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HPE StoreVirtual vs IBM Spectrum Virtualize comparison

 

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

HPE StoreVirtual
Ranking in Software Defined Storage (SDS)
19th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
50
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
IBM Spectrum Virtualize
Ranking in Software Defined Storage (SDS)
12th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
37
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2025, in the Software Defined Storage (SDS) category, the mindshare of HPE StoreVirtual is 1.2%, down from 2.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Spectrum Virtualize is 1.6%, down from 2.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Software Defined Storage (SDS)
 

Featured Reviews

Vebjorn Nergaard - PeerSpot reviewer
Reliable with helpful support and good replication
The setup is okay, however, it comes with a moderate amount of difficulty. If you are new to the product, it is difficult. You do get used to the process over time and it gets easier. A company just needs one person to maintain the solution as it just runs. You don't need any support staff. It's very, very hands-off except when you do updates. The product is living its own life.
EdwinVan Halm - PeerSpot reviewer
Enterprise product that delivers high performance features
The primary use case is high availability and disaster recovery. They use it as an active-active cluster located in two physical locations for quick recovery using immutable snapshots The quick restore, the low latency, and the ease of use are some of the most valuable features. The product is…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"StoreVirtual is that it is our software-defined solution and it's everywhere."
"It allows compute and storage to operate separately, and has the ability to take SAN nodes out of production for maintenance with little effort and zero downtime."
"The solution is quite stable. We haven't had any issues with glitches or bugs."
"All of the administrative tasks are easy and everything is centralized."
"The initial setup is straightforward, not a complex procedure."
"The network RAID feature gives us maximum availability, since we cannot afford any downtime, even for a second."
"The solution's most valuable aspect is that it is hardware independent."
"Simplicity of not having to buy FC or FCoE SAN. Instead, we buy servers with their own storage."
"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."
"We can failover easily, because a lot of our data is replicated from family to the second replication."
"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."
"Using SBC, a valuable feature is the mirroring, which is the virtualization of the disk between disparate places."
"We acquire companies (and things), so we end up with odd hardware. We bring it behind the SVC and it allows us to migrate stuff off of it seamlessly. SVC can also cover up a host of defects of the underlying storage."
"Although the GUI from the XIV was used (in my view), IBM has polished and refined the GUI providing a pleasant and easy to navigate GUI experience."
"Migration from configurations where servers have storage provisioned from older SAN disk systems to newer storage systems is almost seamless using image mode migration techniques, with only a short outage of the servers."
"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."
 

Cons

"The penalty for the availability is performance. So, you have to balance or choose between the availability and the performance."
"it would nice to have deduplication or compression, things that you have in some of the higher end products."
"In our country, Qatar, most of the industry isn't using too much HP. StoreVirtual doesn't move fast. It's not a popular product."
"Hardware and disk failures are happening frequently."
"User interface could be improved."
"Product looks like it is in the end of development."
"The product is coming to end-of-life in the next three years."
"f you're doing the 10Gb adapters, SFPs don't come with it, but it doesn't say that. It might say that somewhere else, but it's not clear."
"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 Storwize port is not so stable."
"I would like to see them provide a unified platform that offers block, file, and object-based protocol access."
"GUI should be developed in HTML5 as opposed to Java."
"The training program could be improved."
"Tighter integration with cloud storage might be useful as a target for a variety of use cases."
"For improvement considerations, I would probably say multiple sites."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"For our organization, I believe the cost is 16,000 Euros for a three-year license. It costs a bit more to do the maintenance on our servers as well. It's also on an HP ProLiant server and an organization will need to do the maintenance there also. I believe the price for that is around 2000 Euros a year."
"One of the key features about it is that when you buy either a VSA license or a StoreVirtual appliance, all your software's included."
"It costs less than $10,000 for one machine. If it costs more than 15% higher than this, then the customer may change to another solution."
"Licensing is not exactly straightforward, but not the worst I have ever seen."
"The prices are OK, so we don't have much difficulty selling HPE in Brazil."
"If you buy a five-year license, not only does the technical support expire after five years, but you also lose the ability to change and expand the VSA, and the systems won't go down."
"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."
"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."
"I think it is a good value for the price."
"The entry point of pricing for this product is the most amazing price ever in the industry."
"It has a lot of advanced functions for a reasonable price."
"We would like the CPU cycle to save more on the licensing costs for us."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
25%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
9%
Computer Software Company
20%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Government
10%
Real Estate/Law Firm
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IBM Spectrum Virtualize?
I have no idea of the pricing as I am not part of the sales team. However, the product is a little bit more expensive due to the high-end enterprise features it offers.
What needs improvement with IBM Spectrum Virtualize?
The training program could be improved. It would be beneficial to have a lab environment to train myself before implementing it at a customer's location.
What is your primary use case for IBM Spectrum Virtualize?
The primary use case is high availability and disaster recovery. They use it as an active-active cluster located in two physical locations for quick recovery using immutable snapshots.
 

Also Known As

HPE StoreVirtual, HPE VSA
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

NBrIX, WIND Telecom, Netrics
Pelephone, Sprint IT Enterprise Services
Find out what your peers are saying about HPE StoreVirtual vs. IBM Spectrum Virtualize and other solutions. Updated: February 2025.
838,713 professionals have used our research since 2012.