IBM Spectrum Scale vs Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct comparison

IBM and Microsoft are both solutions in the Software Defined Storage (SDS) category. IBM is ranked #10 with an average rating of 9.0, while Microsoft is ranked #9 with an average rating of 7.8. IBM holds a 4.5% mindshare in SDS, compared to Microsoft’s 7.4% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of IBM users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 80% of Microsoft users who would recommend it.

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 5, 2024

IBM Spectrum Scale and Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct are storage solutions competing in scalability and ease of integration with existing infrastructures. IBM Spectrum Scale appears to have the upper hand in scalability and data management, while Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct offers superior integration with Windows environments.

Features: IBM Spectrum Scale has strengths in handling large datasets with strong cloud integration and efficient data management. Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, on the other hand, supports hyper-converged infrastructures, offers built-in fault tolerance, and seamless integration with Windows Server.

Room for Improvement: IBM Spectrum Scale could benefit from simpler integration processes by enhancing user interface and more affordable entry-level options. Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct might improve by increasing support for non-Windows environments, offering more customization tools, and further refining its scalability features.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: IBM Spectrum Scale requires a complex deployment process, which is bolstered by robust support for intricate enterprise needs but demands dedicated IT resources. Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct is easier to deploy within Windows ecosystems and benefits from responsive customer service tailored for smaller teams.

Pricing and ROI: IBM Spectrum Scale involves a higher initial setup cost but offers long-term ROI through adaptable scaling. Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct has a lower initial investment with quicker ROI, thanks to reduced operational costs, making it accessible for businesses focusing on cost-efficiency.

To learn more, read our detailed IBM Spectrum Scale vs. Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct Report (Updated: July 2025).

Buyer's Guide

IBM Spectrum Scale vs. Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct

July 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

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Software Defined Storage (SDS) category, the mindshare of Pure Storage FlashBlade is 4.4%, up from 4.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Spectrum Scale is 4.5%, down from 5.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct is 7.4%, up from 7.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Software Defined Storage (SDS)

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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Bernd Stroehle.

Enterprise Architect at kosakya

Deliver improved performance in data processing and foster extensive AI initiatives

I find IBM Spectrum Scale to be an excellent product known for its fast parallel file system. It achieved the best results when integrated with IBM hardware. Even though it is complex, it provided significant performance advantages in large-scale data management. Its fault tolerance mechanisms and integration capabilities make it popular for extensive AI initiatives and data processing tasks for organizations like Daimler Benz and Bosch.

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Stanislaw Mielicki

Solution architect at Netland

Achieve cost-effectiveness with superior performance while needing to address cluster support

I am working with Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct for applications, SQL, and VRS. I am an integrator for this solution The price performance is the best advantage of Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct. They introduced the All-Flash array using SSD or NVMe drives without cache drives. It 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

"Pure Storage FlashBlade is user-friendly. It's replication feature is great because it has active replication and active DR. That's the beauty of the product. It's a perfect solution for block storage."

"It performs well and it is also very fast."

"The product is scalable and easy to expand."

"The solution is able to handle workloads and is easy to use. It allows us to actually manage the boxes in less time."

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

"I would rate this solution an eight plus. It has has good flexibility and stability, it's easy to manage and the response time is good."

"Using this solution has made our backups more reliable."

"Approximately 40% to 50% of my time is saved using Pure Storage FlashBlade compared to different products."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade pros

"Its great servicing high availability. That is what it is used for."

"Technical support has been very helpful. They provide us with pretty good solutions that we can implement moving forward."

"Allows us to share files across multiple environments."

"The profile share is a valuable feature."

"We can have multiple systems within the same file system."

"GPFS monitoring is the best feature."

"I find IBM Spectrum Scale to be an excellent product known for its fast parallel file system."

"I would rate my overall experience with IBM Spectrum Scale as nine out of ten."

More IBM Spectrum Scale pros

"The flash ability, in terms of tiering and caching, is amazing"

"The price performance is the best advantage of Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct."

"The most valuable feature is that there is no single point of failure."

"The main positive impact that Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct has had on my company over the years is increasing performance; our checks show it is three times faster than VMware, making us extremely happy and motivated to keep using it."

"It's mainly about the storage expansion, like in hyper-converged solutions."

"The performance, reliability, and affordability has been most valuable."

"Its technical support is excellent."

"The most valuable feature are the caching capabilities using the storage class memory."

More Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct pros

Cons

"I would like to see more deduplication."

"Compared to, for example, Hitachi NAS, the solution is not mature at all. It's just in its infancy as far as technology goes."

"The documentational aspect of FlashBlade needs improvement."

"It usually comes down to just what you hit and the value you're getting when you spend the money and license the products. I would always go, "If you want to make things better, lower your price and make your licensing simpler." There's always an opportunity around that."

