Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

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 3.9% mindshare in SDS, compared to Microsoft’s 7.3% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of IBM users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 80% of Microsoft users who would recommend it.
Sponsored
Pure Storage FlashBlade
Read 38 Pure Storage FlashBlade reviews
  • 4,959 Views
  • 744 Comparison Views
94% willing to recommend
IBM Spectrum Scale
Read 13 IBM Spectrum Scale reviews
  • 1,419 Views
  • 951 Comparison Views
100% willing to recommend
Microsoft Storage Spaces Di...
Read 11 Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct reviews
  • 3,866 Views
  • 1,430 Comparison Views
80% willing to recommend
 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report
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.

DOWNLOAD THE COMPLETE REPORT
To learn more, read our detailed IBM Spectrum Scale vs. Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct Report (Updated: September 2025).
Buyer's Guide
IBM Spectrum Scale vs. Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct
September 2025
Download the complete report
Helped 868,787 peers since 2012

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
Sponsored
Ranking in Software Defined Storage (SDS)
8th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.8
Number of Reviews
38
Ranking in other categories
All-Flash Storage (15th), File and Object Storage (8th)
IBM Spectrum Scale
Ranking in Software Defined Storage (SDS)
10th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
13
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Software Defined Storage (2nd)
Microsoft Storage Spaces Di...
Ranking in Software Defined Storage (SDS)
9th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
11
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Software Defined Storage (SDS) category, the mindshare of Pure Storage FlashBlade is 4.1%, down from 4.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Spectrum Scale is 3.9%, down from 4.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct is 7.3%, up from 7.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Software Defined Storage (SDS) Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Pure Storage FlashBlade4.1%
Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct7.3%
IBM Spectrum Scale3.9%
Other84.7%
Software Defined Storage (SDS)
 

Featured Reviews

Parul-Patel - PeerSpot reviewer
High performance and throughput enhance IT backup management
The multi-dimensional scale-out design feature of Pure Storage FlashBlade is not in use in our environment. Regarding data reduction technologies, we don't get much deduplication because the data is already deduplicated from our FlashArray before we get to backup, so there is no benefit of deduplication. Regarding the integration with cloud-native ecosystem tools, we are not on cloud; we are strictly an on-premises solution. Pure Storage FlashBlade is not used by any end-user; it's used only for IT backup, with only about four people in our group managing it. I cannot recommend Pure Storage FlashBlade to other users depending upon their financial situation because it's an expensive solution, and the cost is very high, including licensing and renewal every year. I rate Pure Storage FlashBlade an eight out of ten.
Read full review
Bernd Stroehle. - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
Read full review
Stanislaw Mielicki - PeerSpot reviewer
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…
Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The tool's most valuable features are data warehousing, speedy recovery, and analytics. Its latest release is cost-effective."
"Using this solution has made our backups more reliable."
"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 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."
"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."
"It helps simplify our storage, because the user interface is very simple and the installation is easy."
"We have seen a reduction in the total cost of ownership by around 20%."
More Pure Storage FlashBlade pros
"I rate this product ten out of ten."
"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."
"It is a scalable solution."
"We can have multiple systems within the same file system."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to share files across different platforms."
"It has been pretty reliable throughout the years. As far as capacity is concerned, it can handle most heavy loads."
"Its great servicing high availability. That is what it is used for."
"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 price performance is the best advantage of Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct."
"It's mainly about the storage expansion, like in hyper-converged solutions."
"The performance, reliability, and affordability has been most valuable."
"The most valuable feature are the caching capabilities using the storage class memory."
"Its technical support is excellent."
More Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct pros
 

