IBM Spectrum Scale vs Red Hat Ceph Storage comparison

IBM and Red Hat are both solutions in the Software Defined Storage (SDS) category. IBM is ranked #10 with an average rating of 9.0, while Red Hat is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.9. IBM holds a 4.5% mindshare in SDS, compared to Red Hat’s 19.8% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of IBM users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 82% of Red Hat users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 5, 2024

Red Hat Ceph Storage and IBM Spectrum Scale are leading products in the realm of large-scale data storage solutions. IBM Spectrum Scale tends to have an edge due to its advanced features and data management capabilities.

Features: Red Hat Ceph Storage features a distributed and self-healing architecture, integration with a variety of storage solutions, and high availability. IBM Spectrum Scale offers high-speed data access, seamless file sharing across platforms, and advanced monitoring capabilities.

Room for Improvement: Red Hat Ceph Storage could enhance its analytics capabilities, improve its user interface, and expand support for hybrid cloud environments. IBM Spectrum Scale might benefit from simplifying its deployment process, reducing initial costs, and enhancing its integration with external systems.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Red Hat Ceph Storage provides straightforward deployment and extensive customer support, making it a suitable choice for diverse infrastructures. IBM Spectrum Scale, while more complex in setup, requires detailed planning but supports intricate storage requirements.

Pricing and ROI: Red Hat Ceph Storage is cost-effective, appealing to those seeking a low initial investment with satisfactory ROI in scalability and open-source integrations. IBM Spectrum Scale has a higher setup cost but offers superior performance and long-term returns, especially in data-intensive environments where its advanced management features are fully leveraged.

To learn more, read our detailed IBM Spectrum Scale vs. Red Hat Ceph Storage Report (Updated: August 2025).

Buyer's Guide

IBM Spectrum Scale vs. Red Hat Ceph Storage

August 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 Red Hat Ceph Storage is 19.8%, down from 21.8% 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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Rifat Rahman

Infrastructure Architect & CEO at Tirzok Private Limited

Offers reliable performance and availability for large deployments

I would like to see improvements in Red Hat Ceph Storage not because I necessarily think it needs improvement, but because I generally prefer to do things manually rather than following the containerization part. Current deployments are based on containers, but I deploy manually with my scripts and controls. If there are no Kubernetes-like requirements, I often prefer to deploy a whole manual process. I don't ask for improvements in the deployment model because Red Hat has its own philosophy about making things, but it's my personal choice that I prefer things manually. Some features are available only in the containerization part, so if those are also available in manual deployment, that will help.

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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."

"The tool's most valuable features are data warehousing, speedy recovery, and analytics. Its latest release is cost-effective."

"The onboarding and integrated monitoring tools are pretty good."

"What I like best about Pure Storage FlashBlade is its object storage functionality, plus it has fast underlying hardware. Pure Storage FlashBlade is also very stable. I find its stability one of its valuable features."

"It helps simplify our storage, because the user interface is very simple and the installation is easy."

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

"The initial setup is pretty quick."

"It's very easy-to-use."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade pros

"The profile share is a valuable feature."

"It is a scalable solution."

"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."

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

"We are using it for monitoring all of our storage."

"The most valuable feature is the ability to share files across different platforms."

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

"I rate this product ten out of ten."

More IBM Spectrum Scale pros

"radosgw and librados provide a simple integration with clone, snapshots, and other functions that aid in data integrity."

"Stratus allows more reliability than all the other types of computers available."

"Without any extra costs, I was able to provide a redundant environment."

"The community support is very good."

"Most of the features are beneficial and one does not stand out above the rest."

"We have some legacy servers that can be associated with this structure. With Ceph, we can rearrange these machines and reuse our investment."

"Ceph’s ability to adapt to varying types of commodity hardware affords us substantial flexibility and future-proofing."

"Ceph Storage allows us to add value related to cost and offers a unique experience compared to traditional storage."

More Red Hat Ceph Storage pros

Cons

"Its configuration should be easier."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"The speed could be improved."