"I would like to see better integration."

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

"The speed could be improved."

"The technical support needs to improve. When we open a case, it is auto assigned to a support tech person. Nine out of ten times, we get an email right back saying that person is off until tomorrow. I cannot handle that. They just did this over the weekend to us, too. I had to call our rep and have them do something about it."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade cons

"The initial setup is complex, especially if trying to avoid erasure coding, as it requires more discs. Avoiding erasure coding can significantly increase costs."

"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."

"There can be improvements in fault tolerance and making erasure coding faster."

"The biggest problem is that it is not able to provide block storage."

"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."

"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."

"They should probably simply the Red Hat implementation portion. This portion was not as straightforward as I would like it to be."

More IBM Spectrum Scale cons

"Microsoft closed the shared cluster support, which is important for the solution."

"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."

"More optimization could be done in terms of mirroring."

"Microsoft closed the shared cluster support, which is important for the solution."

"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."

"There is a lot of room for improvement. I would like to have more tools to monitor the function and problems."

"I think the online documentation needs a lot of work and so do the sizing tools."

"Documentation management could be improved"

More Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product is very expensive."

"We used a reseller for the purchase."

"The price could be cheaper."

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

"The price is a little high."

"I understand that it is competitively priced compared to other brands."

"Our licensing is renewed annually."

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

More Pure Storage FlashBlade pricing and cost advice

"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."

"Cost-wise the product is one of the more affordable within the category of products."

"The solution is expensive."

"With the data center licensing and everything that is connected to that, this solution is relatively costly."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

13%

Financial Services Firm

12%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Government

Financial Services Firm

20%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Computer Software Company

11%

Educational Organization

Computer Software Company

16%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Financial Services 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 of Pure Storage FlashBlade is expensive compared to other products I used from other companies in the pas...

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What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashBlade?

I believe there is not much improvement needed because they have everything we need, but the interface is a little bi...

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

IBM Spectrum Scale is very expensive with complex pricing models usually based on the amount of storage used or the n...

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What needs improvement with IBM Spectrum Scale?

There is room for improvement in the web interface. There could be more information available, such as charts and gra...

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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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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...

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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...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct?

Microsoft should improve the management aspect of Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, as we have raised multiple recomme...

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Comparisons

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 19% of the time

MinIO vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 10% of the time

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 10% of the time

Pure Storage FlashArray vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 10% of the time

VAST Data vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 9% of the time

More Pure Storage FlashBlade Competitors

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs IBM Spectrum Scale

Compared 23% of the time

DDN IME vs IBM Spectrum Scale

Compared 12% of the time

Portworx Enterprise vs IBM Spectrum Scale

Compared 11% of the time

Red Hat Gluster Storage vs IBM Spectrum Scale

Compared 9% of the time

More IBM Spectrum Scale Competitors

VMware vSAN vs Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct

Compared 59% of the time

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct

Compared 16% of the time

Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) vs Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct

Compared 7% of the time

StarWind Virtual SAN vs Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct

Compared 6% of the time

More Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Pure Storage FlashBlade

August 2025

Download Pure Storage FlashBlade product report

Buyer's Guide

IBM Spectrum Scale

August 2025

Download IBM Spectrum Scale product report

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct

August 2025

Download Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct product report

Also Known As

No data available

MS Storage Spaces Direct

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

IBM Spectrum Scale is a cluster file system that provides concurrent access to a single file system or set of file systems from multiple nodes. The nodes can be SAN attached, network attached, a mixture of SAN attached and network attached, or in a shared nothing cluster configuration. This enables access to this common set of data to support a scale-out solution or to provide a high availability platform. IBM Spectrum Scale has many features beyond common data access including data replication, policy based storage management, and multi-site operations. You can create a cluster of AIX nodes, Linux nodes, Windows server nodes, or a mix of all three. IBM Spectrum Scale can run on virtualized instances providing common data access in environments, leverage logical partitioning, or other hypervisors. Multiple IBM Spectrum Scale clusters can share data within a location or across wide area network (WAN) connections.

IBM

Storage Spaces Direct uses industry-standard servers with local-attached drives to create highly available, highly scalable software-defined storage at a fraction of the cost of traditional SAN or NAS arrays. Its converged or hyper-converged architecture radically simplifies procurement and deployment, while features like caching, storage tiers, and erasure coding, together with the latest hardware innovation like RDMA networking and NVMe drives, deliver unrivaled efficiency and performance.

Microsoft

Sample Customers

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

Information Not Available

Acuutech, Quest Technology Management, Bradley, Mead & Hunt

Buyer's Guide

IBM Spectrum Scale vs. Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct

July 2025

Free Report: IBM Spectrum Scale vs. Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct

Find out what your peers are saying about IBM Spectrum Scale vs. Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.

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