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IBM Spectrum Virtualize vs Scality RING comparison

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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 Virtualize
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
39
Ranking in other categories
Software Defined Storage (SDS) (12th)
Scality RING
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.4
Number of Reviews
15
Ranking in other categories
Software Defined Storage (SDS) (8th), File and Object Storage (5th)
 

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.
Nourreddine AISSAOUI - PeerSpot reviewer
Dev Ops Engineer at Transactis France
Object storage has transformed backup capacity management and supports modern AI-ready workloads
The separation of metadata from object data significantly influences storage performance, as metadata uses NVMe flash storage, serving as an accelerator for accessing data. While data resides on traditional spinning hard disk drives, using NVMe storage for metadata allows for fast access to data, especially for large volumes and a large number of objects. The performance regarding metadata is particularly vital when managing a high number of objects; thus, dedicating servers and fast storage to metadata improves handling those large object counts, which we optimized during our operations, resulting in satisfactory outcomes. The improvement with Scality RING is the ability to manage huge volumes and the easy scalability when dealing with capacity growth and management. We can buy servers, install them, and hot upgrade the capacity without requiring downtime. Everything is available through an API, allowing end users to manage their storage conveniently without needing requests or tickets; they can allocate, delete, and move storage as required, making operations easier for the end user.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"They can provide a lot of performance, so there is not a lot of difference, but efficiency is something customers value because the compression can be up to twice of the second competitor."
"The amount of data that I have moved to it from legacy storage has enabled us to retire units that are three or four times the physical size."
"We have looked at all of the platforms, and to see what Pure was able to do within a PoC environment meant that we never turned back our PoC environment."
"Everpure FlashArray has positively impacted my organization, particularly in performance and reliability, as we've had good improvements, making our applications run faster and giving us more confidence that they will not crash."
"If it's financially viable for you and you can afford it, it's worth it."
"Very stable; no worries about how much it can handle."
"The stability of Pure Storage is very very good."
"The speed is the most valuable feature of this solution."
"I love Spectrum Virtualize."
"I think probably one of the biggest benefits of this solution is that it is relatively easy to use and easy to understand."
"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."
"The most valuable features are the simplicity of use, the flexibility, and the options included. I mean, it's just a big time saver."
"The most valuable feature is its reliability."
"It provides transparency, because of its advanced copy features."
"I would recommend IBM Spectrum Virtualize because it is very robust, stable, and affordable, has very good performance, and is relatively easy to implement and use."
"This product is very good in terms of the stability and scalability."
"The best features of Scality RING include multiple aspects, but a few that we specifically appreciate are the scalability platform, which allows us to scale our growth; second is metadata indexing and S3 API capabilities that allow us to access the data from one source."
"Scality RING is more stable and performs better than before; we don't experience issues from mechanical failures, only from human intervention."
"Another feature I like is the life cycle management that helps me with data storage efficiency."
"The best functionality in Scality RING is the ability to handle three interfaces over a single infrastructure: S3, NFS, and SMB."
"Scality RING has influenced our approach to scaling in different dimensions by providing a cost-effective solution for the tremendous amount of data we generate every day for each customer. It allows us to store, sort, and analyze data effectively while meeting our performance thresholds."
"The best functionality of Scality RING is its ease of administration; it is out of the box and was set up for us in collaboration with Scality and HP."
"The most valuable feature of Scality RING8 is its performance and good interface."
"We have virtually zero data loss thanks to this resilience."
 

