IBM Spectrum Scale vs. VMware vSAN Comparison

IBM Spectrum Scale

VMware vSAN

IBM Spectrum Scale

Read 4 IBM Spectrum Scale reviews.

4,600 views|3,408 comparisons

VMware vSAN

Read 16 VMware vSAN reviews.

83,077 views|68,102 comparisons

Most Helpful Review

Use IBM Spectrum Scale? Share your opinion.

Anonymous User

IT Infrastructure Specialist at a computer software company

Good unified administration, very stable, and easy to set up

The solution works well to help businesses simplify their administration. They unify the technology in boxes like vSAN. You see the performance... Read more »

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Quotes From Members

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

Pros
"GPFS monitoring is the best feature.""The most valuable feature is the ability to share files across different platforms.""We are using it for monitoring all of our storage.""The high performance of the solution is its most valuable aspect. If you compare it to other storage solutions, it's much better." More IBM Spectrum Scale Pros »	"As a function of our core business, it's a sought after tool that helps us provide analytical support across a wide spectrum of client needs. It's allowed us to test out in our connected restaurant - "TheWorks" - a fully-functional restaurant experience center that allows our clients to discover the value of our connected solutions firsthand. We deploy vSAN in this customer-like environment within a hyperconvergent infrastruction (HCI) to give our clients a better understanding and help optimize data and the end-users' experience.""The newer versions of this solution are much more stable and easier to manage.""VMware vSAN has greatly reduced refresh spending.""It is more stable now than it was before. It's not like it was in the first year. Now it is stable, and we trust it more.""We can also create test cases. We can even throttle down performance or release more performance. So, we can run more precise test scenarios.""When we do to do more scaled load testing, we can run more dense workloads and still have the same results across all specific nodes""It is very easy to set up and very easy to use. It is very useful.""The deduplication and compression are excellent." More VMware vSAN Pros »
Cons
"The biggest problem is that it is not able to provide block storage.""The pricing and licensing model for this solution are complex and it is sometimes difficult to explain it to customers.""Integration with other vendors is not available.""It would be helpful if there was a graphical user interface that could walk you through the deployment process. The instructions surrounding setup aren't the best. They need to be more step-by-step." More IBM Spectrum Scale Cons »	"I would like to see the availability of more template based VMware systems. Combined with the ability to check and measure multiple and converging data segments. Another issue I've seen is that the tool seems to be slow when first starting up.""This solution would benefit from better collaboration with Cisco for driver updates.""This solution is not great for large file shares/object/rich media repository.""Disaster recovery needs to be improved, when there is a crisis, there is a problem with what is the quickest way to get out of it.""When we talk about improvements for vSAN, there is some way to go from a at least stability perspective. Adding all these new features is nice, but we are now at the level that most of the features you need in production are there.""Upgradability could be a bit easier sometimes. We are now where vSAN can be updated without ESXi, but there is still enough dependency. So that would be good if that actually would uncoupled even more.""If one node out of your ten nodes fails, it takes a lot of time to replicate and rebalance VMware vSAN. This time can be reduced. When a node fails and the data is not accessible, vSAN has to be rebalanced to make the redundancy level of two again. However, if it is taking a lot of time and any other hardware fails during that time, then we have a problem. Two disk failures mean that all data will be lost, and we may have to recover it from the backup. So, the number of threads that run to do the rebalancing could be more so that the time taken to make it fully redundant again is not so much.""There's a lot that can be done to segregate. That may be available now in vSAN 7, I suppose, however, the deduplication and compression can be segregated." 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."

More IBM Spectrum Scale Pricing and Cost Advice »

"ROI from an administrative perspective is clearly much better because I only have to deal with one user interface.""If they could reduce the cost, it would be better. Licensing costs are something that they could take care of. If you are a smaller and strong IT team, then VMware vSAN is a very good product. If you want to expand in the service provider space, then you will have to go for an open-source solution like OpenStack. We are now looking at OpenStack because we sell licensing costs. We are a service provider, so the IT component data is a substantial component in our overall costing. We feel that OpenStack might help us to cut down the licensing cost. Therefore, we are looking at SAS storage instead of vSAN. SAS is open source, but it is not wise to have open source without having the backend support. We are using RedHat SAS, and it is an open-source solution. You can also have a free version, but we are using it with support from RedHat so that we have somebody to back us up in case we have a problem. If you do normal business, then IT expense is 1% or 2% of the total turnover. The higher licensing costs sometimes don't make difference to the big companies who are not service providers and are using it only for their internal use. For them, the IT cost is 1% or 2%, but for an IT service provider, the IT costs will go up to 15% to 16% of the total cost of the operations. This is where the licensing costs become irrelevant. For example, the licensing cost of using VMware, VC, and vSAN is 8% of my monthly revenue. Every month, I pay about $35,000, and, with the revised plan, it will be something like $50,000 or revenue of 600k per month, which means almost 8% of the revenue is going into VMware licensing. In a very competitive world, 8% as a cost element is huge. So, if I can bring it down to 2%, I save 6% in revenue expenditure. In terms of profit, 6% of 30% is something like another 25% increase in my profit. My profit can be almost 25%. It would be 20% to 25% in case I am able to handle the licensing costs and bring them to a very low level. Because these IT costs are substantial for us, that is why we are going with OpenStack. OpenStack has a limitation that it requires more hardware. There will be some increase in the hardware cost, but overall we will save 5% to 6% of our licensing cost by using OpenStack.""It is fairly cost-effective for entry to mid-level performance based on the underlying hardware components.""The price is expensive.""It is an expensive solution. There should be more flexible with licensing to allow small businesses the essentials of the solution's features."

