We performed a comparison between IBM Spectrum Virtualize 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."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."
"The most valuable features are the simplicity of use, the flexibility, and the options included. I mean, it's just a big time saver."
"The SVC gives excellent performance with tiered storage behind it."
"We acquire companies (and things), so we end up with odd hardware. We bring it behind the SVC and it allows us to migrate stuff off of it seamlessly. SVC can also cover up a host of defects of the underlying storage."
"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."
"It lowers cost. It does so by getting more efficient use out of the technology behind it."
"Although the GUI from the XIV was used (in my view), IBM has polished and refined the GUI providing a pleasant and easy to navigate GUI experience."
"When we add storage behind it, the product is good for the customers because their customers do not notice that anything is happening due to the virtualization."
"Technical support has been very good. They respond pretty fast, especially if we have a critical issue. Their responses have been great."
"The vSAN features we've found most helpful are live application migrations and storage policies. It has storage, policies, application, and DRS policies. Automation is there."
"It is easy to work with, easy to handle, and easy to manage."
"The product's initial setup phase was very straightforward."
"The most valuable feature is the simplicity of its scalability: being able to grow it without having to make sure you get the right disks and the right nodes. The solution is also easy to manage. It's all right there in the vSphere Client. You're not going through multiple things. You don't have to know, once you've created the vSAN node. You add storage, it sees it, and you create your data storage from there. Everything is right there for you."
"The most valuable features are ease of deployment, and ease of management. If you compare it to other software-defined storage products, it's much easier. It's a checkbox. It's lot easier to manage."
"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."
"The most valuable features are secure IOPs and LAN security."
"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 hate I/O groups. If you start swapping I/O groups, they can be potentially risky. If they could get rid of the whole I/O group principle, the risk is not there anymore. I understand the fundamental thing about I/O groups, but they are risky."
"They are actually working on one bug we found, which was with flash restore. This was the user interface design for virtual environments."
"In general, the migration is complicated. Though, it is case-by-case."
"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."
"For improvement considerations, I would probably say multiple sites."
"Level 1 technical support needs improvement."
"Tighter integration with cloud storage might be useful as a target for a variety of use cases."
"Because of virtual storage, the system reaches reserve storage for its functions. It also consumes a certain amount of storage, which then results in the creation of a fault tolerance for the system. All of this adds to a lot of capacity being consumed in terms of storage for each drive for vSan. I find this to be one drawback of using vSan."
"It could be more robust. The latency is also an issue for us, and the reliability. I would like it to be faster and a little more flexible."
"It should be easier to use."
"The ability to access SAN environments with fiber channels (or even NVMe) would be a good addition."
"We do see weird things crop up every now and again. It will say that a drive gets kicked off even though it's fine, and we have to re-add it."
"The integration could be improved. I would like to see integration with other platforms."
"They should provide Deduplication and Compression over the hybrid drives."
"The platform’s pricing needs improvement. Additionally, there should be an appliance module included in it."
IBM Spectrum Virtualize is ranked 14th in Software Defined Storage (SDS) with 35 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 2nd in HCI with 227 reviews. IBM Spectrum Virtualize is rated 8.8, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of IBM Spectrum Virtualize writes "Robust, stable, with good performance, and easy to implement". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSAN writes "Very stable, easy to set up, and easy to use". IBM Spectrum Virtualize is most compared with Dell VPLEX, VxRail, IBM Spectrum Scale, DataCore SANsymphony and NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP, 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 Virtualize vs. VMware vSAN report.
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