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IBM Spectrum Scale vs Maxta Hyperconvergence Software comparison

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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

Everpure FlashArray
Sponsored
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
232
Ranking in other categories
All-Flash Storage (2nd)
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)
Maxta Hyperconvergence Soft...
Average Rating
7.0
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
HCI (33rd)
 

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.
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.
LC
Senior Manager IT Infrastructure at Trusource Labs
Has the ability to have a single-pane-of-glass using the VMware interface but it needs better support
The product helped improve the way our organization functions starting with our hiring practices. We do not have to have a storage engineer or other engineering specialists. So, for example, I had a budget to get someone for a security engineer position of $120,000 a year. In the end, after talking to several local people in my industry, they just told me that security guys will come in and then somebody will offer them $5,000 more and they will just go where the money is. So I went with a third party called the Arctic Wolf Networks to do all my monitoring of my Office 365 environments, all of our servers, collect all the logs, and get all the services I needed from one source that would be consistent. This way, I can hire just general networking engineers and they can run everything. I do not have to have special employees and the benefits of that flexibility are pretty great. With the solution, you can swap out a drive for a larger capacity drive. You can lose a couple of drives and everything still runs. You can lose the server and it is self-healing and you can schedule maintenance around events. But I do not have to have staffing 24-hours a day because we do not have outages. That is probably the biggest thing. Meanwhile, in another part of the network that I am currently taking over from the global holding company, they have outages all the time. Sometimes it is due to a network failure or sometimes it is just poor engineering practices and standards. Over there we just set up to large servers and a couple of data centers using the VxRail system, which is like vSAN, so it is pretty similar stuff to our current setups but just uses other products.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Performance, dedupe, and that it works well with database workloads are its most valuable features."
"Pure Storage FlashArray provides immediate benefits to our customers with its easy setup process, allowing for instant use and rapid realization of advantages."
"Simplicity and reliability are the most valuable feature of Pure Storage FlashArray."
"Technical support is very good."
"The most valuable feature is replication."
"The cost of Pure FlashArray is a bit high compared to peers, but its sustainability and features justify the price."
"The best features Everpure FlashArray offers are the speed and dependability, which are the main features that we get from Pure; it is faster than its competition, and we do not have any documented downtime from it ever."
"The seamless integration into the public cloud has improved my organization."
"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."
"There is nothing else that even compares to Spectrum Scale."
"Technical support has been very helpful, and they provide us with pretty good solutions that we can implement moving forward."
"Allows us to share files across multiple environments."
"I would rate my overall experience with IBM Spectrum Scale as nine out of ten."
"Its great servicing high availability. That is what it is used for."
"Over the past five or ten years, IBM has developed this solution and it has improved a lot."
"I find IBM Spectrum Scale to be an excellent product known for its fast parallel file system."
"The single-pane-of-glass VMware interface makes configuration and management easy so you do not need IT specialists."
"I think my favorite feature is the ability to have a single-pane-of-glass using the VMware interface."
 

Cons

"I would like to see support for NVMe, end-to-end."
"I would like to migrate to the cloud in the future and know how that would actually work with this product."
"It falls far short of protocol support."
"Price per terabyte is substantially higher than their competition. We would like to see it drop."
"A three wave application or multi wave application synchronization would be an improvement."
"I would prefer that they lower their pricing."
"On the technical side, the way that the array performs cleanup and garbage collection sometimes pushes it close to 100 percent utilization, causing some stress."
"In the next release, I would like to see file-level encryption."
"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."
"We do have some issues where Spectrum Scale does not work as expected."
"The biggest problem is that it is not able to provide block storage."
"Initially, stability was a concern as we encountered numerous issues and errors."
"Integration with other vendors is not available. This feature would be very helpful."
"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."
"The pricing and licensing model for this solution are complex and it is sometimes difficult to explain it to customers."
"There can be improvements in fault tolerance and making erasure coding faster."
"The support of Maxta has a lot of room for improvement. It was good before the company closed and sold out, but the level of service has changed."
"A new company took over the product and now the support for Maxta has gone way downhill."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I would rate it a seven out of ten for pricing. It could be improved."
"The cost was initially high, but once more people were using it, the costs came down. This was because the University was reselling it to other departments."
"The price of the solution can be a bit expensive. There is an additional fee for support."
"Pure Storage FlashArray's pricing is very competitive."
"We evaluated Oracle and Hitachi, but Pure Storage had the better pricing."
"The Evergreen Storage subscription is a really cool concept. As long as we maintain our subscription, we will get new controllers every three years and really never have a forklift upgrade like we currently are doing. Just that future-proofing is an ease off of my mind to know that I won't have to do what I'm dong right now again."
"Pure is not a cheap product. It is not something that is inexpensive. But, the total cost of ownership tends to be lower than with other solutions, because you don't need a lot of expertise, you don't need a lot of training or very expensive engineers or very expensive consultants."
"When we bought the unit, we bought per capacity. So, the licensing is per capacity, and the only thing that we have to buy every year or every three years is maintenance. Included in that maintenance is the upgrade of the controllers every three years at no cost to us."
"The licensing model is complex and depends on factors such as the number of processing cores and the amount of storage."
"The licensing is based on the number of terabytes."
"The solution is costly but reliable."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
13%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Construction Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Manufacturing Company
6%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business73
Midsize Enterprise38
Large Enterprise160
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Large Enterprise8
No data available
 

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?
When comparing cost, I find that the cost is either the same or slightly higher, but that is returned by the ease of ...
What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashArray?
The only thing I think could be improved is price. The price is the main concern for our customers.
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.
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Also Known As

Pure Storage FlashArray
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Overview

 

Sample Customers

Nielsen, Lamar Advertising, LinkedIn, Betfair, UT-Dallas
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