IBM Spectrum Virtualize vs Red Hat Ceph Storage comparison

IBM and Red Hat are both solutions in the Software Defined Storage (SDS) category. IBM is ranked #13 with an average rating of 8.7, while Red Hat is ranked #3 with an average rating of 9.3. IBM holds a 2.2% mindshare in SDS, compared to Red Hat’s 12.8% mindshare. Additionally, 91% 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 Virtualize compete in the efficient and scalable data management category. IBM Spectrum Virtualize often has the upper hand for its advanced data virtualization capabilities and comprehensive feature set.

Features: Red Hat Ceph Storage provides scalability, open-source flexibility, and unified storage for cloud environments. It supports seamless integration with OpenStack, delivers block and object storage, and offers a distributed architecture. IBM Spectrum Virtualize allows integration of diverse storage systems into a single platform, improving management and performance. It features a robust virtualization engine, flexible data migration, and unified management across multi-vendor storage.

Room for Improvement: Red Hat Ceph Storage can benefit from easier configuration and better deployment processes. It may also improve its user interface to reduce complexity for tech teams. Enhancing customer support responsiveness would be beneficial. IBM Spectrum Virtualize could improve by offering solutions at a lower cost. Streamlining advanced features for simplicity and further optimizing virtualized environments could also enhance user experience.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Red Hat Ceph Storage may present challenges with its complex open-source setup, potentially requiring experienced teams. IBM Spectrum Virtualize is often praised for its streamlined deployment process and strong customer service, offering a more straightforward experience thanks to its support network.

Pricing and ROI: Red Hat Ceph Storage is generally viewed as cost-effective, providing good ROI by leveraging open-source advantages and reducing external storage costs. IBM Spectrum Virtualize, while more expensive, is justified by its feature-rich offering and long-term benefits of virtualization technologies. The choice centers around Red Hat's affordability versus IBM's higher upfront cost with possible greater long-term returns.

To learn more, read our detailed IBM Spectrum Virtualize vs. Red Hat Ceph Storage Report (Updated: January 2026).

Buyer's Guide

IBM Spectrum Virtualize vs. Red Hat Ceph Storage

January 2026

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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 February 2026, in the Software Defined Storage (SDS) category, the mindshare of Pure Storage FlashBlade is 3.4%, down from 4.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Spectrum Virtualize is 2.2%, up from 1.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Red Hat Ceph Storage is 12.8%, down from 21.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Software Defined Storage (SDS) Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Red Hat Ceph Storage	12.8%
Pure Storage FlashBlade	3.4%
IBM Spectrum Virtualize	2.2%
Other	81.6%

Software Defined Storage (SDS)

Featured Reviews

MikaelHellström

IT Manager at Regin Dalarna

Has handled backup storage needs reliably and supports seamless upgrades

In environments requiring high throughput and low latency, Pure Storage FlashBlade provides high throughput and normal latency, but we do not have any application that requires low latency right now, so the latency of three to five milliseconds is considered kind of high. Pure Storage FlashBlade's ability to integrate with enterprise applications is not important for us, as we only want to present an S3 bucket for our backup, which we have done, and it works very fast. We use the Purity software's data reduction techniques; we have a backup software that compresses everything before sending it to the S3 bucket, achieving a data reduction of 1.1 to one. I would recommend Pure Storage FlashBlade to other companies because it's a very fast and scalable solution for anyone who needs it. On a scale of 1-10, I rate this solution an 8.

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AhmedSorour

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.

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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.

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 most valuable features include the ease of implementation, ease of use and the speed that you can do backup and recovery on."

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

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

"It is very easy to use, and it is very fast."

"The performance of FlashBlade is excellent. It does not necessarily leverage the SOS API that some of the newer products leverage, but I found its speed pretty much on par and comparable. It is fast, and it does what it is supposed to do."

"The most valuable feature is Safe Mode."

"The solution provides many controllers."

"We can capacity plan at a greater level than we used to."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade pros

"I like that it can virtualize more than three hundred storage providers."

"IBM offers excellent customer service."

"It has the ability to seamlessly move hardware in and out as we refresh technology."

"One of the main features of Spectrum Virtualize is it virtualizes the servers from the storage. We have a very large infrastructure. A major advantage is when you get the aged storage arrays and you have to replace all of those."

"We acquire companies (and things), so we end up with odd hardware. We bring it behind the SVC and it allows us to migrate stuff off of it seamlessly. SVC can also cover up a host of defects of the underlying storage."

"When we add storage behind it, the product is good for the customers because their customers do not notice that anything is happening due to the virtualization."

"The abstraction flair and the abstraction layer. We had a mixture of different storage arrays, and the wonderful thing about SVC is is that it normalizes all it into a single driver. A single view that all hosts see simultaneously."

"Although the GUI from the XIV was used (in my view), IBM has polished and refined the GUI providing a pleasant and easy to navigate GUI experience."

More IBM Spectrum Virtualize pros

"The solution is pretty stable."

"It's a very performance-intensive, brilliant storage system, and I always recommend it to customers based on its benefits, performance, and scalability."

"The most valuable feature is the stability of the product."

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

"I like the distributed and self-healing nature of the product."

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

"Red Hat Ceph Storage is a reliable solution, it works well."

"Replicated and erasure coded pools have allowed for multiple copies to be kept, easy scale-out of additional nodes, and easy replacement of failed hard drives. The solution continues working even when there are errors."

