# IBM Storage Scale Reviews **Vendor:** IBM **Category:** [Workload Automation Software](https://www.g2.com/categories/workload-automation) **Average Rating:** 4.3/5.0 **Total Reviews:** 17 ## About IBM Storage Scale IBM Spectrum Scale is a multi-protocol, high-performance, highly available, clustered file system and associated management software. IBM Spectrum Scale can scale in several dimensions, including performance (bandwidth and IOPS), capacity, and number of nodes (instances) that can mount the file system. IBM Spectrum Scale addresses the capacity and performance requirements to support modern scale-out applications such as AI/ML/DL with multi-cloud support. The latest version of IBM Spectrum Scale delivers an unprecedented, world-class level of performance for file storage. The improvements were driven by the demands of providing the storage software for the world’s most powerful supercomputer, the US Department of Energy Summit system at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Those same innovations are now available to commercial customers, and include major improvements across the product, including performance, space efficiency, improved installation and setup, more powerful GUI and improved security to help organizations address new regulations such as GDPR. ## IBM Storage Scale Reviews ### 1. Spectrum Scale Status **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Insurance | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 23, 2022 **What do you like best about IBM Storage Scale?** As SDS Solution it is a flexible Plattform to fit our Storagechellanges in all aspect to provisioning a performant, scalable Storage Solution. **What do you dislike about IBM Storage Scale?** In some areas of function there are some gaps to interoparate with the current implementation of IAM Provider like sssd on redhat. An other aspect of scale there are very complex filesystem with many parameters thats are great, but the different usecases generate different io pattern. This genrate different performance tuneing options that are not very good documented and there are small hints available to automate and write the correct values to optimize this. This is currently science work. **What problems is IBM Storage Scale solving and how is that benefiting you?** Spectrum scale is in our company in many areas established. It hosted our complete Backup, Archive, most Filesystem-Protocol and complete Container-Storage plattform. An other usecase are our SAS-Institute Plattform as our analytics Cluster. ### 2. More than a file system - a data management platform **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Antony S. | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 28, 2020 **What do you like best about IBM Storage Scale?** Functionality, performance and flexability. Hardware and storage options with data management tools. Range of configuration and tuning options. **What do you dislike about IBM Storage Scale?** ECE Version is not available ppcle, therefore IC922 **Recommendations to others considering IBM Storage Scale:** One of IBM's best kept secrets, which is popular in the HPC community, but has a real place as a commercial data management system **What problems is IBM Storage Scale solving and how is that benefiting you?** Scallable Low latency, clustered solution with HA/DR ### 3. GPFS/IBM Spectrum Scale has speeded up concurrent file usages for Production Image data. **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Aratik R. | Programmer (Principal Officer), Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 22, 2021 **What do you like best about IBM Storage Scale?** It can write the same file at two or more application node at a time. And User can access those file concurrently. **What do you dislike about IBM Storage Scale?** Need or consume more storage fo write the same file at two or more application node at a time. **Recommendations to others considering IBM Storage Scale:** Strongly Recommended to other users who will use concurrent user access data from many branches. The setup of the IBM Spectrum Scale in the server is not complex too. **What problems is IBM Storage Scale solving and how is that benefiting you?** Now I am solving slowness of concurrent file usages for our Production Image data with IBM Spectrum Scale or GPFS. As a result, our users are accessing concurrent Production Image data quickly without any delay. ### 4. IBM Spectrum Scale **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 21, 2021 **What do you like best about IBM Storage Scale?** 1. It is easily scalable with its clustering options to support high storage requirement's. 2. It could support both Hot-Hot datacenter approach i.e. both replica could active at a same time. 3. Very good and innovative option to store large amount of data. 4. Though it is product of IBM but it could support both IBM and non-IBM storage. **What do you dislike about IBM Storage Scale?** Nothing really. It works pretty well. So no complaints. **Recommendations to others considering IBM Storage Scale:** Absolutely **What problems is IBM Storage Scale solving and how is that benefiting you?** 1. It is easily scalable with its clustering options to support high storage requirement's. 2. It could support both Hot-Hot datacenter approach i.e. both replica could active at a same time. 3. Very good and innovative option to store large amount of data. 4. Though it is product of IBM but it could support both IBM and non-IBM storage. ### 5. IBM Spectrum Scale - a versatile tool that must be well understood to get the most from it. **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Research | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 28, 2020 **What do you like best about IBM Storage Scale?** The flexibility of the platform is substantial and unique. It is the only filesystem that combines all the functionality it does with the level of enterprise integration capability and feature-richness of its kind. The platform has impressive developers and multiple teams globally that work on different parts of the project. Perhaps one of the best parts is the ability to have different teams work on different components to achieve customer outcomes. Performance is "king" in Spectrum Scale. It is a parallel filesystem made to "go fast" but it is also a product to "manage" data. It is more than just an HPC filesystem. **What do you dislike about IBM Storage Scale?** It is a complex product. It is not meant for those that have not worked with these types of technologies before or those who have no familiarity with parallel filesystem technologies. It is a "big" product, has a lot of moving parts and there are many gotchas and pitfalls if care and time are not paid diligence in implementation. The product documentation is also (often) not completely up to date when compared to the release versions, such that a version might be released but its upgrade procedures are not published at that point, so one might find that old instructions do not work. **Recommendations to others considering IBM Storage Scale:** Be very careful with planning and assurance. Understand your environment and be able to articulate it carefully before you try to implement scale. The better information one can give the IBM account team, the better your outcome will be. **What problems is IBM Storage Scale solving and how is that benefiting you?