No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

IBM Spectrum Virtualize vs ScaleIO [EOL] comparison

Sponsored
 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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
217
Ranking in other categories
All-Flash Storage (4th)
IBM Spectrum Virtualize
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
39
Ranking in other categories
Software Defined Storage (SDS) (13th)
ScaleIO [EOL]
Average Rating
8.0
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

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.
SK
Manager at Securetech
Meets our customers' needs but they should move towards high-level scaling
I the product already has scalability features, but in terms of size maybe they could do more to work with parent storage and move to high-level scaling. That area, I feel, is a place where there could be some more options in this solution. It would be a way to improve the scalability in another direction, maybe options to scale out rather than just up. So far we have done very few installations. So maybe in the coming days, weeks and months, we would be able to come up with some additional features that are needed, but right now the product has the competitive features that our clients need.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The cost of Pure FlashArray is a bit high compared to peers, but its sustainability and features justify the price."
"For an organization, it can take storage from 40 terabytes down to five terabytes."
"It has improved my organization because now have lower latency, we get fewer complaints from customers, and we see a constant response time."
"Their support system has insight into errors on our SAN fabric that we can't see. They've brought attention to and raised awareness for us about things that we couldn't see, when we were experiencing problems."
"The most valuable feature is its data reduction."
"It does efficient work of storing data while still delivering the performance that you would normally expect from a higher priced solution."
"Pure Storage is extremely reliable — it's never failed."
"After installing Pure, the processes that would take 40 minutes to two hours to complete are now done in five minutes."
"It makes data migration straightforward, and on the customer side, there is downtime, but it is very minimal."
"The ease of management, the simplicity of the CLI, the speed of that interface, and the well-architected design of the product in general are valuable features."
"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."
"Across the industry, nobody matches it."
"The most valuable feature is probably data migration so we can bring in back-end systems and swap data out."
"The most valuable feature for me is its ease of use."
"It improves a lot of functions for our clients, the high availability is the best thing, I have been working with it for 15 years, and it's one of the most stable products that IBM has."
"My advice to those wanted to implement this solution would be it is very useful and will give you all the details you need; how to set up the data movers, make sure they are balanced so that the load is distributed evenly, how to set it up and get all the documents in place once you log in."
"We are using it as the primary virtualization storage (both for internal corporate users and external customers) for VMware and Hyper-V virtualization platforms."
"The ScaleIO UI: EMC has been working with storage for a long time; therefore, they know how to clearly present any important data, including data flow and each drive's IOPS/bandwidth, and allow the user to easily monitor bottlenecks and problems, especially the rebuild and rebalance status of child objects."
"They know how to clearly present any important data, including data flow and each drive's IOPS/bandwidth; and allow the user to easily monitor bottlenecks and problems"
"Compared to other products in this category that are competing with Dell EMC, Dell seems to us to always come out on top."
"Comparing other products that are competing with Dell EMC (Enhanced Memory Controller), Dell seems to us to always come out on the high-side."
"Automatic rebalancing is the feature saving administration time."
"Automatic rebalancing is the feature saving administration time, and also auto rebuilding."
 

Cons

"Having something native in the Pure Storage ecosystem would make it integrated and in one single company, and we wouldn't have to work with multiple organizations."
"Price is about the only thing that's wrong with it."
"In the next release, I would like to see file-level encryption."
"I would like to see more cloud integration."
"The one major gripe I have is that there is no snapshotting enabled by default on the SAN."
"From a scalability perspective, it is a very small storage solution, so it's not very expandable."
"Currently, the solution fails to support file screening."
"We would like to see better troubleshooting aspects. It helps us if we can find out where the problem is. Right now, it's difficult. Sometimes it's difficult to pinpoint the issue. If they had more visibility and more troubleshooting feature built into the tool that would really help."
"There are some caveats with scalability, such as volume count. We are highly limited by volume count at this point in time."
"Tighter integration with cloud storage might be useful as a target for a variety of use cases."
"Scalability needs some work in some areas. The number of volumes needs to be increased drastically."
"I have encountered stability issues in situations when the customer-provided AC power has defects."
"There are things that occur when you get to this size and capacity. We're very large, i.e., petabytes. When you get to that sheer volume of the numbers of things, it is too big for people to keep track of."
"The SVC port (virtualized port) is very stable, but the Storwize port is not so stable."
"In general, the migration is complicated. Though, it is case-by-case."
"Level 1 technical support needs improvement."
"I think ScaleIO already has some features for scalability as it is part of the reason for the product, but in terms of size, maybe they should try to address parent storage."
"Ecosystem around the product: There is no built-in system for viewing history data, such as volume IOPS. We have to provide graphing by Prometheus and Grafana, which would be a good new feature in ScaleIO."
"It would be nice to set minimum IOPS per volume, besides just the maximum, to be able to satisfy this demand from customers out-of-the-box, not by calculating number of disks, etc."
"There is room for improvement in the area of horizontal scaling."
"Ecosystem around the product: There is no built-in system for viewing history data, such as volume IOPS."
"If they could introduce a write cache feature, the product would be perfect overall."
"If they could introduce a write cache feature, the product would be perfect overall."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The cost has room for improvement."
"Pure Storage has not helped us to reduce our licensing costs."
"I don't know the exact cost but it's around $1,000."
"The price is very reasonable when compared to other solutions."
"Pure Storage FlashArray is expensive."
"The pricing of Pure Storage is all-inclusive. It is very fair, and very easy. In comparison, Dell EMC has licensing that needs to be added if you wan to work in a complex environment or in specific functionalities."
"All storage is expensive so any price improvement would help."
"The price is reasonable."
"We would like the CPU cycle to save more on the licensing costs for us."
"Do a proof of concept, if you are not comfortable jumping in, but do it."
"This solution came as an additional cost for the TSM package we chose."
"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."
"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."
"I think it is a good value for the price."
"The entry point of pricing for this product is the most amazing price ever in the industry."
Information not available
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Software Defined Storage (SDS) solutions are best for your needs.
893,164 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
12%
Construction Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
8%
Performing Arts
14%
Marketing Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Construction Company
8%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business65
Midsize Enterprise36
Large Enterprise151
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business11
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise31
No data available
 

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?
The only issue is the pricing. Because we have competition, our customers always take another brand and say they can ...
What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashArray?
Our customers using Dell storage also use competing solutions. Our customers who have Everpure FlashArray may also ha...
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 ...
Ask a question
Earn 20 points
 

Also Known As

Pure Storage FlashArray
No data available
EMC ScaleIO
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Nielsen, Lamar Advertising, LinkedIn, Betfair, UT-Dallas
Pelephone, Sprint IT Enterprise Services
Check Point Software Technologies, Blue Central, Deltares, Sentinel Technologies, The Binding Site Group, Swisscom, Itrica
Find out what your peers are saying about StarWind, Nutanix, Red Hat and others in Software Defined Storage (SDS). Updated: April 2026.
893,164 professionals have used our research since 2012.