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

IBM Spectrum Virtualize vs StorPool comparison

Sponsored
 

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
7.2
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) (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

"All our junior partners can administer the storage arrays. It is simple and easy to use. We don't have to dedicate a whole team of full time people to work on it."
"The pricing of the product is very competitive to others in the market for Flash and NVMe storage, and from an ROI standpoint, if you consider compression and de-duplication and all that, you get a pretty good ratio."
"Now with Pure Storage, our developers work a lot faster and more efficiently which has definitely improved our productivity."
"The deduplication in the array combined with its snap technologies allows the product to be remotely/manually controlled or scheduled."
"Pure Storage FlashArray simplifies maintenance and management with its intuitive GUI, making storage allocation and other processes easy to understand, even for beginners."
"It solved many problems and provided unexpected features that improved our business execution, making us more agile internally."
"FlashArray has many valuable features. It's very user-friendly and it has high availability, so there is comparatively less downtime. During maintenance, there is no shutdown procedure, so you can directly power off the Array and manage the shutdown process without any data loss, which is a unique feature. Managing replication and data migration is also very easy."
"Having fast storage allows actual servers to perform in high capacity so we don't have slowdowns on our applications."
"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."
"We can failover easily, because a lot of our data is replicated from family to the second replication."
"Across the industry, nobody matches it."
"It provides transparency, because of its advanced copy features."
"Stability has been outstanding."
"Storage virtualization and the ability to migrate massive amounts of data to other systems without impacting your client are the most valuable."
"The most valuable feature for sure is the abstraction of the 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."
"Storpool replaced our old storage system; it is extremely fast and reliable, which has translated to exceptional performance for our customers."
"We would recommend StorPool without reservation."
"The speed of the storage solution also allows us to provide service to applications that are ​very I/O ​intensive."
"Performance, redundancy, scalability and cost-effectiveness. StorPool delivers superbly in all of these areas."
"Creating snapshots within seconds for big disks has helped our different migration projects since it allows us to perform them in a short period of time."
"The team behind it was very engaged and had the skills and ability to support a service provider."
"StorPool’s team has deep understanding about technology and help us tune our system, consult for further vHost.vn growth, and coach our System Engineering to a higher level with more information about tech in this industry."
"We are very happy with StorPool, performance is impressive and expansion is as simple as adding an additional node."
 

Cons

"The price of the Pure Storage Flash Array is too high and there needs to be more contract clarity."
"Pure Storage support could be a little better."
"The only time that we had problems with it was that there was a bug in the VVol implementation but, outside of that, it has been flawless."
"I would like to have an easy way to determine the cost per VM so that I can present a solution to our customers."
"The product should improve its response time. I have also encountered issues with its configuration."
"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 see them lower the costs."
"Reports of performance and LUN utilization could be improved."
"Technical support at IBM is actually not as great as it used to be. It seems like IBM has decreased the number of people who can support this environment."
"There are big arrays now, and if a customer wants add more disks to it, you have to have another array. Adding disks to existing arrays is one of the most demanded things from our customers."
"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."
"Anything which improves performance and the ability of our systems would be a nice."
"We've had some issues with the production rate behind SVC."
"There are some caveats with scalability, such as volume count. We are highly limited by volume count at this point in time."
"The integration would be an option that we would like, but I understand that's not how it's going to be implemented."
"The training program could be improved."
"Live and historical performance statistics would be useful, though my understanding is that this is on the way in a future release."
"Monitoring and statistics UI is a bit clumsy, although StorPool is currently working on a new version."
"Support for VMware is with iSCSI at this point."
"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."
"At times we need to check the disks and do some minor operations. A friendlier user interface would be useful in such cases."
"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."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"They have a standardized fee; it's been the same price for 10 years straight. I am happy with the price — I think it's good."
"I have had a couple of customers who have complained about the cost. It can be a little more expensive than some of the other platforms. After it has been installed, I have never had a customer say, "I wish we wouldn't have spent all that extra money." They have always been happy with the product after it has been installed. They might be on the fence about it because of the price, but everybody who I have ever seen install it, they are always happy with it."
"The pricing is very attractive and it delivers performance for the money."
"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 pricing is reasonable."
"Because the price is a bit higher than other products, the data reduction equalizes the price with amount of the data reduction."
"It is a cheaper solution."
"It is light years beyond anything else with the same price point."
"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 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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Software Defined Storage (SDS) solutions are best for your needs.
900,747 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

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

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 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?
I have knowledge about the licensing part, which we obtained for around 10 years from the time of deployment, but I d...
What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashArray?
When it comes to Everpure FlashArray ports shown in the GUI, it would be better if, when one of the Pure array ports ...
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
No data available
 

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: June 2026.
900,747 professionals have used our research since 2012.