IBM Spectrum Scale vs VMware vSAN comparison

Cancel
You must select at least 2 products to compare!
IBM Logo
1,521 views|1,258 comparisons
100% willing to recommend
VMware Logo
23,828 views|17,653 comparisons
87% willing to recommend
Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between IBM Spectrum Scale and VMware vSAN based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Software Defined Storage (SDS) solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.
To learn more, read our detailed IBM Spectrum Scale vs. VMware vSAN Report (Updated: May 2024).
772,679 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"It is a scalable solution.""It is incredibly scalable and stable.""The most valuable feature is the ability to share files across different platforms.""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.""We are using it for monitoring all of our storage.""The profile share is a valuable feature.""Allows us to share files across multiple environments.""It has been pretty reliable throughout the years. As far as capacity is concerned, it can handle most heavy loads."

More IBM Spectrum Scale Pros →

"The technical support is good. We are always thankful for the technical support from VMware. They are very supportive when we have a technical problem.""The flexibility is most valuable. Being able to manage things quickly if something goes wrong is also valuable. Very recently, we had one node that went down due to a power problem, but there was really no major impact on the systems running on top of it.""It is easy to use. It is easy to implement for us, and it is also easy to maintain for the customers. It is not necessary to buy some extra devices and talk with other vendors.""The most valuable feature of VMware vSAN is you do not have to use additional hardware for storage. The operation of VMware vSAN does not take a lot of effort. If you have VMware technology on your site, then it's easy for the operational support of the system.""vSAN Health is a feature designed to monitor the health and performance of the vSAN environment. It's crucial for us and our customers to frequently check on this to ensure everything is operating smoothly.""The high availability is very good.""VMware vSAN is a global solution, so we can manage all the storage solutions in one place. It's embedded in VCI solutions.""I like that we could choose whatever hardware we wanted, rather than having to use one particular vendor."

More VMware vSAN Pros →

Cons
"I believe there is no graphic user interface, so they should include it.""The main issue that we have now is with the encryption. They want to use more metrics in encryption, which is not working very well.""Maybe it needs integration with HA.""The biggest problem is that it is not able to provide block storage.""Integration with other vendors is not available.""The pricing and licensing model for this solution are complex and it is sometimes difficult to explain it to customers.""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.""The solution's pricing could be better."

More IBM Spectrum Scale Cons →

"The stability needs to be improved.""Integration could be better.""I lose a node in a cluster vSAN, which is also used as a cluster HA. I lose not only the storage part, which is not necessarily serious (depending on the configuration of the vSAN cluster), but on the other hand, I lose also a node of Compute, which can make things complicated quickly.""In a future release, they could add micro-segmentation or security level features integrated into vSAN.""It would be much improved if we could somehow integrate a better backup with it. Right now, we're using Veeam and it's okay, but I would like more of a VDP vSAN solution. That would be excellent. The VDP, at least the last time we looked at, it was just not quite there.""The platform's cost affects the business. This particular area needs improvement.""It can be very expensive.""I would like for the next release to be a bit cheaper."

More VMware vSAN Cons →

Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "The licensing is based on the number of terabytes."
  • "The licensing model is complex and depends on factors such as the number of processing cores and the amount of storage."
  • "The solution is costly but reliable."
  • More IBM Spectrum Scale Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "The first 1-2 years of purchasing vSAN will be expensive. Thereafter, the longer you are running it, the more cost savings you will have."
  • "Its reasonable, compare with other storage vendors"
  • "Basically, vSAN is a license in addition to that of the classic VMware Vsphere, which is also mandatory."
  • "​I would like to see this technology be made available to smaller businesses, who might benefit from high availability but struggle with the entry fee.​"
  • "Perhaps a bundle, like Essentials, would allow more businesses to make the leap to the product."
  • "We have increased our user productivity."
  • "What made us go with this solution was price point. When you can utilize existing storage infrastructure, and not have to continually purchase new SAN products out there that are going up in price as time goes by, then it's a wonderful thing."
  • "We did consider other hyperconverged solutions. It usually came down to price. vSan was the most cost effective thing."
  • More VMware vSAN Pricing and Cost Advice →

    report
    Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Software Defined Storage (SDS) solutions are best for your needs.
    772,679 professionals have used our research since 2012.
    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer: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… more »
    Top Answer:We found the reduced power consumption with Nutanix Acropolis AOS a very attractive feature. We also like the interface that allows you to talk directly to your VM from the present software. We found… more »
    Top Answer:HPE SimpliVity is a hyper-converged infrastructure solution that is primarily geared to mid-sized companies. We researched VMware vSAN but found HPE was a better option for us HPE SimpliVity has… more »
    Ranking
    Views
    1,521
    Comparisons
    1,258
    Reviews
    2
    Average Words per Review
    202
    Rating
    9.5
    2nd
    out of 44 in HCI
    Views
    23,828
    Comparisons
    17,653
    Reviews
    13
    Average Words per Review
    603
    Rating
    9.1
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    vSAN
    Learn More
    IBM
    Video Not Available
    Overview
    IBM Spectrum Scale is a cluster file system that provides concurrent access to a single file system or set of file systems from multiple nodes. The nodes can be SAN attached, network attached, a mixture of SAN attached and network attached, or in a shared nothing cluster configuration. This enables access to this common set of data to support a scale-out solution or to provide a high availability platform. IBM Spectrum Scale has many features beyond common data access including data replication, policy based storage management, and multi-site operations. You can create a cluster of AIX nodes, Linux nodes, Windows server nodes, or a mix of all three. IBM Spectrum Scale can run on virtualized instances providing common data access in environments, leverage logical partitioning, or other hypervisors. Multiple IBM Spectrum Scale clusters can share data within a location or across wide area network (WAN) connections.

