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IBM Spectrum Virtualize vs VxRail comparison

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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

Everpure FlashArray
Sponsored
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
215
Ranking in other categories
All-Flash Storage (4th)
IBM Spectrum Virtualize
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
39
Ranking in other categories
Software Defined Storage (SDS) (13th)
VxRail
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
135
Ranking in other categories
HCI (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

Software Defined Storage (SDS) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
IBM Spectrum Virtualize2.7%
Red Hat Ceph Storage10.9%
DataCore SANsymphony6.5%
Other79.9%
Software Defined Storage (SDS)
HCI Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
VxRail10.6%
Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI)9.2%
VMware vSAN8.9%
Other71.30000000000001%
HCI
 

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.
AS
IT Specialist at Saudi Business Machines - SBM
Unified storage solution supports cross-vendor replication and diverse industries
One of the most valuable features of IBM Spectrum Virtualize is its virtualization capability. It allows for the creation of stretched clusters, which are crucial for running Linux-based workloads that need mirroring for boot disks. The solution also provides asynchronous and synchronous replication, supporting operations across different data centers. Its deployment options across public, private, and hybrid clouds add to its versatility.
Saleh Khalid - PeerSpot reviewer
computer scientist at Imam University
Experience improved integration and cost-efficiency while facing support challenges
The best features of VxRail are its compatibility with VMware, its hyper-converged solution capabilities, and its single line of support. These are the most beneficial aspects of VxRail. I switched from the previous HP solution to Dell solution because it was a good decision. With HP servers, we dealt with a vendor for the compute servers, another vendor for the storage servers, and another vendor for the networking, which required us to manage multiple vendors. Now, we have a single team who can handle VxRail and a single line of support. We don't need anything other than that, and these are the differences we noticed after we switched.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The solution has probably reduced my power use substantially."
"The most valuable feature is that maintenance is free."
"The speed of the Pure FlashArray is very, very fast and nothing in the market can compare to it."
"We chose Pure Storage because it had the best performance of all the products that we tested."
"We were previously on legacy storage systems, and after moving to Pure Storage, our stability and performance both drastically improved."
"The seamless integration into the public cloud has improved my organization."
"All my customers are pretty happy with most Pure Storage solutions."
"Very stable; no worries about how much it can handle."
"IBM offers excellent customer service."
"Good luck finding anything that does half of what it does."
"It's got full features, so we can compress volumes. We can do thin volumes and we can change them on the fly."
"It enabled us to build an infrastructure and replace storage with no disruption to our hosts whatsoever."
"I like that it can virtualize more than three hundred storage providers."
"I would recommend IBM Spectrum Virtualize because it is very robust, stable, and affordable, has very good performance, and is relatively easy to implement and use."
"It lowers cost. It does so by getting more efficient use out of the technology behind it."
"We are happy with the support that IBM provides us."
"This solution has improved our organization in the following ways: Easier to manage: reduced management points, consolidated alerts, automation."
"The best features of VxRail are its compatibility with VMware, its hyper-converged solution capabilities, and its single line of support."
"We enjoy the ease of management since all of the resources are located on one box — one single point of support."
"The solution is easy to use. When turning on a server or a machine that is required for, deployment or quality assurance, the dynamic deployment of resources is good."
"VxRail is a very good software-defined solution that has been simplified so that it's very easy to use, very robust, and especially well-suited for small or medium-sized organizations, with excellent built-in vSAN and strong support from Dell EMC."
"It is scalable. When you are buying it, you have to buy a minimum of three nodes. After that, if you want to add more nodes, you can buy can buy them. You can also add-on additional compute and storage."
"We were able to speed up our gaming software, which was a big plus."
"RecoverPoint give us peace of mind knowing any corruption or server issue can be rectified very quickly, making sure the business impact is minimal."
 

