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IBM Spectrum Virtualize vs VxRail comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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

IBM Spectrum Virtualize
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
36
Ranking in other categories
Software Defined Storage (SDS) (12th)
VxRail
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
130
Ranking in other categories
HCI (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

IBM Spectrum Virtualize and VxRail aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. IBM Spectrum Virtualize is designed for Software Defined Storage (SDS) and holds a mindshare of 1.6%, down 2.2% compared to last year.
VxRail, on the other hand, focuses on HCI, holds 20.8% mindshare, down 21.3% since last year.
Software Defined Storage (SDS)
HCI
 

Featured Reviews

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…
Rami Jadallah - PeerSpot reviewer
Streamline management and integration with seamless upgrades
The primary reasons customers choose VxRail include ease of management, ease of upgrades, and integration with VMware. The hyper-converged infrastructure simplifies software and hardware upgrades. Customers prefer the single pane of glass management and integration with VMware, which makes it easier for them to proceed with decisions involving VMware products.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The scalability is very good. It can handle anywhere from very small to large enterprise class."
"It has the ability to seamlessly move hardware in and out as we refresh technology."
"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."
"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 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."
"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."
"It's got full features, so we can compress volumes. We can do thin volumes and we can change them on the fly."
"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 major advantage is the blueprint. You do not need to separately manage the sand or network part because it all gets virtualized."
"The most valuable feature of VxRail is the VxRail Manager, which centralizes resources like storage built with vSAN."
"VxRail's integration with VMware environments is very good. Our VxRail is built on VMware, and the integration is seamless. We haven't faced any challenges. We can migrate VMs between servers in real-time and replicate them to our DR site without any problems."
"Compared with other products, the IT administrator or IT integrator doesn't take much time to get the tool up and running."
"It supports VDI deployment, enabling easy use for running different platforms in similar environments."
"It is the most valuable Software Defined Storage ever to manage all storage workloads, and also offers high availability."
"Initial setup is straightforward, as everything is pre-installed."
"The manageability for controlling the console is the most valuable feature."
 

Cons

"For improvement considerations, I would probably say multiple sites."
"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."
"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."
"The disk reliability is not that good."
"Anything which improves performance and the ability of our systems would be a nice."
"Tighter integration with cloud storage might be useful as a target for a variety of use cases."
"They are actually working on one bug we found, which was with flash restore. This was the user interface design for virtual environments."
"The integration would be an option that we would like, but I understand that's not how it's going to be implemented."
"The price should come down a little bit. It has become better than it was at the beginning. There was a really big price difference between a hyper-converged infrastructure and the classic servers and storage. The gap is lessening, however, it's still there."
"The way that the VxRail is licensed could be improved."
"It could be improved by having more information on the integration portion of ACI."
"I would like to see integration with vCenter if possible."
"We spend around six months waiting for a confirmation and firmware upgrade to confirm this step."
"They should have better compatibility with other processors, such as AMD processors."
"VxRail is a closed system with an out-of-the -box solution approach, it has basic 3 layers, Hardware, Network, Storage, Software, (Virtualizing) Applications. Release notes and improvement tips, patches from the back office, the business units, should be frequent and up to the patches which are coming from different vendors as far as the operating system application and also the technology itself is concerned."
"VxRail could be easier to set up. It's tricky to configure the network properly and match the requirements."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"It has a lot of advanced functions for a reasonable price."
"The entry point of pricing for this product is the most amazing price ever in the industry."
"Do a proof of concept, if you are not comfortable jumping in, but do it."
"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."
"This solution came as an additional cost for the TSM package we chose."
"We would like the CPU cycle to save more on the licensing costs for us."
"I think it is a good value for the price."
"This is an expensive product and that should be considered a point to be improved."
"The hardware cost associated is a bit high"
"We pay for annual support from VxRail."
"VxRail is quite expensive and could be cheaper. I would say that the main difference between VxRail and the competition is cost. There may be some differences in features, but I would say that it's mainly the costs."
"The VMware licenses are included and we do not have to worry about the license, everything is integrated."
"We were expecting Dell EMC to bring us something that would work very quickly and easily, but also be at a reasonable price point, and they did."
"The price is rather on the high side."
"Though somewhat expensive. But in terms of performance and stability, it's worth it."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
21%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Government
8%
Real Estate/Law Firm
7%
Computer Software Company
15%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Government
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

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.
How does HPE Nimble Storage compare to VxRail?
HPE Nimble Storage dHCI Vs. VxRail One of the best things about the HPE Nimble Storage dHCI is the three, two, one, zero rule. That means I need three copies of my data on two different types of me...
What Is The Biggest Difference Between vSAN And VxRail?
While both run on the vSAN technology from VMware, vSAN needs to be deployed on vSAN ready nodes while VxRail is an engineered system. The choice to choose which technology depends on two major fac...
What are the major differences between VxRail and Dell EMC PowerFlex?
VxRail vs. Dell EMC PowerFlex VxRail provides stable solutions for technical problems while at the same time not being too expensive for a company to invest in. Even if the user is working with a l...
 

Also Known As

No data available
VCE VxRail
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Pelephone, Sprint IT Enterprise Services
World Wide Technology Inc, Renault Sport Formula One Team, 8x8 Inc, Brownes, Canadian Pacific, Canopy, Denton, EDF, Unilin, Xerox
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