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."The ability to add the virtual machine on the Spectrum environment to sort out the data movers(DMs) and their schedules is a valuable feature. You are able to have, for example, four data movers to balance them so you do not have too much work on one data mover."
"The most valuable features are the simplicity of use, the flexibility, and the options included. I mean, it's just a big time saver."
"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."
"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 scalability is very good. It can handle anywhere from very small to large enterprise class."
"It's got full features, so we can compress volumes. We can do thin volumes and we can change them on the fly."
"Migration from configurations where servers have storage provisioned from older SAN disk systems to newer storage systems is almost seamless using image mode migration techniques, with only a short outage of the servers."
"It provides transparency, because of its advanced copy features."
"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."
"We are finding that vSAN is a lot more scalable and adaptable, because we can go in with hybrid arrays for our lower-end storage needs or with all-flash versions of vSAN for places where we need more performance, and it's coming in at a lower cost point than an actual traditional array."
"VMware comes with different stacks like VMware Cloud Foundation, which is integrated with different VMware modules. There's interoperability between VMware products."
"High availability is a valuable aspect of this solution."
"The performance of VMware vSAN is very good."
"Technical support has been very good. They respond pretty fast, especially if we have a critical issue. Their responses have been great."
"It uncoupled the idea of proprietary technology and component capabilities. It is basically a proprietary technology for a cost-effective infrastructure."
"Instead of going for SAN storage, customers can use the scale-up and scale-out features of VMware vSAN."
"The integration would be an option that we would like, but I understand that's not how it's going to be implemented."
"For improvement considerations, I would probably say multiple sites."
"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."
"Adding features for data deduplication is one area of improvement."
"I would like to see more baseline replication and integration with the operating system between Vmware and IBMI."
"There are things that occur when you get to this size and capacity. We're very large, i.e., petabytes. When you get to that sheer volume of the numbers of things, it is too big for people to keep track of."
"The disk reliability is not that good."
"The Storwize port is not so stable."
"It would be ideal if the solution offered some intelligent monitoring."
"The main problem we had was hardware compatibility, finding the right hardware that was certified."
"More focus has to be put on deduplication and compression with a hybrid architecture."
"Troubleshooting tools could be improved."
"The monitoring feature in VMware vSAN could be better."
"We would like to see even more storage capacity."
"There is always a challenge with their firmware."
"I would like to see some of the more traditional SAN functions that are out the now. I can list them: being able to Snapshot on the back-end, better de-dupe, and better compression. Those are the major ones."
IBM Spectrum Virtualize is ranked 15th in Software Defined Storage (SDS) with 2 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 3rd in HCI with 13 reviews. IBM Spectrum Virtualize is rated 8.8, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of IBM Spectrum Virtualize writes "A highly scalable product that is relatively easy to use and set up". 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 Virtualize is most compared with Dell VPLEX, VxRail, IBM Spectrum Scale, DataCore SANsymphony and Red Hat Ceph Storage, whereas VMware vSAN is most compared with VxRail, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, HPE SimpliVity, Red Hat Ceph Storage and Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI). See our IBM Spectrum Virtualize vs. VMware vSAN report.
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