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IBM Spectrum Scale vs NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP comparison

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Executive Summary

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 Scale
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
14
Ranking in other categories
Software Defined Storage (SDS) (10th), Cloud Software Defined Storage (1st)
NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
64
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Migration (3rd), Cloud Storage (9th), Cloud Backup (27th), Public Cloud Storage Services (11th), Cloud Software Defined Storage (2nd)
 

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.
Sachin Prakash - PeerSpot reviewer
Assistant Consultant at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Has optimized performance using cluster deployment and distributed file access but needs better visibility into network dependencies
IBM Spectrum Scale being software-based storage allows users to utilize any hardware supported or defined by IBM without dependency on physical hardware provided by IBM. This is one of the features I appreciate most because if you have existing infrastructure at your site but don't want to reinvest in hardware, you can purchase IBM Spectrum Scale software and deploy it as software-defined storage. Users can comfortably access data from their host to the storage host without relying on new network setup when deploying GPFS as it uses the existing corporate network. However, high-speed ethernet network is required. By adding switches to the same network where client hosts reside and deploying GPFS storage array, any file system created on the storage cluster can grant export permissions determining which hosts can access specific file systems. These hosts can directly mount them as remote file systems. The process is simpler compared to defining IQN for providing access to client hosts. Creating a cluster for clients with virtual machines or physical Linux/Windows machines requires installing GPFS services on client nodes, which creates a client cluster. Access is defined on the storage cluster for the particular client cluster, allowing all hosts in that client cluster to mount file systems with granted permissions.
SB
Principal Consultant at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
Offers performance control and cloud integration while supporting data management with granular flexibility
The scalability of NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP is interesting. We have thought about it, but we haven't used it. I think the scalability is something you scale up rather than respond to peak demand. It wouldn't help with outages either; the scaling is manual, and there are no processes we've used to automate that for unexpected scenarios. We like the scalability; it's enough for what we're planning to use, but we haven't used any advanced features. The standard platform is NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP, which is their cloud service. In fact, that's probably the most experience I have with NetApp. I've experienced it on-premise, but kind of secondhand.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The initial setup was straightforward in the way that it was a database vacuum storage."
"Overall, I am sure that Everpure FlashArray is the best option on the market."
"This is the best all-flash storage array on the market."
"The solution is easy to scale. I'm running two environments right now, so I need to scale. I'm running a part technology. I've got an A-side and a B-side."
"The most valuable feature of Pure Storage FlashArray is the complete set of functions it provides."
"The dashboard is nice. It is easy to manage compared to other storage solutions such as Dell EMC."
"Technical support has been amazing."
"I cannot imagine my workflow without Everpure FlashArray because I do not have any other type of storage in use."
"GPFS monitoring is the best feature."
"I would rate my overall experience with IBM Spectrum Scale as nine out of ten."
"I find IBM Spectrum Scale to be an excellent product known for its fast parallel file system."
"It is incredibly scalable and stable."
"It is incredibly scalable; you can add more storage to it, add more file sets, and add it to more servers, making it a robust product that should be able to expand with us."
"It is a scalable solution."
"Its great servicing high availability. That is what it is used for."
"It makes our file system sharing a lot easier, even across different continents. We have had file systems shared across different continents with no performance degradation."
"The storage tiering is definitely the most valuable feature... With respect to tiering, the inactive data is pushed to a lower tier where the storage cost is cheap, but the access cost is high."
"By implementing Cloud Volumes ONTAP in the Azure portal, we eliminated the cost of additional hardware and everything you have to maintain on-prem in a physical environment and put it up to the cloud."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is that it makes our data readily available and we don't have to go through a lot of trouble to access it."
"ONTAP made us less reliant on in-house hardware."
"The most valuable features are the ease of management, the deduplication, storage optimization, SnapMirror, it has flexible in testing for different scenarios, rapid deployment of the test environments, and rapid recovery."
"The most valuable features are tiering to S3 and being able to turn it on and off, based on a schedule."
"This solution has helped us because it is easy to use."
"The most valuable feature is its exceptional performance and storage efficiency."
 