Cons

"There are many features which need to be added, particularly on the replication side."
"In the next release, I would like to see file-level encryption."
"We haven't seen ROI."
"In the next release of the solution I would like to see Vormetric native block encryption."
"It doesn’t provide enough information on performance analytics. For example, Nimble Storage has Infosight, which provides data; Pure Storage doesn’t have an equivalent."
"There are a lot of things to improve."
"As partners, we should have the option to download the software, rather than have to go back through Pure to obtain it."
"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."
"I already discussed possible improvements with some of the guys from Hearnsley. One of our frustrations is when you go to expand volumes in a global mirror environment, you have to stop everything in order to expand. So that's one of the things."
"One very important feature is the analysis of the logs which should be there in the system."
"Technical support is sometimes good and sometimes it is low."
"It even has a component, which I would say is a bit lacklustre."
"Technical support can be improved in terms of the knowledge base for the first level of support. We have to reach the second level to receive good support."
"Adding features for data deduplication is one area of improvement."
"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."
"Anything which improves performance and the ability of our systems would be a nice."
"What we are currently missing and will be demanding in the new tender is an additional external backup of all data, ideally on a simple system, to safeguard against any severe local incidents so that we still have the data protected elsewhere."
"When we used this solution in 2015, it was not scalable at all. I don't know if they have improved on that, but at the time, scalability was just horrible."
"Scality RING is not easy to learn for someone new. It is a little bit difficult. There are a lot of components to it, and you also need to understand them to work with it effectively."
"I typically have at least three different views with three user interfaces open when I work on something. I find it quite complicated at times."
"They should prioritize quality over timeliness to minimize customer disruptions and not force customers into a cycle of fixes that interfere with daily work."
"Sometimes we need to restart components, including metadata, so it is not just plug and play; day-to-day attention is necessary, but we can leverage vendor-provided monitoring tools, including dashboards to identify potential issues, allowing us to help manage overhead as much as possible."
"While Scality claims to be 100% compatible with Amazon S3, it seems this isn't entirely true; there are instances where specific backup tools require S3 to create checksums over written backups, which Scality does not support, unlike Amazon S3."
"There are too many changes because it's software-defined storage and host-based. They should reduce the number of patches and enhance product reliability and stability. When releasing new versions, they should perform thorough quality checks instead of flooding us with patches."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It's expensive, but you get what you pay for."
"I would rate it a seven out of ten for pricing. It could be improved."
"The price of Pure Storage FlashArray is expensive."
"We implemented Pure Storage FlashArray nine years ago when it was new to the market and obtained it at a preferential price."
"Cost-wise, it's been very effective."
"There should be quite a bit of reduction of TCO with just licensing (and stuff) because we run the VM environment off it."
"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 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."
"This solution came as an additional cost for the TSM package we chose."
"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."
"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."
"We would like the CPU cycle to save more on the licensing costs for us."
"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."
"Do a proof of concept, if you are not comfortable jumping in, but do it."
"The cost of Scality RING8 could be less expensive. It is difficult for smaller businesses to afford it."
"The initial cost (CAPEX) to set up the infrastructure is expensive due to the specific hardware required."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Construction Company
9%
Outsourcing Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Construction Company
10%
Performing Arts
10%
Construction Company
10%
Government
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
9%
 

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 Business11
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise31
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise12
 

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 find the pricing of Everpure FlashArray to be quite high compared to other storage solutions; however, the reliabil...
What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashArray?
I believe we have covered the most important features; the architecture of Pure Storage is essential, and features su...
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 ...
What needs improvement with Scality RING8?
Scality RING has room for improvement, particularly in having a supervisor external to Scality RING, which is key for...
What is your primary use case for Scality RING8?
Scality RING is used exclusively for S3 object storage. Scality RING is an alternative to Amazon S3, allowing custome...
What advice do you have for others considering Scality RING8?
I assess the simplicity of managing large volumes of data with Scality RING's interface as feasible, but it requires ...
 

Also Known As

Pure Storage FlashArray
No data available
Scality RING, RING8
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Nielsen, Lamar Advertising, LinkedIn, Betfair, UT-Dallas
Pelephone, Sprint IT Enterprise Services
Comcast, TimeWarner Cable, EuroSport, Orange, Deluxe, DailtMotion, SFR, RTL, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Telstra
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM Spectrum Virtualize vs. Scality RING and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
913,683 professionals have used our research since 2012.