IBM Spectrum Scale vs Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct comparison

IBM Spectrum Scale vs. Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct

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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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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

"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."

"The ease of deployment and management has helped us simplify our storage. We also do not have to worry about capacity management as much. A lot of these things are native to Pure Storage."

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

"Speed and ease of use are the two most valuable features."

"The main feature I have found to be product replication."

"The most valuable features of this solution are the rewrite speed and the nonstop services."

"FlashBlade offers low latency, high throughput, and seamless scalability."

"We have integrated it with VMware. The integration process is pretty good. Especially with VMware, it helps with the capacity of it."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade pros

"It has been pretty reliable throughout the years. As far as capacity is concerned, it can handle most heavy loads."

"Allows us to share files across multiple environments."

"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."

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

"It is incredibly scalable and stable."

"We use GPFS Scale for parallel file access, the file management, and it's an essential part of our operations."

More IBM Spectrum Scale pros

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

"Its technical support is excellent."

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

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

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

"The initial setup is straightforward."

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

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

More Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct pros

Cons

"I have not seen ROI."

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

"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."

"In terms of scalability, it doesn't expand out quite as robustly as some of the others, but it covers 90% of the market in what it does."

"They need better integration with public clouds along with a better hybrid solution."

"To improve FlashBlade, some analysts suggest enhancing its handling of relational database management systems and SQL queries."

"On our dedupe during our initial buy, we were expecting a number a little higher like 4x. However, we are getting about 3.6. While it is close enough, it doesn't quite hit the numbers. So, this has been a challenge."

"I want efficiency. FlashBlade doesn't have efficiency now."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade cons

"The solution's pricing could be better."

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

"I believe there is no graphic user interface, so they should include it."

"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."

"I wish there were some graphical user interface to access the GPFS file system creation and monitoring."

"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."

"This is probably the biggest challenge, getting everything upgraded, because it just takes time. We wish it was a faster solution to be able to do everything at once, but you have do each node individually. The more nodes, the longer it takes."

"Maybe it needs integration with HA."

More IBM Spectrum Scale cons

"It is difficult to get a hardware compatibility certification for the solution."

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

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

"Documentation management could be improved"

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

"It is scalable, but only beyond two nodes. If I go for two nodes it's not scalable. I need to build a complete cluster from the beginning if I'm going for two nodes."

"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."

More Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

"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."

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

"The product is very expensive."

"The price could be cheaper."

"Our customers have seen a reduction in TCO."

"We used a reseller for the purchase."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade pricing and cost advice

"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."

"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

Educational Organization

37%

Computer Software Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

20%

Computer Software Company

14%

Manufacturing Company

14%

Educational Organization

Computer Software Company

14%

Manufacturing Company

10%

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...

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...

What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashBlade?

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

What do you like most about IBM Spectrum Scale?

It is a scalable solution.

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...

What needs improvement with IBM Spectrum Scale?

There can be improvements in fault tolerance and making erasure coding faster. Additionally, it would be beneficial t...

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 do you like most about Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct?

Its technical support is excellent.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct?

Pricing is an advantage of Storage Spaces Direct. Licenses can be on a monthly or yearly basis, depending on the addi...

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Product Reports

Pure Storage FlashBlade

Download Pure Storage FlashBlade product report

IBM Spectrum Scale

Download IBM Spectrum Scale product report

Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct

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

IBM Spectrum Scale vs. Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct