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IBM Spectrum Virtualize vs Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct 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
7.3
Number of Reviews
227
Ranking in other categories
All-Flash Storage (3rd)
IBM Spectrum Virtualize
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
39
Ranking in other categories
Software Defined Storage (SDS) (13th)
Microsoft Storage Spaces Di...
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.4
Number of Reviews
12
Ranking in other categories
Software Defined Storage (SDS) (8th)
 

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.
AS
IT Specialist at Saudi Business Machines - SBM
Unified storage solution supports cross-vendor replication and diverse industries
One of the most valuable features of IBM Spectrum Virtualize is its virtualization capability. It allows for the creation of stretched clusters, which are crucial for running Linux-based workloads that need mirroring for boot disks. The solution also provides asynchronous and synchronous replication, supporting operations across different data centers. Its deployment options across public, private, and hybrid clouds add to its versatility.
reviewer2588997 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Technical Support Engineer at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
Solution delivers impressive speed and performance with room for better management tool integration
Microsoft should improve the management aspect of Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, as we have raised multiple recommendations but they often refer us to use Microsoft Arc instead of Windows Admin Center. The licensing for Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct could be improved to be clearer, as calculating license requirements requires significant expertise; even Microsoft resources do not provide the full picture needed for licensing, leaving gaps that become evident once we move to deploy solutions. Improving the Windows Admin Center to be more stable with alert notifications and management capabilities for Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct would greatly benefit users, as we have not seen any recent product updates since the announcements last November.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"I cannot imagine my workflow without Everpure FlashArray because I do not have any other type of storage in use."
"Compared to other storage boxes, Everpure FlashArray is very useful because it is cost-effective and requires less work."
"It is easy to manage. You don't have to have the same people who used to manage the Dell EMC arrays because the solution is more intuitive."
"My advice to others looking into using Everpure FlashArray is that it's a really good product, especially if your main purpose is to get high speed with more redundancy and reliability; then go for it."
"It simplifies the overall management. We don't have to worry about storage anymore."
"The most valuable feature is the speed of it, as it is much faster than anything that we can get from similar competitors, and the solution helps to simplify storage."
"I find two features of Pure Storage most valuable. The first is the "safe mode" function, and the second is its simplicity."
"We currently have four Pure Storage FlashArray boxes, and all the storage boxes are on an Evergreen subscription model where we receive the latest hardware and features without any cost in a completely non-intrusive task."
"Good luck finding anything that does half of what it does."
"It helps us to reduce time, reduce complexity, and be more responsive to requests instead of taking an hour to do one volume; now I can do one volume in less than two minutes."
"Migration from configurations where servers have storage provisioned from older SAN disk systems to newer storage systems is almost seamless using image mode migration techniques, with only a short outage of the servers."
"We can failover easily, because a lot of our data is replicated from family to the second replication."
"It provides transparency, because of its advanced copy features."
"Our disaster recovery plan tests are always successful, which is good."
"The scalability is very good. It can handle anywhere from very small to large enterprise class."
"Being able to move things around from one array to the other has been the biggest feature for us."
"For an on-prem campus, it has been fine."
"The most valuable feature is that there is no single point of failure."
"We chose Microsoft due to its simplicity, affordability, reliability and performance."
"The price performance is the best advantage of Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct."
"The performance, reliability, and affordability has been most valuable."
"The performance is immediately noticeable by end users of all our on-premise applications."
"The main advantages are price and performance, and I am happy with the combination."
"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."
 

