We performed a comparison between IBM Spectrum Virtualize and StarWind Virtual SAN based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Software Defined Storage (SDS) solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."We can failover easily, because a lot of our data is replicated from family to the second replication."
"I like all the features, but the most impressive recently has been the introduction of IBM's Flash Core Modules. They are a form of a flash drive, but they have many more features."
"Using SBC, a valuable feature is the mirroring, which is the virtualization of the disk between disparate places."
"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."
"There are many benefits to this solution. Storage virtualization and the ability to migrate massive amounts of data to other systems without impacting your client are the most valuable. It is non-disruptive for my users. We migrated 350 terabytes of data in one night to a new machine without a small system going down and a single user complaining about the performance. You have to fine-tune a lot of storage machines constantly for performance and for making sure that they are optimal, but IBM Spectrum Virtualize does this by itself. It does the adjustment on its own, and it does it right. That's what makes it different. I had a huge VSP from Hitachi, which is also a type of virtualization-based engine but with a decent size. It was a continuous performance-tuning exercise. I never had that issue with IBM Spectrum Virtualize."
"It's got full features, so we can compress volumes. We can do thin volumes and we can change them on the fly."
"The most valuable feature is its reliability."
"The ability to add the virtual machine on the Spectrum environment to sort out the data movers(DMs) and their schedules is a valuable feature. You are able to have, for example, four data movers to balance them so you do not have too much work on one data mover."
"The ease of reaching the support team and their promptness for support is great."
"StarWind allowed us to deploy highly available shared storage within our budget."
"This solution made it possible to deploy a new infrastructure in the shortest amount of time, at a low cost without purchasing expensive hardware storage, and use unused servers."
"We have been able to use more on-prem hardware to reduce cost and also use old disks that we do not trust enough for ordinary RAID or usage."
"We went from "no way DB applications would have good performance" to "Wow! We can now actually have a DB running and have some VMs running at the same time.""
"The performance of the solution is accurate and concise."
"We are able to do maintenance by bringing down one node at a time, rather than having to schedule a complete shutdown."
"Training is also easy as it is just one system to learn."
"The only errors I find sometimes is the solution tells me I cannot operate it because a service has turned off, you can just go back to the VM, go to services, and turn back the services. However, this should improve."
"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."
"I would like to see more baseline replication and integration with the operating system between Vmware and IBMI."
"Level 1 technical support needs improvement."
"The Storwize port is not so stable."
"The disk reliability is not that good."
"The integration would be an option that we would like, but I understand that's not how it's going to be implemented."
"NBME support and support for a higher Fibre Channel lengths could be improved, but those are already on the roadmap."
"The documentation could be clearer in terms of explaining the installation."
"I would like to see more monitoring and alert tools."
"A web management interface would be good, especially for those coming from other solutions that have one."
"The cluster configuration is time-consuming and tedious."
"Server-side snapshots are one thing the Linux appliance can't do yet."
"I want to suggest that the complexity of the startup and shutdown procedure needs to be reduced."
"Ongoing improvements in read and write performance would help meet increasingly demanding workloads."
"A central management console may be nice to see all nodes."
IBM Spectrum Virtualize is ranked 14th in Software Defined Storage (SDS) with 35 reviews while StarWind Virtual SAN is ranked 1st in Software Defined Storage (SDS) with 183 reviews. IBM Spectrum Virtualize is rated 8.8, while StarWind Virtual SAN is rated 9.6. The top reviewer of IBM Spectrum Virtualize writes "Robust, stable, with good performance, and easy to implement". On the other hand, the top reviewer of StarWind Virtual SAN writes "Excellent support, great performance, and good redundancy". IBM Spectrum Virtualize is most compared with Dell VPLEX, VMware vSAN, VxRail, IBM Spectrum Scale and DataCore SANsymphony, whereas StarWind Virtual SAN is most compared with VMware vSAN, StorMagic SvSAN, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, Red Hat Ceph Storage and DataCore SANsymphony. See our IBM Spectrum Virtualize vs. StarWind Virtual SAN report.
See our list of best Software Defined Storage (SDS) vendors.
We monitor all Software Defined Storage (SDS) reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
