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."GPFS monitoring is the best feature."
"The high performance of the solution is its most valuable aspect. If you compare it to other storage solutions, it's much better."
"The profile share is a valuable feature."
"Allows us to share files across multiple environments."
"Its great servicing high availability. That is what it is used for."
"It is a scalable solution."
"We are using it for monitoring all of our storage."
"We can have multiple systems within the same file system."
"One of the valuable features for us is the ability to restrict the performance capacity per client. Other solutions don't have this feature."
"The product's initial setup phase is simple."
"It completely removes the need for a storage network and for a storage administrator and all of that infrastructure and the costs that are involved with them."
"The most valuable features of vSAN are its simplicity to deploy and that we can use commodity disks in our servers without complexity or need for external storage arrays or storage specialists on our teams."
"VMware has been around for a long time are are doing a decent job at catching up with the latest technologies i.e. bringing in kubernetes and containerization. Overall, this is a great tool for virtualization."
"The most valuable features are Erasure Coding, Deduplication and Compression, and the advancement in stretching regarding replication."
"Good performance, reliable and agile."
"Very easy to implement in any existing environment."
"The solution's pricing could be better."
"Integration with other vendors is not available."
"They should probably simply the Red Hat implementation portion. This portion was not as straightforward as I would like it to be."
"The pricing and licensing model for this solution are complex and it is sometimes difficult to explain it to customers."
"The biggest problem is that it is not able to provide block storage."
"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."
"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."
"I believe there is no graphic user interface, so they should include it."
"I would like to see better integration between the cloud and our VMware virtual environment. We only have one virtual environment, which is VMware vSAN. Right now, there is little interoperability with the cloud solution at the moment."
"I see room for improvement with vSAN in particularly in the reporting realm. Now, with vSAN 6.7, they're starting to include vRealize Operations components in the vSphere Client, even if you're not a vRealize Operations customer. So, that's really good. It exposes some really low-level reporting. I would like to see more of that. However, you have to be a vRealize Operations customer to obtain that. I would like to see more include of this included in the vSAN licensing."
"It needs to be vanilla. There shouldn't be any custom drivers, any custom anything. It should just be, "Hey, you know what? These drivers are going to work for this version, the next version, and the following version after that." That's the difficulty in this. It takes too much upkeep... The main issue is drivers. Every time we move to a new vSAN version, we're having problems finding the correct drivers for the vendor."
"Currently, one of the available features is shareable VMBKs. You can create the VMBK disc and you can make them shareable between the ends. But as soon as you start using this feature, you lose the ability to create snapshots."
"There is always a challenge with their firmware."
"vSAN itself is a great storage platform, but one of the issues with it is that you have to be fully locked into the VMware package to use it. We're going to be deploying 72 Kubernetes nodes, and we're not going to buy VMware licenses for 72 of them, just so they can access vSAN. That's what we're using the Pure for. Opening it up so you could have vSAN as a data store, use it as a data lake, hit it with an NFS, S3 from outside the VMware ecosystem, would be great."
"The customer service is good but there is a cost for it. It does not come free."
"I would like to be able to limit IOPS."
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.
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