use it as an active-active cluster located in two physical locations for quick recovery using immutable snapshots The quick restore, the low latency, and the ease of use are some of the most valuable features. The product is…

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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

"It's very easy-to-use."

"The performance of FlashBlade is excellent. It does not necessarily leverage the SOS API that some of the newer products leverage, but I found its speed pretty much on par and comparable. It is fast, and it does what it is supposed to do."

"It has absolutely simplified our storage because the dashboards on the consoles show a clear understanding of where you are, and it is also very easy to provision. This been a big help for our teams."

"It has also helped to simplify storage for us in the way that it's easy to manage. Their automatic monitoring really helps when things break or are about to break. They see a problem coming and alert us even before our own system does."

"The most valuable features of FlashBlade include its replication capabilities, reports, and easy allocation. Everything is user-friendly."

"The most valuable features are the Metro clustering, and disaster recovery."

"The most valuable features include the ease of implementation, ease of use and the speed that you can do backup and recovery on."

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

More Pure Storage FlashBlade pros

"A very flexible solution."

"A company can scale it easily."

"The solution's most valuable aspect is that it is hardware independent."

"he interface and the installation makes it easy as it's all in one piece of hardware and it doesn't need to be connected to anything else."

"Data is stored in two different places, leveraging more security and availability. Therefore, network problems are having less affect on iSCSI."

"The seamlessness behind the scenes of block management."

"The solution is very stable."

"HPE StoreVirtual is very easy to use from the management console."

More HPE StoreVirtual pros

"The most valuable feature is its reliability."

"The ease of management, the simplicity of the CLI, the speed of that interface, and the well-architected design of the product in general are valuable features."

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

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

"It lowers cost. It does so by getting more efficient use out of the technology behind it."

"IBM offers excellent customer service."

"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."

"It provides transparency, because of its advanced copy features."

More IBM Spectrum Virtualize pros

Cons

"The features provided for SMB customers are limited."

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

"File storage needs a lot of improvement. Mainframe connectivity also needs improvement because it requires additional components to be integrated with Pure Storage FlashBlade. If you want to keep your backup data, then this becomes an even more expensive solution because Pure Storage FlashBlade will not be able to meet your backup needs."

"We initially encountered challenges with the assembly process due to issues with the documentation required during setup, an area where Pure Storage needs improvement."

"I would like to see more deduplication."

"I have not seen ROI."

"The feature that we're waiting on is better integration with the cell services."

"I would like to see more monitoring capability included in the next release of this solution."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade cons

"Product looks like it is in the end of development."

"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."

"The initial setup could be simplified to make it easier for new users."

"The product is coming to end-of-life in the next three years."

"The penalty for the availability is performance. So, you have to balance or choose between the availability and the performance."

"The solution needs to ensure it is on par with the industry in terms of availability of features and various other options."

"It is a costly solution."

"it would nice to have deduplication or compression, things that you have in some of the higher end products."

More HPE StoreVirtual cons

"NBME support and support for a higher Fibre Channel lengths could be improved, but those are already on the roadmap."

"The integration would be an option that we would like, but I understand that's not how it's going to be implemented."

"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."

"I already discussed possible improvements with some of the guys from Hearnsley. One of our frustrations is when you go to expand volumes in a global mirror environment, you have to stop everything in order to expand. So that's one of the things."

"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."

"Level 1 technical support needs improvement."

"The training program could be improved."

"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."

More IBM Spectrum Virtualize cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

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

"The price is a little high."

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

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

"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."

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

"Pure Storage FlashBlade is a hardware appliance, and it's very expensive if you compare its price with other solutions. You can get the same features and benefits from its competitor, VAST Data, but for half the price of Pure Storage FlashBlade."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade pricing and cost advice

"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."

"The prices are OK, so we don't have much difficulty selling HPE in Brazil."

"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."

"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."

"Licensing is not exactly straightforward, but not the worst I have ever seen."

"I am very happy with the pricing. There is no comparison when it comes to pricing. I have looked at all solutions from EMC, Veritas, Hitachi, Dell, etc. None of them compares to IBM when it comes to pricing. I get great pricing from them."

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

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

"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."

"We would like the CPU cycle to save more on the licensing costs for us."

"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."

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

More IBM Spectrum Virtualize pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

37%

Computer Software Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

24%

Financial Services Firm

12%

Manufacturing Company

12%

Government

Computer Software Company

20%

Financial Services Firm

15%

Government

12%

Real Estate/Law Firm

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

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...

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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...

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What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashBlade?

Its configuration should be easier. There should be easier language for the configuration.

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IBM Spectrum Virtualize?

As a customer of IBM, I can often secure discounts of seventy to ninety percent, depending on the purchase volume, wh...

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What needs improvement with IBM Spectrum Virtualize?

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

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What is your primary use case for IBM Spectrum Virtualize?

I use IBM Spectrum Virtualize as a storage device that provides storage to servers needing storage. I utilize it in m...

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Comparisons

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 21% of the time

VAST Data vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 12% of the time

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 11% of the time

MinIO vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 11% of the time

Pure Storage FlashArray vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 8% of the time

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Red Hat Ceph Storage vs HPE StoreVirtual

Compared 56% of the time

VMware vSAN vs HPE StoreVirtual

Compared 44% of the time

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VxRail vs IBM Spectrum Virtualize

Compared 28% of the time

Dell VPLEX vs IBM Spectrum Virtualize

Compared 22% of the time

IBM Spectrum Scale vs IBM Spectrum Virtualize

Compared 19% of the time

VMware vSAN vs IBM Spectrum Virtualize

Compared 16% of the time

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs IBM Spectrum Virtualize

Compared 15% of the time

More IBM Spectrum Virtualize Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Pure Storage FlashBlade

March 2025

Download Pure Storage FlashBlade product report

Buyer's Guide

HPE StoreVirtual

March 2025

Download HPE StoreVirtual product report

Buyer's Guide

IBM Spectrum Virtualize

March 2025

Download IBM Spectrum Virtualize product report

Also Known As

No data available

HPE StoreVirtual, HPE VSA

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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

HPE StoreVirtual storage ensures that organisations can optimise the benefits of server virtualisation with cost-effective high availability and disaster recovery. The iSCSI-based, scale-out storage platform is easy to manage and change – meeting ongoing business demands without creating IT bottlenecks or application downtime. Overcoming the cost and management limitations of traditional storage area networks (SANs), HPE StoreVirtual nodes use storage clustering to form a single pool of resources that enable organisations to buy only what they need today, scaling non-disruptively to meet requirements in the future.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise

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

Sample Customers

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

NBrIX, WIND Telecom, Netrics

Pelephone, Sprint IT Enterprise Services

Buyer's Guide

HPE StoreVirtual vs. IBM Spectrum Virtualize

February 2025

Free Report: HPE StoreVirtual vs. IBM Spectrum Virtualize

Find out what your peers are saying about HPE StoreVirtual vs. IBM Spectrum Virtualize and other solutions. Updated: February 2025.

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