More VMware vSAN Pricing and Cost Advice »

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Questions from the Community
What do you like most about IBM Spectrum Scale? Top Answer: We are using it for monitoring all of our storage. Read all 3 answers What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IBM Spectrum Scale? Top Answer: The licensing model is complex and depends on factors such as the number of processing cores and the amount of storage. Read all 2 answers What needs improvement with IBM Spectrum Scale? Top Answer: Integration with other vendors is not available. This feature would be very helpful. Read all 3 answers	What Is The Biggest Difference Between vSAN And VxRail? Top Answer: very helpful post Read all 16 answers Nutanix and vSAN: Which is best for cloud services? Top Answer: Nutanix is intelligent hyper-convergent Read all 21 answers
Ranking
11th out of 35 in Software Defined Storage (SDS) Views 4,600 Comparisons 3,408 Reviews 4 Average Words per Review 490 Rating 8.0	3rd out of 38 in Hyper-Converged (HCI) Views 83,077 Comparisons 68,102 Reviews 15 Average Words per Review 445 Rating 8.4
Popular Comparisons
Red Hat Ceph Storage vs. IBM Spectrum Scale Compared 31% of the time. Red Hat Gluster Storage vs. IBM Spectrum Scale Compared 18% of the time. NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP vs. IBM Spectrum Scale Compared 9% of the time. IBM Spectrum Virtualize vs. IBM Spectrum Scale Compared 5% of the time. Nutanix Acropolis AOS vs. IBM Spectrum Scale Compared 5% of the time. See more IBM Spectrum Scale competitors » + Add more products to compare	Nutanix Acropolis AOS vs. VMware vSAN Compared 24% of the time. VxRail vs. VMware vSAN Compared 17% of the time. Red Hat Ceph Storage vs. VMware vSAN Compared 9% of the time. HPE SimpliVity vs. VMware vSAN Compared 9% of the time. See more VMware vSAN competitors » + Add more products to compare
Also Known As
	vSAN
Learn
IBM	VMware
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 the industry-leading software powering Hyper-Converged Infrastructure solutions. What vSAN Does Enables you to evolve without risk. Seamlessly extend virtualization to storage with an integrated hyper-converged solution that simply works with your overall VMware environment and reduces the risk in digital transformation by using existing tools, skillsets and solutions. Lowers total cost of ownership by 50% or more with capital and operational savings. Reduce storage CapEx, decrease operational costs, manage the day-to-day operations of compute and storage infrastructure, and accelerate responsiveness to traditionally time-consuming tasks. vSAN helps customers scale to tomorrow. Prepare for tomorrow's dynamic business in the multi-cloud era with a solution designed to utilize the latest storage and server technologies and ready to support a wide range of applications, from current business critical applications to next-gen applications using containers.
Offer
Learn more about IBM Spectrum Scale Learn More	Learn more about VMware vSAN Learn More
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 Firm71% Comms Service Provider14% Computer Software Company14% VISITORS READING REVIEWS Computer Software Company41% Comms Service Provider13% Educational Organization7% Manufacturing Company6%	REVIEWERS Healthcare Company16% Retailer12% Financial Services Firm9% Energy/Utilities Company7% VISITORS READING REVIEWS Computer Software Company35% Comms Service Provider19% Manufacturing Company5% Government5%
Company Size
REVIEWERS Small Business13% Large Enterprise88%	REVIEWERS Small Business29% Midsize Enterprise17% Large Enterprise53% VISITORS READING REVIEWS Small Business11% Midsize Enterprise9% Large Enterprise80%

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Find out what your peers are saying about Nutanix, StarWind, DataCore and others in Software Defined Storage (SDS). Updated: December 2020.

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456,719 professionals have used our research since 2012.

IBM Spectrum Scale is ranked 11th in Software Defined Storage (SDS) with 4 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 3rd in Hyper-Converged (HCI) with 16 reviews. IBM Spectrum Scale is rated 8.0, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of IBM Spectrum Scale writes "Storage system with good performance that has GPFS monitoring and NFS support". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSAN writes "Gives us a lot of advantages when we need to expand resources". IBM Spectrum Scale is most compared with Red Hat Ceph Storage, Red Hat Gluster Storage, NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP, IBM Spectrum Virtualize and Nutanix Acropolis AOS, whereas VMware vSAN is most compared with Nutanix Acropolis AOS, VxRail, Red Hat Ceph Storage and HPE SimpliVity.

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