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IBM Spectrum Scale vs Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

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)
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)
Microsoft Storage Spaces Di...
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.4
Number of Reviews
12
Ranking in other categories
Software Defined Storage (SDS) (8th)
 

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.
reviewer2588997 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Technical Support Engineer at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
Solution delivers impressive speed and performance with room for better management tool integration
Microsoft should improve the management aspect of Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, as we have raised multiple recommendations but they often refer us to use Microsoft Arc instead of Windows Admin Center. The licensing for Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct could be improved to be clearer, as calculating license requirements requires significant expertise; even Microsoft resources do not provide the full picture needed for licensing, leaving gaps that become evident once we move to deploy solutions. Improving the Windows Admin Center to be more stable with alert notifications and management capabilities for Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct would greatly benefit users, as we have not seen any recent product updates since the announcements last November.

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 features would be its performance, retrieval, recovery, and backup, and it meets the customer's expectations."
"All our junior partners can administer the storage arrays. It is simple and easy to use. We don't have to dedicate a whole team of full time people to work on it."
"Remote assist is a valuable feature that supports customers and engineers in troubleshooting and resolving issues, allowing for easy problem identification and repair."
"The most valuable feature of Pure Storage FlashArray is the all-flash storage performance, low latency, and efficiency of their de-duplication technology. Additionally, the ease of use is good compared to other storage systems. The features in data protection, snapshotting, and replication between data centers and sites are superior to other solutions."
"It solved many problems and provided unexpected features that improved our business execution, making us more agile internally."
"The GUI is very easy to use and intuitive."
"It does efficient work of storing data while still delivering the performance that you would normally expect from a higher priced solution."
"Go with Pure (or a flasher rate which is similar) because of the ease of management and performance."
"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."
"I rate this product ten out of ten."
"It is incredibly scalable and stable."
"GPFS monitoring is the best feature."
"We use GPFS Scale for parallel file access, the file management, and it's an essential part of our operations."
"Spectrum Scale is one of the most important products in our environment now."
"It makes our file system sharing a lot easier, even across different continents. We have had file systems shared across different continents with no performance degradation."
"In terms of reliability, scalability, performance, security and so forth, it is definitely very good."
"The price performance is the best advantage of Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct."
"We chose Microsoft due to its simplicity, affordability, reliability and performance."
"For an on-prem campus, it has been fine."
"The flash ability, in terms of tiering and caching, is amazing."
"One of the best things about Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct is that it allows for optimized storage solutions and high availability, which is beneficial for managing workloads efficiently."
"Its technical support is excellent."
"Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct definitely has its advantages, especially with robustness and scalability."
 

Cons

"I would like to see box-to-box encryption on replication included in the next release."
"The initial setup of the product is complex."
"We haven't seen ROI."
"I would appreciate improvements on daily health checks."
"The connectivity needs improvement. You do not have the possibility to have a file and block connectivity at the same time on the same machine. It has limited ability to do so."
"I would like to see more cloud integration."
"For large storage needs, it is expensive."
"Pure Storage FlashArray could improve by being more secure."
"Initially, stability was a concern as we encountered numerous issues and errors."
"The solution's pricing could be better."
"The pricing and licensing model for this solution are complex and it is sometimes difficult to explain it to customers."
"We do not feel as a company that the product can grow with us anymore, so we are not going to use it anymore."
"We do have some issues where Spectrum Scale does not work as expected."
"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."
"Integration with other vendors is not available. This feature would be very helpful."
"The main issue that we have now is with the encryption. They want to use more metrics in encryption, which is not working very well."
"The reason why this product is not being widely accepted by the public is that it doesn't include intuitive streamline, which makes it far from complete."
"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."
"Microsoft closed the shared cluster support, which is important for the solution."
"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."
"I think the online documentation needs a lot of work and so do the sizing tools."
"There is a lot of room for improvement. I would like to have more tools to monitor the function and problems."
"The performance of Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct is challenging when trying to support both NVMe and SATA SSDs, and there are problems regarding performance that need to be addressed."
"On a scale of one to ten, I would rate the customer service and technical support of Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct a three, as there were issues that the Microsoft team could not pinpoint, leading to delays in finding solutions."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is a cheaper solution."
"The price of the solution is not expensive."
"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."
"There are no fees for licensing. The hardware is paid for only once."
"While more expensive than NetApp, Pure Storage FlashArray offers superior performance that often justifies the higher cost and adds value overall."
"For us, as the customer, it reduced the price of the management."
"In the beginning, we saw that the price is not very good. When we made some compilations about the deduplication and the compression and what the equipment does, including the differentiation of upper management of the storage, the price was not so bad. However, in the beginning, the price was very difficult to justify."
"Our licensing is on a yearly basis. So, every year, we renew. We could do a three-year contract, but right now, we only do a one-year."
"The licensing model is complex and depends on factors such as the number of processing cores and the amount of storage."
"The solution is costly but reliable."
"The licensing is based on the number of terabytes."
"The solution is expensive."
"With the data center licensing and everything that is connected to that, this solution is relatively costly."
"Cost-wise the product is one of the more affordable within the category of products."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Construction Company
10%
Computer Software Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Construction Company
7%
Government
6%
Computer Software Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Government
8%
 

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 Business6
Large Enterprise8
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise3
 

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 have knowledge about the licensing part, which we obtained for around 10 years from the time of deployment, but I d...
What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashArray?
When it comes to Everpure FlashArray ports shown in the GUI, it would be better if, when one of the Pure array ports ...
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.
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?
Overall, I find the cost of Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct to be affordable for the on-prem Windows pure solution, b...
What needs improvement with Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct?
The performance of Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct is challenging when trying to support both NVMe and SATA SSDs, and...
 

Also Known As

Pure Storage FlashArray
No data available
MS Storage Spaces Direct
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Nielsen, Lamar Advertising, LinkedIn, Betfair, UT-Dallas
Information Not Available
Acuutech, Quest Technology Management, Bradley, Mead & Hunt
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM Spectrum Scale vs. Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
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