Cons

"I would like to see the licensing fees improved as well as the price per terabytes."
"The Pure Storage Orchestrator is our biggest pain point at the moment. If we can have more say in future developments of feature sets that we will need to support for our use case, that would be pretty beneficial to us."
"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 speed could be improved."
"It's on the expensive side, as expected for a niche product."
"The solution is expensive."
"I would like to have Snapshots and Snapmail in the next release. People who came from a NetApp background, especially expect these features."
"An area for improvement in Pure Storage FlashBlade is its price. It could be reduced. The technical support for Pure Storage FlashBlade also needs improvement. It used to be good, with more experienced engineers. Nowadays, it isn't, and it takes longer for support to solve problems."
More Pure Storage FlashBlade cons
"Integration with other vendors is not available."
"The initial setup is complex, especially if trying to avoid erasure coding, as it requires more discs. Avoiding erasure coding can significantly increase costs."
"The pricing and licensing model for this solution are complex and it is sometimes difficult to explain it to customers."
"Maybe it needs integration with HA."
"They should probably simply the Red Hat implementation portion. This portion was not as straightforward as I would like it to be."
"I believe there is no graphic user interface, so they should include it."
"I wish there were some graphical user interface to access the GPFS file system creation and monitoring."
"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."
More IBM Spectrum Scale cons
"It is difficult to get a hardware compatibility certification 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."
"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."
"I think the online documentation needs a lot of work and so do the sizing tools."
"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."
"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."
"Documentation management could be improved"
"Microsoft closed the shared cluster support, which is important for the solution."
More Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct cons
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Our licensing is renewed annually."
"Our customers have seen a reduction in TCO."
"The pricing for FlashBlade is between cheap and moderate."
"It's a costly solution, but Pure Storage FlashBlade doesn't require additional licenses. All of the software is combined into one bundle."
"The pricing is relatively expensive due to the FlashBlade technology. However, for companies needing quick and reliable data access, the cost is justified."
"The price could be cheaper."
"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."
"I have seen ROI. It has allowed me to increase the density of my VMs without having to purchase anything additional."
More Pure Storage FlashBlade pricing and cost advice
"The solution is costly but reliable."
"The licensing is based on the number of terabytes."
"The licensing model is complex and depends on factors such as the number of processing cores and the amount of storage."
"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."
report
See which vendors are best for you
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Software Defined Storage (SDS) solutions are best for your needs.
See recommendations
868,787 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
7%
Financial Services Firm
18%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Computer Software Company
10%
Government
8%
Computer Software Company
15%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Government
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business11
Midsize Enterprise11
Large Enterprise20
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Large Enterprise7
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business7
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise3
 

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...
See all answers
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...
See all answers
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...
See all answers
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...
See all answers
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...
See all answers
What is your primary use case for IBM Spectrum Scale?
My personal use of this product is for parallel writing or reading files.
See all answers
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...
See all answers
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...
See all answers
 

Comparisons

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs Pure Storage FlashBlade Logo
Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs Pure Storage FlashBlade
Compared 20% of the time
Pure Storage FlashArray vs Pure Storage FlashBlade Logo
Pure Storage FlashArray vs Pure Storage FlashBlade
Compared 11% of the time
MinIO vs Pure Storage FlashBlade Logo
MinIO vs Pure Storage FlashBlade
Compared 10% of the time
Red Hat Ceph Storage vs Pure Storage FlashBlade Logo
Red Hat Ceph Storage vs Pure Storage FlashBlade
Compared 9% of the time
VAST Data vs Pure Storage FlashBlade Logo
VAST Data vs Pure Storage FlashBlade
Compared 8% of the time
More Pure Storage FlashBlade Competitors
Red Hat Ceph Storage vs IBM Spectrum Scale Logo
Red Hat Ceph Storage vs IBM Spectrum Scale
Compared 20% of the time
Portworx Enterprise vs IBM Spectrum Scale Logo
Portworx Enterprise vs IBM Spectrum Scale
Compared 12% of the time
DDN IME vs IBM Spectrum Scale Logo
DDN IME vs IBM Spectrum Scale
Compared 12% of the time
VMware vSAN vs IBM Spectrum Scale Logo
VMware vSAN vs IBM Spectrum Scale
Compared 9% of the time
Red Hat Gluster Storage vs IBM Spectrum Scale Logo
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 Logo
VMware vSAN vs Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct
Compared 57% of the time
Red Hat Ceph Storage vs Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct Logo
Red Hat Ceph Storage vs Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct
Compared 17% of the time
Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) vs Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct Logo
Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) vs Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct
Compared 9% of the time
StarWind Virtual SAN vs Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct Logo
StarWind Virtual SAN vs Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct
Compared 7% of the time
DataCore SANsymphony vs Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct Logo
DataCore SANsymphony vs Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct
Compared 4% of the time
More Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct Competitors
 

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide
Pure Storage FlashBlade
September 2025
Pure Storage FlashBlade reportDownload Pure Storage FlashBlade product report
Buyer's Guide
IBM Spectrum Scale
September 2025
IBM Spectrum Scale reportDownload IBM Spectrum Scale product report
Buyer's Guide
Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct
September 2025
Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct reportDownload Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct product report
 

Also Known As

No data available
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
September 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: September 2025.
DOWNLOAD NOW
868,787 professionals have used our research since 2012.
See our IBM Spectrum Scale vs. Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct report.
See our list of best Software Defined Storage (SDS) vendors and best Software Defined Storage (SDS) vendors.

We monitor all Software Defined Storage (SDS) reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.