More Red Hat Ceph Storage pros

Cons

"It usually comes down to just what you hit and the value you're getting when you spend the money and license the products. I would always go, "If you want to make things better, lower your price and make your licensing simpler." There's always an opportunity around that."

"There could be improvements in public cloud integration."

"I have not seen ROI."

"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."

"Commvault has mainly driven the Analytics, providing data and reports. However, the product has room for improvement, especially regarding storage analytics. Upgrading firmware has caused issues, requiring feature disabling to revert to traditional backups. The firmware upgrades sometimes affect Commvault backups."

"I would like to see more VM-Aware features in the next release of this solution."

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

More Pure Storage FlashBlade cons

"The disk reliability is not that good."

"NBME support and support for a higher Fibre Channel lengths could be improved, but those are already on the roadmap."

"t is limited in terms of a single system to eight nodes or four, what they call IO groups."

"Adding features for data deduplication is one area of improvement."

"The training program could be improved."

"GUI should be developed in HTML5 as opposed to Java."

"They are actually working on one bug we found, which was with flash restore. This was the user interface design for virtual environments."

"Level 1 technical support needs improvement."

More IBM Spectrum Virtualize cons

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

"While the documentation for Ceph Storage is helpful, it could be improved."

"I have encountered issues with stability when replication factor was not 3, which is the default and recommended value. Go below 3 and problems will arise."

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

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

"Geo-replication needs improvement. It is a new feature, and not well supported yet."

"It took me a long time to get the storage drivers for the communication with Kubernetes up and running. The documentation could improve it is lacking information. I'm not sure if this is a Ceph problem or if Ceph should address this, but it was something I ran into. Additionally, there is a performance issue I am having that I am looking into, but overall I am satisfied with the performance."

"An area for improvement would be that it's pretty difficult to manage synchronous replication over multiple regions."

More Red Hat Ceph Storage cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"I understand that it is competitively priced compared to other brands."

"Our licensing is renewed annually."

"We used a reseller for the purchase."

"The product is very expensive."

"The pricing for FlashBlade is between cheap and moderate."

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

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

More Pure Storage FlashBlade pricing and cost advice

"Do a proof of concept, if you are not comfortable jumping in, but do it."

"It has a lot of advanced functions for a reasonable price."

"We would like the CPU cycle to save more on the licensing costs for us."

"I think it is a good value for the price."

"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."

"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."

"The entry point of pricing for this product is the most amazing price ever in the industry."

"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."

More IBM Spectrum Virtualize pricing and cost advice

"There is no cost for software."

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

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

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

"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."

"The price of this product isn't high."

More Red Hat Ceph Storage pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

12%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Computer Software Company

10%

Government

Performing Arts

15%

Marketing Services Firm

14%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

14%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

Comms Service Provider

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	11
Midsize Enterprise	11
Large Enterprise	21

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	11
Midsize Enterprise	4
Large Enterprise	31

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	13
Midsize Enterprise	4
Large Enterprise	15

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?

Regarding pricing, it is okay; we needed exactly this in size, and the price was a lot lower than competitors, making...

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What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashBlade?

In my opinion, one way Pure Storage FlashBlade can be improved is by having more compatibility between the FlashArray...

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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-...

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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...

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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 ...

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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 18% of the time

MinIO vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 9% of the time

Pure Storage FlashArray vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 8% of the time

VAST Data vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 7% of the time

Dell ObjectScale vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 6% of the time

More Pure Storage FlashBlade Competitors

IBM Spectrum Scale vs IBM Spectrum Virtualize

Compared 15% of the time

Dell VPLEX vs IBM Spectrum Virtualize

Compared 10% of the time

DataCore SANsymphony vs IBM Spectrum Virtualize

Compared 9% of the time

IBM Spectrum Accelerate vs IBM Spectrum Virtualize

Compared 9% of the time

NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP vs IBM Spectrum Virtualize

Compared 9% of the time

More IBM Spectrum Virtualize Competitors

MinIO vs Red Hat Ceph Storage

Compared 50% of the time

NetApp StorageGRID vs Red Hat Ceph Storage

Compared 3% of the time

VMware vSAN vs Red Hat Ceph Storage

Compared 3% of the time

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs Red Hat Ceph Storage

Compared 3% of the time

Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) vs Red Hat Ceph Storage

Compared 2% of the time

More Red Hat Ceph Storage Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Pure Storage FlashBlade

January 2026

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Buyer's Guide

IBM Spectrum Virtualize

January 2026

Download IBM Spectrum Virtualize product report

Buyer's Guide

Red Hat Ceph Storage

January 2026

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 Virtualize is a dependable solution that improves data value, security, and simplicity for new and existing storage infrastructure. Proven over 12 years in thousands of deployments, its innovative virtualization capabilities help organizations achieve better data economics by supporting new workloads that are critical to their success. IBM Spectrum Virtualize software helps make new and existing storage more effective and standardizes functions traditionally deployed separately in disk systems for greater flexibility and potentially lower costs.

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

Pelephone, Sprint IT Enterprise Services

Dell, DreamHost

Buyer's Guide

IBM Spectrum Virtualize vs. Red Hat Ceph Storage

January 2026

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

Find out what your peers are saying about IBM Spectrum Virtualize vs. Red Hat Ceph Storage and other solutions. Updated: January 2026.

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