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IBM Spectrum Virtualize 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
7.3
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)
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.
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.
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

"While all these products have their own uses, Pure Storage FlashArray is in a market of its own."
"If you're interested in using this solution, I recommend that you do the same — see if you like it."
"This solution has improved our organization in the way that we used to see latency but now with this solution we don't. It also has good performance. Latencies have come down for our performance in the SQL databases. We can put a lot more in a lot less in terms of space savings. We also save data center space have good deduplication."
"The most valuable features would be its performance, retrieval, recovery, and backup, and it meets the customer's expectations."
"This improves our organization because we can just set it up and we forget about it, everything works, and we do not need to worry about storage or bandwidth issues."
"The most valuable features in Pure Storage FlashArray are deduplication and active cluster."
"The solution is very reliable."
"Pure gives us better compression, it's easier to manage, a lot less hands-on."
"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 biggest benefits of IBM Spectrum Virtualize are its stability, data security, and customer support."
"I would recommend it, for sure, because it offers supportability, reliability, and some scalability, and the vendor is there as a partner."
"It is a single pane of glass management interface, so once the storage is allocated to SVC, they only have one place to go to manage it for everything."
"Don't go with EMC. Go with IBM. Go with this product. Absolutely. It's a very good product compared to the competitors."
"The IBM Spectrum Virtualize has gone from strength to strength but at the same time setting the bar for what's possible in the storage virtualization market."
"IBM offers excellent customer service."
"The versatility is the main benefit, since it virtualizes everything, they use it for so many different things."
"Using StorPool we had about 15% increase in our gross margin and that is huge for a service provider."
"Using StorPool we had about 15% increase in our gross margin and that is huge for a service provider."
"We would recommend StorPool without reservation, to anyone who needs what they offer."
"We are very happy and can finally say that the collaboration that we have had with StorPool has been excellent."
"We now have a high performance shared storage system which enables us to run on private cloud, giving us the best of both worlds, SSD-class performance with the flexibility of a private cloud system."
"With StorPool we were able to build live failover on top of our LXC infrastructure; this allows us both to live-migrate containers between compute nodes without any downtime and, in case of an entire node suffering any type of failure, we can bring all containers back online within a minute on a spare compute node."
"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

"FlashArray's capacity for forecasting should be improved because it needs to be a bit more current. I think it's bundled with the deduplication and other compression factors. We need more user interfaces for forecasting in this software and more interfaces need to be integrated with this array management tool."
"One thing I'd like to see in a future release is integration between their main storage array and what they call their FlashBlade product; to be able to snapshot directly from the primary array into multiple different backup copies on FlashBlade."
"Pure Storage FlashArray has not helped to decrease the total cost of ownership, and I believe our total cost has probably gone up, but that's balanced by our increased amount of data and number of use cases."
"The price should be lower."
"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."
"If we suddenly dump large amounts of data onto the storage system, it takes a while to process it."
"The latest release contains bugs that shouldn't be in a production environment. Two incidents impacted our client, including hardware-related bugs. They need to be more cautious in testing before they release."
"I would like to see them lower the costs."
"I would like to see more baseline replication and integration with the operating system between Vmware and IBMI."
"The case logging process is efficient, but resolving software problems takes too much time."
"Tighter integration with cloud storage might be useful as a target for a variety of use cases."
"Anything which improves performance and the ability of our systems would be a nice."
"I hate I/O groups. If you start swapping I/O groups, they can be potentially risky."
"The SVC port (virtualized port) is very stable, but the Storwize port is not so stable."
"We found a gap for smaller clients. Right now, the only offering is a huge, rack-sized storage device, and no more."
"It even has a component, which I would say is a bit lacklustre."
"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."
"Live and historical performance statistics would be useful, though my understanding is that this is on the way in a future release."
"Live and historical performance statistics would be useful, though my understanding is that this is on the way in a future release."
"At times we need to check the disks and do some minor operations. A friendlier user interface would be useful in such cases."
"Support for VMware is with iSCSI at this point."
"The only place we feel they could improve is the time it takes to bring new features to production."
"There are too many features that we don't know or use yet."
"Monitoring and statistics UI is a bit clumsy, although StorPool is currently working on a new version."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We have seen a reduction in total cost of ownership (TCO)."
"The price was slightly higher than others, but competitive, if you consider all the other features that you get from it."
"I would rate the pricing of Pure Storage FlashArray a five out of ten. It is expensive but not too much."
"Dell and Pure Storage offer competitive pricing, but Pure Storage might have a slight advantage."
"The price, in general, is around $100,000, however, I know it costs more."
"The Evergreen Storage subscription is great, because then I get new controllers every three years."
"We consume it as a service, and that's actually something we really like, or at least I really like from the technical perspective. That's because it means there is no hassle when we need to upgrade arrays to add capacity. We just interact directly with technical counterparts, and we say, "Hey, we're filling up," and they say, "All right, here's another data pack." They ship it in, and we install it. So, the as-a-service model has worked very well. Given the outstanding data reduction rates, it has improved our profitability because we're selling allocated volumes as part of the cloud service or recovering those costs from our tenants. It is very efficient, but that has offset the premium price. It started out that way, but over time, as we've added capacity, the price per gig has gone down a lot because we have a lot of it."
"We feel that the pricing is fair and the licensing process was easy for both."
"It has a lot of advanced functions for a reasonable price."
"I think it is a good value for the price."
"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."
"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."
"We would like the CPU cycle to save more on the licensing costs for us."
"The entry point of pricing for this product is the most amazing price ever in the industry."
"This solution came as an additional cost for the TSM package we chose."
"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 software is cost-effective and gives us a pricing advantage over our competitors."
"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
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%
Performing Arts
14%
Manufacturing Company
13%
Computer Software Company
13%
Comms Service Provider
8%
 

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
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?
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 ...
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Also Known As

Pure Storage FlashArray
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Overview

 

Sample Customers

Nielsen, Lamar Advertising, LinkedIn, Betfair, UT-Dallas
Pelephone, Sprint IT Enterprise Services
CloudSigma, Kualo, Togglebox, Neterra, Serveo, Superhosting.bg, GroupOne, DRFortress, Metanet, Dia, Server Storage Solutions
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM Spectrum Virtualize vs. StorPool and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
893,221 professionals have used our research since 2012.