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IBM Spectrum Scale vs StorPool 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)
StorPool
Average Rating
10.0
Reviews Sentiment
8.0
Number of Reviews
11
Ranking in other categories
Software Defined Storage (SDS) (18th)
 

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.
it_user1721697 - PeerSpot reviewer
Managing Director at CloudScale365, Inc.
Great service and support with a constant addition of new features
As of now, the product has been working really well for us. They keep updating and launching new features. Their support has been great and have always been available. I have personally met with multiple Storpool engineers and spoke about different options and features. There are too many features that we don't know or use yet. My recommendation would be to promote the new features and give users different examples of how they can be used and how we can benefit from them. This is a great product.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"We like the speed. It's very low latency. In virtualization, you can mask lots of problems, and even in code you can mask lots of problems, with low latency. It's just pure speed and low latency."
"They are quite responsive and our local team was pretty good."
"After moving to Pure Storage, I have noticed that our databases are considerably faster and our performance has improved by at least four times."
"The GUI is very easy to use and intuitive."
"It has made working with storage as easy and simple as it should be."
"We actually originally went with a competitor's product, and after about eight months, a lot of wrangling, had them buy it back from us, and then we bought a similar Pure Storage product, and it's just been great."
"One could tell, the minute we switched to this program, everything ran a lot faster."
"The mobile app is very helpful."
"It is a scalable solution."
"I find IBM Spectrum Scale to be an excellent product known for its fast parallel file system."
"Its great servicing high availability. That is what it is used for."
"We use it for our data over multiple systems, and at the same time it is a shared file system that works pretty well for the most part."
"The high performance of the solution is its most valuable aspect; if you compare it to other storage solutions, it is much better."
"Allows us to share files across multiple environments."
"It is incredibly scalable and stable."
"It is incredibly scalable; you can add more storage to it, add more file sets, and add it to more servers, making it a robust product that should be able to expand with us."
"The team behind it was very engaged and had the skills and ability to support a service provider."
"The speed of the storage solution also allows us to provide service to applications that are ​very I/O ​intensive."
"We are very happy and can finally say that the collaboration that we have had with StorPool has been excellent."
"Using StorPool we had about 15% increase in our gross margin and that is huge for a service provider."
"Performance, redundancy, scalability and cost-effectiveness. StorPool delivers superbly in all of these areas."
"StorPool’s team has deep understanding about technology and help us tune our system, consult for further vHost.vn growth, and coach our System Engineering to a higher level with more information about tech in this industry."
"The two 10GE networks provide redundancy and increased performance as they serve as two separate networks doubling the throughput and doing multipathing and load balancing. We now have a high performance shared storage system which enables us to run on private cloud. Our previous system used bare-metal hardware, which provided high performance but inflexible management. Now we have best of both worlds, SSD-class performance with flexibility of a private cloud system."
"Storpool replaced our old storage system; it is extremely fast and reliable, which has translated to exceptional performance for our customers."
 

Cons

"I’d love to view the average, minimum and maximum performance in the reports (Analysis tab - Performance) but it is only graphics and you need to export data in CSV to find this information."
"There is not a great need for improvement, but better pricing could be beneficial."
"Larger capacity and more storage ports would be the two things I'd like to see."
"It is not possible to create a cluster on top of multiple arrays."
"When creating a support case, visibility should be extended to others involved in assisting."
"Some services could be inserted directly into the SAN, so Pure Storage could complete with the HyperFlex."
"I recognize it's a difficult challenge, but I would like to see them make the pricing more reasonable."
"The product should improve its response time. I have also encountered issues with its configuration."
"We do have some issues where Spectrum Scale does not work as expected."
"They should probably simply the Red Hat implementation portion. This portion was not as straightforward as I would like it to be."
"We do not feel as a company that the product can grow with us anymore, so we are not going to use it anymore."
"I believe there is no graphic user interface, so they should include it."
"Integration with other vendors is not available. This feature would be very helpful."
"The pricing and licensing model for this solution are complex and it is sometimes difficult to explain it to customers."
"The biggest problem is that it is not able to provide block storage."
"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."
"I have personally met with multiple Storpool engineers and spoke about different options and features. There are too many features that we don't know or use yet. My recommendation would be to promote the new features and give users different examples of how they can be used and how we can benefit from them."
"The only place we feel they could improve is the time it takes to bring new features to production."
"Support for VMware is with iSCSI at this point."
"Monitoring and statistics UI is a bit clumsy, although StorPool is currently working on a new version."
"Although controlling the system from console has lots of capabilities, an interface to view the performance of the StorPool System and control some cases is a need."
"There are too many features that we don't know or use yet."
"At times we need to check the disks and do some minor operations. A friendlier user interface would be useful in such cases."
"It would be good if, with next releases, StorPool provide a better GUI for monitoring and statistics. This would make our experience even better and complete."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Pure has been flexible with us on the pricing models."
"Once you purchase Pure Storage FlashArray it is all-inclusive, you receive all the licenses needed."
"The price was slightly higher than others, but competitive, if you consider all the other features that you get from it."
"Pricing is very competitive, and it's better than other competitors."
"The price-to-performance is good. I looked at Pure about three to four years back, but the price-to-performance wasn't right for us. Now, it's right."
"When I last looked, the prices were reasonable, and we could get an excellent array for about $60,000."
"It is not the cheapest one out there. We're paying yearly, but I'm not 100% sure."
"In terms of other contemporary arrays, Pure is something you need to have a use case for, as it's not priced for you to buy one off-the-shelf. If you have a use case, heavy lift Oracle Databases, any type of noticeable virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), or need low latency and high throughput, you should consider all-flash at least and probably Pure Storage."
"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."
"The licensing is based on the number of terabytes."
"StorPool software is cost-effective and gives us a pricing advantage over our competitors."
"It provides us with a significant reduction in TCO due to their pay-as-you-grow licensing model, which means we don’t have to pay upfront for hardware and licensing for capacity thStorPoolat we don’t yet need to use."
"StorPool's pricing and licensing model is very transparent. As always, one has to due his due diligence when choosing a product like distributed storage solutions."
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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%
Manufacturing Company
13%
Computer Software Company
12%
Comms Service Provider
12%
Construction Company
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 Business6
Large Enterprise1
 

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.
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Also Known As

Pure Storage FlashArray
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Overview

 

Sample Customers

Nielsen, Lamar Advertising, LinkedIn, Betfair, UT-Dallas
Information Not Available
CloudSigma, Kualo, Togglebox, Neterra, Serveo, Superhosting.bg, GroupOne, DRFortress, Metanet, Dia, Server Storage Solutions
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM Spectrum Scale vs. StorPool and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
900,644 professionals have used our research since 2012.