Cons

"Everything has been good, but we faced one issue last year while migrating volumes from one Pure Storage to another. The snapshots were not visible in the Veeam backup portal."
"A noticeable area for improvement is the support for object storage."
"Having something native in the Pure Storage ecosystem would make it integrated and in one single company, and we wouldn't have to work with multiple organizations."
"It is not possible to create a cluster on top of multiple arrays."
"Larger capacity and more storage ports would be the two things I'd like to see."
"I’d love to view the average, minimum and maximum performance in the reports (Analysis tab - Performance) but it is only graphics and you need to export data in CSV to find this information."
"In the next release I would like to see integration into other third-party player providers like Google."
"I would like to see more cloud integration."
"In general, the migration is complicated. Though, it is case-by-case."
"There are some caveats with scalability, such as volume count. We are highly limited by volume count at this point in time."
"GUI should be developed in HTML5 as opposed to Java."
"They are actually working on one bug we found, which was with flash restore."
"In general, the migration is complicated, though it is case-by-case."
"We've had some issues with the production rate behind SVC."
"Anything which improves performance and the ability of our systems would be a nice."
"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."
"I can't speak to any missing features or weak aspects of the system just yet. We haven't had a chance to really dig in."
"If they can provide deduplication compression through the traditional hard drives, as Cisco does in the HyperFlex system, it will be very cost-effective, especially when it comes to archiving workload. VxRail doesn't allow the mixing of old flash clusters and hyper clusters. When I'm starting with an old flash cluster and it comes to archiving workload, I will also need to attend the new cluster. So, I either manage two different clusters, or I pay and upload my work with the archiving mobile hard drive, which is not cost-effective at all. The main key is to allow mixing between two types of clustering, like Nutanix, or allow deduplication of completion over the period of shared hard drive on SAV. It will be much better."
"Sometimes during implementation, you can some scripting errors. And there are some issues when we update the version. There are some issues like the version will not get updated or stable at some time. Dell needs to resolve these problems, we don't waste time fixing them."
"All updates are supposed to be done through VxRail, however, the vCenter actually showed that there was an update it needed. I've just started using the product. I didn't know what I was doing. I actually updated my vCenter and that actually threw the VxRail system offline. We had to spend some time trying to get that working again. If possible, they should make the process a bit more clear so we don't make mistakes like this in the future. There should maybe be some sort of pop-up that can direct you."
"VxRail should try to improve the pricing."
"Lacks integration of licenses so that it's an expensive solution."
"The SCL database sends out a warning and you have to download the adjacent file from the Dell website. You have to upload it and retest it."
"Deployment was not initially straightforward for us. We had an incompatibility issue that was very difficult for Dell Professional Service to solve."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We evaluated Oracle and Hitachi, but Pure Storage had the better pricing."
"It could always be lower, but it's okay."
"It is cheaper than NetApp."
"The price of Pure Storage FlashArray could always improve. They are still more expensive than some alternative offerings. Cost is always a concern and when there is a battle they tend to be more expensive."
"There should be quite a bit of reduction of TCO with just licensing (and stuff) because we run the VM environment off it."
"We implemented Pure Storage FlashArray nine years ago when it was new to the market and obtained it at a preferential price."
"The solution could be cheaper."
"My organization has a yearly license, but I believe that Pure Storage FlashArray has capacity-based licenses as well. I'm definitely happy with the pricing."
"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 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."
"I think it is a good value for the price."
"It has a lot of advanced functions for a reasonable price."
"This solution came as an additional cost for the TSM package we chose."
"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."
"We would like the CPU cycle to save more on the licensing costs for us."
"The entry point of pricing for this product is the most amazing price ever in the industry."
"The price could be lower."
"When compared with others, the price is very reasonable."
"The cost was cheaper compared to other virtualization solutions."
"Price is a bit of a challenge, particularly if you want extra features or higher performance."
"A typical node that I would sell to a customer has a list price be between $80,000 and $100,000 per node. Organizations typically start with four nodes. That's the hardware, software, VMware licensing, everything. Customers typically pay about half of that - approximately $45,000 to $50,000 a node. On average, it costs about $200,000 to get your foot in the door."
"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 price is a little bit on the higher side but the system and management are so quick and easy that it's worth it for the customer."
"The solution can be pricey depending on the project."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
12%
Computer Software Company
9%
Construction Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Performing Arts
14%
Marketing Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Construction Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Government
11%
Computer Software Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business64
Midsize Enterprise36
Large Enterprise151
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business11
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise31
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business42
Midsize Enterprise43
Large Enterprise57
 

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?
The only issue is the pricing. Because we have competition, our customers always take another brand and say they can ...
What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashArray?
Our customers using Dell storage also use competing solutions. Our customers who have Everpure FlashArray may also ha...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IBM Spectrum Virtualize?
IBM Spectrum Virtualize is not an expensive product. It offers flexibility with different flavors, whether appliance-...
What needs improvement with IBM Spectrum Virtualize?
IBM could improve IBM Spectrum Virtualize by bundling Storage Scale and Storage Virtualize into a single appliance. T...
What is your primary use case for IBM Spectrum Virtualize?
I primarily use IBM Spectrum Virtualize ( /products/ibm-spectrum-virtualize-reviews ) when I have different hardware ...
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, z...
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 e...
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 bein...
 

Also Known As

Pure Storage FlashArray
No data available
VCE VxRail
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Nielsen, Lamar Advertising, LinkedIn, Betfair, UT-Dallas
Pelephone, Sprint IT Enterprise Services
World Wide Technology Inc, Renault Sport Formula One Team, 8x8 Inc, Brownes, Canadian Pacific, Canopy, Denton, EDF, Unilin, Xerox
Find out what your peers are saying about StarWind, Nutanix, Red Hat and others in Software Defined Storage (SDS). Updated: April 2026.
892,646 professionals have used our research since 2012.