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Dell VPLEX vs IBM Spectrum Virtualize comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary
 

Categories and Ranking

Dell VPLEX
Average Rating
8.2
Number of Reviews
18
Ranking in other categories
Storage Management (1st)
IBM Spectrum Virtualize
Average Rating
8.8
Number of Reviews
35
Ranking in other categories
Software Defined Storage (SDS) (20th)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Storage Management and Software solutions, they serve different purposes. Dell VPLEX is designed for Storage Management and holds a mindshare of 8.2%, up 7.3% compared to last year.
IBM Spectrum Virtualize, on the other hand, focuses on Software Defined Storage (SDS), holds 1.8% mindshare, down 2.2% since last year.
Storage Management
Software Defined Storage (SDS)
 

Featured Reviews

Sayed Zuber - PeerSpot reviewer
It's an excellent solution for data mobility and disaster recovery, but the CLI can be difficult for beginners
Dell VPLEX currently requires Flash Player to access the GUI. It would be better to have a web-based HTML management interface. The encryption could also be improved. When the host writes data, it goes from VPLEX back to the physical storage. The physical storage device will do encryption or use an algorithm called Data Address Encryption. If there are vulnerabilities between the host and the storage device, you can lose your data. I suggest encrypting the data before it is sent from the host to the storage. I would also recommend using the NVM protocol in VPLEX. It still has Flash Player and a local SATA disk built into the Flash Player. You need to Flash the disk to SAS and then SATA. The NVM protocol is better.
Nicolae Chirea - PeerSpot reviewer
Robust, stable, with good performance, and easy to implement
The primary use case with IBM Spectrum Virtualize for us is in relationship to databases I like that it can virtualize more than three hundred storage providers. I enjoy the performance, replication, and compression. I value all of the features. I would like to see three-side support. When we do…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The solution works well. It's very reliable."
"The best feature of VPLEX storage is its ability to consolidate storage. It also provides the highest RPO and RTOs for replication technology. VPLEX enables application mobility."
"Its mirroring capabilities allow for data to be mirrored across two different data centers, so if one center were to crash or fail, the other center could take over and keep everything running smoothly."
"Mobility enables us to carry out an internal migration of data."
"The most valuable feature is deduplication, as we have no duplication in the snapshots."
"Storage virtualization and geographic resilience for Metro Sans, plus a great performance improvement."
"The capacity to migrate machines onto VPLEX is great — it's very clean. We can migrate machines and add arrays easily."
"Dell's technical support is awesome. We received instant support from EMC as long as we had an active contract."
"The abstraction flair and the abstraction layer. We had a mixture of different storage arrays, and the wonderful thing about SVC is is that it normalizes all it into a single driver. A single view that all hosts see simultaneously."
"The scalability is very good. It can handle anywhere from very small to large enterprise class."
"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."
"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."
"I like that it can virtualize more than three hundred storage providers."
"It lowers cost. It does so by getting more efficient use out of the technology behind it."
"It has the ability to seamlessly move hardware in and out as we refresh technology."
"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."
 

Cons

"Dell VPLEX should improve its integration and user interface and be easier to configure."
"There can be delays in getting performance reports."
"I would like to have site-to-site replication capability for applications."
"The initial setup is complex."
"VPLEX's engine-based architecture is complex, so the implementation is challenging and takes more time. It's also difficult to fix hardware issues. When an appliance fails, it takes Dell EMC a long time to fix it because spare parts are in short supply."
"With Dell VPLEX, there are some bugs with Broadcom."
"The price is a problem with EMC due to the fact that it's more expensive than the other vendors."
"VPLEX hardware migration to spare equipment in case of major disruption."
"I hate I/O groups. If you start swapping I/O groups, they can be potentially risky. If they could get rid of the whole I/O group principle, the risk is not there anymore. I understand the fundamental thing about I/O groups, but they are risky."
"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."
"Anything which improves performance and the ability of our systems would be a nice."
"Adding features for data deduplication is one area of improvement."
"t is limited in terms of a single system to eight nodes or four, what they call IO groups."
"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."
"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."
"Level 1 technical support needs improvement."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We struck a great deal with Dell EMC, so for us, VPLEX was not very expensive."
"VPLEX is a little bit expensive in my personal opinion."
"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 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."
"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."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
23%
Government
12%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Computer Software Company
23%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Government
9%
Real Estate/Law Firm
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Dell VPLEX?
Dell's technical support is awesome. We received instant support from EMC as long as we had an active contract.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Dell VPLEX?
This is an enterprise solution so licensing costs are generally on the higher side. There will be additional costs if you want to do a network cluster for business servers.
What needs improvement with Dell VPLEX?
Dell VPLEX should improve its integration and user interface and be easier to configure. Any EMX product, be it PowerMax, VMAX, or DMAX, works based on the CLI. A person has to be very good at runn...
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Sample Customers

Kindred Healthcare, Regis Aged Care, WeBank SpA, Panduit, Munson Healthcare
Pelephone, Sprint IT Enterprise Services
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, NetApp, Broadcom and others in Storage Management. Updated: November 2024.
816,636 professionals have used our research since 2012.