"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."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade cons

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

"The pricing and licensing model for this solution are complex and it is sometimes difficult to explain it to customers."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Making it a little easier to add bad file sets would help. There is a transition to how you add storage and how you add a file set, so making that a little smoother would probably be my recommendation."

"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."

More IBM Spectrum Scale cons

"When it comes to the capabilities of Red Hat Ceph Storage such as object, block, and file storage, I am not fully satisfied."

"This product uses a lot of CPU and network bandwidth. It needs some deduplication features and to use delta for rebalancing."

"Routing around slow hardware."

"Ceph does not deal very well with, or takes a long time to recover from, certain kinds of network failures and individual storage node failures."

"The product lacks RDMA support for inter-OSD communication."

"I've heard the integration with OpenShift is great, however, the licensing cost is excessively high."

"The licensing cost is excessively high. This is a significant issue from my perspective."

"It would be nice to have a notification feature whenever an important action is completed."

More Red Hat Ceph Storage cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price could be cheaper."

"The price of this solution could be made more affordable."

"Licensing fees are paid yearly."

"The product is very expensive."

"I feel that the price could always be lowered."

"Our customers have seen a reduction in TCO."

"The pricing is relatively expensive due to the FlashBlade technology. However, for companies needing quick and reliable data access, the cost is justified."

"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."

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."

"We never used the paid support."

"If you can afford a product like Red Hat Ceph Storage then go for it. If you cannot, then you need to test Ceph and get your hands dirty."

"The operational overhead is higher compared to Azure because we own the hardware."

"Most of time, you can get Ceph with the OpenStack solution in a subscription as a bundle."

"I rate the product’s pricing an eight out of ten."

"The other big advantage is that Ceph is free software. Compared to traditional SAN based storage, it is very economical."

"There is no cost for software."

"The price of Red Hat Ceph Storage is reasonable."

More Red Hat Ceph Storage pricing and cost advice

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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

12%

Computer Software Company

10%

Educational Organization

Computer Software Company

18%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

Comms Service Provider

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...

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...

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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...

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 Red Hat Ceph Storage compare with MiniO?

Red Hat Ceph does well in simplifying storage integration by replacing the need for numerous storage solutions. This ...

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What do you like most about Red Hat Ceph Storage?

The high availability of the solution is important to us.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Red Hat Ceph Storage?

Areas of Red Hat Ceph Storage that have room for improvement include more promotion. Many people do not know about th...

See all answers

Comparisons

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 19% of the time

MinIO 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

Dell ECS vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 5% of the time

More Pure Storage FlashBlade Competitors

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

VMware vSAN vs IBM Spectrum Scale

Compared 8% of the time

IBM Spectrum Accelerate vs IBM Spectrum Scale

Compared 6% of the time

More IBM Spectrum Scale Competitors

MinIO vs Red Hat Ceph Storage

Compared 39% of the time

NetApp StorageGRID vs Red Hat Ceph Storage

Compared 6% of the time

VMware vSAN vs Red Hat Ceph Storage

Compared 5% of the time

Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct vs Red Hat Ceph Storage

Compared 4% of the time

Dell PowerFlex vs Red Hat Ceph Storage

Compared 3% of the time

More Red Hat Ceph Storage 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

Red Hat Ceph Storage

August 2025

Download Red Hat Ceph Storage product report

Also Known As

No data available

Ceph

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

Red Hat Ceph Storage is an enterprise open source platform that provides unified software-defined storage on standard, economical servers and disks. With block, object, and file storage combined into one platform, Red Hat Ceph Storage efficiently and automatically manages all your data.

Red Hat

Sample Customers

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

Information Not Available

Dell, DreamHost

Buyer's Guide

IBM Spectrum Scale vs. Red Hat Ceph Storage

August 2025

Free Report: IBM Spectrum Scale vs. Red Hat Ceph Storage

Find out what your peers are saying about IBM Spectrum Scale vs. Red Hat Ceph Storage and other solutions. Updated: August 2025.

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