Cons

"There is not a great need for improvement, but better pricing could be beneficial."
"As long as they always improve on IOPS speed, that's all we're really looking for. The faster the storage can be the more we can do speed of application and speed of use."
"It would be nice to have a better view of the allocated capacity on their Platform as a Service solution because we have to do some manual calculations to understand how much we are going to pay every month to use the storage that is allocated."
"It would be nice if Pure had something in its portfolio that provided higher deduplication and compression for backups."
"During heavy load situations with 100K IOPS on one specific port, it requires more granularity level for distribution."
"The price of this solution is high and should be lowered."
"Pure Storage FlashArray could improve in the area of cryptographic information in the consoles. The user-friendliness could improve. The Pure Storage FlashArray team should come and log into the system with their maintenance credentials and then pull out the information as evidence of cryptography."
"The initial setup of the product is complex."
"Initially, stability was a concern as we encountered numerous issues and errors."
"Making it a little easier to add bad file sets would help. There is a transition to how you add storage and how you add a file set, so making that a little smoother would probably be my recommendation."
"This is probably the biggest challenge, getting everything upgraded, because it just takes time. We wish it was a faster solution to be able to do everything at once, but you have do each node individually. The more nodes, the longer it takes."
"We do have some issues where Spectrum Scale does not work as expected. We have seen our Spectrum Scale servers go down unexpectedly, but because we have a cluster, it does not take out the entire organization."
"We do not feel as a company that the product can grow with us anymore, so we are not going to use it anymore."
"There is room for improvement in the web interface. There could be more information available, such as charts and graphs to monitor performance."
"The initial setup is complex, especially if trying to avoid erasure coding, as it requires more discs. Avoiding erasure coding can significantly increase costs."
"There can be improvements in fault tolerance and making erasure coding faster."
"There is room for improvement in tier one support, especially with potential language barriers and communication challenges."
"The product is more restricted with underlying cloud."
"When Azure does their maintenance, they do maintenance on one node at a time. With the two nodes of the CVO, it can automatically fail over from one node to the node that is staying up. And when the first node comes back online, it will fail back to the first node. We have had issues with everything failing back 100 percent correctly."
"The solution could be better when we're connecting to our S3 side of the house. Right now, it doesn't see it, and I'm not sure why."
"NetApp's support could improve"
"The dashboard is a little bit clunky. I like to see it a little bit more on the simplistic side. I would like to be able to create my own widgets and customize what I want to see a little bit more versus what is currently there. That would be helpful so that when I log in, I go straight to my widget or my board without going to multiple places to get to what I need to find or build."
"The integration wizard requires a bit of streamlining. There are small things that misconfigure or repeat the deployment that will create errors, specifically in Azure."
"Something we would like to see is the ability to better manage the setup and tie it to our configuration management database. We manage our whole IT infrastructure out of that database."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Our Evergreen Storage subscription is supposed to be good when we go to upgrade."
"In the beginning, we saw that the price is not very good. When we made some compilations about the deduplication and the compression and what the equipment does, including the differentiation of upper management of the storage, the price was not so bad. However, in the beginning, the price was very difficult to justify."
"There are no licensing fees aside from the support."
"The cost was initially high, but once more people were using it, the costs came down. This was because the University was reselling it to other departments."
"The guaranty that Pure Storage provides when you purchase it doesn't meet the overall capacity needs to provide extra storage, if needed. Thus, it is not meeting our expectations."
"When you are paying more than you were paying for the storage space, you'd like the cost to be less. If they could get into the spinning disk kind of cost, that would be it."
"The best features come included without any additional cost."
"It is a cheaper solution."
"The solution is costly but reliable."
"The licensing model is complex and depends on factors such as the number of processing cores and the amount of storage."
"The licensing is based on the number of terabytes."
"The cost is quite high."
"Our licensing costs are folded into the hardware purchases and I have never differentiated between the two."
"The pricing of this solution is definitely higher than what the typical Azure Files and AWS solutions charge, but given the features and the stability NetApp has provided, we are okay with it. We are not complaining about the pricing."
"It is expensive. There are no costs in addition to their standard licensing fees."
"For enterprise customers, it's a very cost effective. But in the SMB segment, yeah, pricing is a little bit challenge for your time."
"Overall, the pricing of NetApp is aggressive and the pricing becomes more aggressive as the amount of data increases. The cost for a given volume of data that you are storing becomes lower. The greater the volume of data, the cheaper the license."
"It is not a cheap solution because we need to pay for the license and pay for Azure resources as well."
"Make sure you investigate what your requirements are going to cost you using the native cloud solutions versus what NetApp is going to cost you, to make sure you have a business case to go with NetApp."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Construction Company
9%
Outsourcing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Construction Company
7%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Government
6%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Construction Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Computer Software Company
6%
 

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 Business6
Large Enterprise8
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise11
Large Enterprise53
 

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 find the pricing of Everpure FlashArray to be quite high compared to other storage solutions; however, the reliabil...
What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashArray?
I believe we have covered the most important features; the architecture of Pure Storage is essential, and features su...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IBM Spectrum Scale?
IBM Spectrum Scale functions as software-based storage, allowing users to utilize any hardware supported or defined b...
What needs improvement with IBM Spectrum Scale?
The system relies heavily on ethernet networking, and when issues occur, we must consult with the network team to inv...
What is your primary use case for IBM Spectrum Scale?
My personal use of this product is for parallel writing or reading files.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP?
NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP is actually quite reasonable in price compared to other native cloud storage options. For ...
What needs improvement with NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP?
It would be nice to see technology supporting the Elastic Fabric Adapter on Amazon AWS, therefore getting RDMA techno...
What is your primary use case for NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP?
I use NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP mostly in customer companies.
 

Also Known As

Pure Storage FlashArray
No data available
ONTAP Cloud, CVO, NetApp CVO
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Nielsen, Lamar Advertising, LinkedIn, Betfair, UT-Dallas
Information Not Available
1. Accenture 2. Acer 3. Adidas 4. Aetna 5. AIG 6. Apple 7. Bank of America 8. Barclays 9. Bayer 10. Berkshire Hathaway 11. BNP Paribas 12. Cisco 13. Coca-Cola 14. Comcast 15.ConocoPhillips 16. CVS Health 17. Dell 18. Deutsche Bank 19. eBay 20. Eli Lilly 21. FedEx 22. Ford 23. Freescale Semiconductor 24. General Electric 25. Google 26. Honeywell 27. IBM 28. Intel 29. Intuit 30. JPMorgan Chase 31. Kellogg's 32. KeyCorp 33. Liberty Mutual 34. L'Oréal 35. Mastercard
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM Spectrum Scale vs. NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
911,473 professionals have used our research since 2012.