    VMware vSAN is a software-defined storage product that is used in collaboration with VMware ESXi hypervisor and that provisions and manages storage based on policies, regardless of the underlying hardware. The solution enables you to prime your business for growth through its seamless evolution (it is integrated with vSphere and requires no new tools), its flexibility, and its multi-cloud capabilities. As an industry-leading software, VMware vSAN provides high levels of performance with minimal impact on CPU and memory.

    VMware vSAN Features

    VMware vSAN has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

    • Storage policy-based management (SPBM): VMware vSAN supports storage policy-based management for automated management of storage profiles.
    • Software-defined data-at-rest encryption: With this VMware vSAN feature, you can prevent unauthorized access of data at rest.
    • Multiple nodes: VMware vSAN provides clusters that can include as few as 2 nodes or as many as 64 nodes.
    • High security and availability: VMware vSAN offers stretched clusters, allowing more than one virtualization host server to be used in the same setup, promoting higher security as well as availability.
    • Deduplication: VMware vSAN’s deduplication compresses data to ensure efficient storage management and security.
    • HCI mesh updates: VMware vSAN clusters can share storage capacity with non-HCI Sphere clusters and can adopt HCI without having to scale computing resources and storage or replace existing servers.
    • Simplified file services: With VMware vSAN’s file services, backup of file shares is simplified. You can use APIs that allow backup and recovery software vendors to integrate with your VMware vSAN file services, which enables backup software to track new data and add scalability enhancements to files.

    VMware vSAN Benefits

    There are many benefits to implementing VMware vSAN. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

    • Reduced total cost of ownership (TCO): VMware vSAN helps you reduce upfront costs for businesses because it can be easily deployed on inexpensive x86 servers. In addition, its highly scalable infrastructure and quick deployment also save organizations time and money, making it an efficient storage solution. 
    • Good manageability: VMWare vSAN is easy to set up, manage, and provision, without sacrificing performance. 
    • Scalability: VMware vSAN is agile and allows administrators to scale storage on demand, quickly, and efficiently via policies and rules.
    • Simplicity: VMWare vSAN is simple to configure since it is embedded in the vSphere hypervisor. Installing it using the vSphere Web Client can be done quickly. 
    • Reduced risk: VMWare vSAN reduces the risk associated with digital transformations by utilizing existing tools, skill sets, and solutions.

    Reviews from Real Users

    Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by PeerSpot users currently using the VMware vSAN solution.

    PeerSpot user Yves S., CEO, Cloud Evangelist at Comdivision Consulting GmbH, says, “vSAN gives us a lot of advantages when we need to expand resources. We have an overall larger host infrastructure, and we split that up for specific customer test and use cases. In that specific scenario, we can easily add more hosts or reduce the number of hosts in the environment.”

    A reviewer who works in Infrastructure Security explains, “The ease of use is great. The initial setup and upgrade process was pretty straightforward. And, technical support is great.”

    Laurent N., Director at Softlogic, comments, "The feature that I have found most valuable is that it is easy to deploy. It is easy to create and delete virtual servers. It is easy to create the load balancing and the clustering."

    Sample Customers
    Information Not Available
    Read Some Case Studies At Home Cloud CaribCINgroupDiscovery Check out the Rest of our Customer Stories Here
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm63%
    Computer Software Company25%
    Comms Service Provider13%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Financial Services Firm19%
    Computer Software Company15%
    Manufacturing Company10%
    Government8%
    REVIEWERS
    Computer Software Company15%
    Comms Service Provider12%
    Financial Services Firm11%
    Healthcare Company9%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization46%
    Computer Software Company9%
    Manufacturing Company6%
    Government5%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business30%
    Large Enterprise70%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business20%
    Midsize Enterprise11%
    Large Enterprise69%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business34%
    Midsize Enterprise21%
    Large Enterprise44%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business13%
    Midsize Enterprise54%
    Large Enterprise32%
    Buyer's Guide
    IBM Spectrum Scale vs. VMware vSAN
    May 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about IBM Spectrum Scale vs. VMware vSAN and other solutions. Updated: May 2024.
    772,679 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    IBM Spectrum Scale is ranked 7th in Software Defined Storage (SDS) with 10 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 2nd in HCI with 227 reviews. IBM Spectrum Scale is rated 8.4, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of IBM Spectrum Scale writes "A stable solution with valuable profile-sharing features". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSAN writes "Very stable, easy to set up, and easy to use". IBM Spectrum Scale is most compared with Red Hat Ceph Storage, Portworx Enterprise, NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP, DDN IME and IBM Cloud Object Storage, whereas VMware vSAN is most compared with VxRail, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, HPE SimpliVity, Red Hat Ceph Storage and Dell PowerFlex. See our IBM Spectrum Scale vs. VMware vSAN report.

    See our list of best Software Defined Storage (SDS) vendors and best Cloud Software Defined Storage vendors.

    We monitor all Software Defined Storage (SDS) reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.