Cons

"If we suddenly dump large amounts of data onto the storage system, it takes a while to process it."
"The price of Pure Storage FlashArray could be better."
"Pure Storage will have issues with positioning in the near future since its a relatively new company. For now, customers need a PoC to trust using the solution, as it can't stand on its brand name alone. They need to improve Pure Storage's marketing."
"The support for NFS protocols right out-of-the-box need improvement. I'm used to other storage vendors who have NFS support right out-of-the-box, and Pure Storage doesn't seem to have anything."
"I would like to see data tiering to AWS."
"I would like to see the NAS add-on component become more fault-tolerant than just a single virtual machine running inside the array. I'm unwilling to use it for that reason."
"I would like to have support available in Spanish."
"I would appreciate improvements on daily health checks."
"We are not happy with the technical support. In the last seven or eight years, I honestly think that IBM's technical support has gotten way worse."
"I have encountered stability issues in situations when the customer-provided AC power has defects."
"Level 1 technical support needs improvement."
"Tighter integration with cloud storage might be useful as a target for a variety of use cases."
"Maybe sometimes we don't get responses back as fast as we would like, but they have always been very professional and they follow through."
"The training program could be improved."
"Technical support is sometimes good and sometimes it is low."
"Cheaper pricing and GUI should be developed in HTML5 as opposed to Java."
"The main reason that we have not implemented this solution or put it into production is because of the pricing."
"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."
"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."
"More optimization could be done in terms of mirroring."
"I think the online documentation needs a lot of work and so do the sizing tools."
"Microsoft closed the shared cluster support, which is important for the solution."
"It is difficult to get a hardware compatibility certification for the solution."
"Microsoft's frontline support is not adequate if you rely on this for your business."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"There is an annual or perpetual license required for this solution."
"Our licensing is on a yearly basis. So, every year, we renew. We could do a three-year contract, but right now, we only do a one-year."
"When you are paying more than you were paying for the storage space, you'd like the cost to be less. If they could get into the spinning disk kind of cost, that would be it."
"Price is about the only thing that's wrong with it. A little bit better pricing would be great."
"The cost has room for improvement."
"Because the price is a bit higher than other products, the data reduction equalizes the price with amount of the data reduction."
"You can pay extra for Evergreen support, which gives you free upgrades when new features are introduced."
"Pure Storage has not helped to reduce our HANA licensing costs."
"We would like the CPU cycle to save more on the licensing costs for us."
"This solution came as an additional cost for the TSM package we chose."
"We have struggled with Pure Storage, but people are understanding that much of Pure has been consumer grade SSDs. Therefore, when the customer is really understands what they are getting, they realize that IBM presents the same sort of value as existing vendors."
"I am very happy with the pricing. There is no comparison when it comes to pricing. I have looked at all solutions from EMC, Veritas, Hitachi, Dell, etc. None of them compares to IBM when it comes to pricing. I get great pricing from them."
"The entry point of pricing for this product is the most amazing price ever in the industry."
"Do a proof of concept, if you are not comfortable jumping in, but do it."
"Generally the bundled licensing is more cost effective and gives flexibility to the solution. Linking into the Spectrum Suite can also be advantageous, but depends on the scale of the enterprise."
"I think it is a good value for the price."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Construction Company
9%
Computer Software Company
7%
Performing Arts
14%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Marketing Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Government
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business69
Midsize Enterprise37
Large Enterprise157
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business11
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise31
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise3
 

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 needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashArray?
I do not have any improvements at the moment; I like how it is. I have nothing to add about needed improvements.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IBM Spectrum Virtualize?
IBM Spectrum Virtualize is not an expensive product. It offers flexibility with different flavors, whether appliance-...
What needs improvement with IBM Spectrum Virtualize?
IBM could improve IBM Spectrum Virtualize by bundling Storage Scale and Storage Virtualize into a single appliance. T...
What is your primary use case for IBM Spectrum Virtualize?
I primarily use IBM Spectrum Virtualize ( /products/ibm-spectrum-virtualize-reviews ) when I have different hardware ...
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 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...
What needs improvement with Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct?
The performance of Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct is challenging when trying to support both NVMe and SATA SSDs, and...
 

Also Known As

Pure Storage FlashArray
No data available
MS Storage Spaces Direct
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Nielsen, Lamar Advertising, LinkedIn, Betfair, UT-Dallas
Pelephone, Sprint IT Enterprise Services
Acuutech, Quest Technology Management, Bradley, Mead & Hunt
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM Spectrum Virtualize vs. Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
897,297 professionals have used our research since 2012.