** Complicated mass-data transit and presentation of very large research data environments. The benefits are the ability to build out a data fabric architecture with technologies such as Spectrum Scale AFM (a part of Spectrum Scale) and the ability to move data around the fabric autonymously. ### 6. Greater collaborative ability of IBM Spectrum Scale helped in managing converged infrastructure. **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Sachin V. | Associate professional - Infrastructure, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 11, 2020 **What do you like best about IBM Storage Scale?** Best thing is about the high-performance SAN capability with LUNs providing extensive scaling. **What do you dislike about IBM Storage Scale?** After working with IBM and NetApp storage systems, IBM seems a bit complex in terms of cloud tiering. **Recommendations to others considering IBM Storage Scale:** For those who are using IBM Spectrum Scale, recommend you to explore more and unleash its potential, because it is more than a File system / Storage architecture. **What problems is IBM Storage Scale solving and how is that benefiting you?** Client's SAN Infrastructure management with IBM LUNs. Active-Active clustering in Disaster recovery (Metro-cluster) environments are critical and IBM Spectrum scale replication & mirroring capabilities are phenomenal. ### 7. Realiable and powerful platform **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Insurance | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 18, 2021 **What do you like best about IBM Storage Scale?** Reliability is the best wordt to discribe Spectrum Scale from IBM. Been using it for a couple of year and never experienced a downtime due to the platform itself. IBM support is also very helpful in case of questions or upgrades. **What do you dislike about IBM Storage Scale?** Can't think of any downsides, everything works as expected. **Recommendations to others considering IBM Storage Scale:** Dare to compare. Reliability is one of the strengths of IBM Spectrum Scale **What problems is IBM Storage Scale solving and how is that benefiting you?** Clustered filesystem between 2 DC's ### 8. Good support, tricky performance **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Rodrigo P. | Senior Infrastructure Engineer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 19, 2021 **What do you like best about IBM Storage Scale?** Fast and accurate support from IBM when having problems **What do you dislike about IBM Storage Scale?** The systems resulted unstable when several users were accessing the same file from different nodes. Snapshots provoke the system to respond really slow for few minutes when they are running or deleting (several times per day) **What problems is IBM Storage Scale solving and how is that benefiting you?** Problems with CTDB service. Nodes being unstable. The support really help you with the troubleshooting. ### 9. Great performance monitoring metrics **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Maria Mercedes A. | Senior Associate Auditor, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 13, 2020 **What do you like best about IBM Storage Scale?** Great trasnparent Cloud tieting service. Manages NFS exports, AFM and gateway nodes easely, when Protocols are enabled on the cluster. **What do you dislike about IBM Storage Scale?** I ised this page to grant access to the remote clusters and it worked great. Also helped me to notify administrators when system events occured. **What problems is IBM Storage Scale solving and how is that benefiting you?** Helped to monitor and troubleshoot issues. Great IBM spectrum scale system. Is very easy to integrate, creating object users, configuring authentication methods and defining default fileset quotas. I recommend it! ### 10. Spectrum review **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Banking | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 22, 2021 **What do you like best about IBM Storage Scale?** High availability, I think it's not big different than old system GPFS **What do you dislike about IBM Storage Scale?** Nothing in specific but may I say the configuration some time complex. **Recommendations to others considering IBM Storage Scale:** The IBM product in general is the best **What problems is IBM Storage Scale solving and how is that benefiting you?** Where I worked we just do the config and test it just as demo for costumer. The main issues was I faced in configuration steps. ### 11. IBM Spectrum a usefull tool for the modern day **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Chemicals | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 30, 2020 **What do you like best about IBM Storage Scale?** It is an excellent tool to monitor the systems health and performance. In addition I enjoy using it to monitor the capacity details of file systems, pools, filesets, users, and user groups **What do you dislike about IBM Storage Scale?** The snapshot feautre could be improved. I used this to create rules and automatize snapshots and I fell the used interface could be improved. **What problems is IBM Storage Scale solving and how is that benefiting you?** All in all we use it to monitor the systems health and performance as well as monitoring dashboards and events. The main benefit for us is having a better undestanding of how we are opperating on a daily basis. ### 12. Advanced storage management of unstructured data for cloud, big data, analytics, and objects **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Youssef L. | General Manager and Associate Executive Director, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 28, 2020 **What do you like best about IBM Storage Scale?** The ability to look to a single source of truth for the input to my AI and analytics pipelines Unlimited throughput Single namespace Unified view of all data so that everyone in my team can work with the same information and using the latest version of that same information. **What do you dislike about IBM Storage Scale?** The product is just perfect! honestly nothing to dislike **What problems is IBM Storage Scale solving and how is that benefiting you?** High Performance High Available shared FS ### 13. Yes, it's good **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Hardware | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 04, 2021 **What do you like best about IBM Storage Scale?** Container native and Data-aware intelligence is Impressive. **What do you dislike about IBM Storage Scale?** not experienced bad as of now and the futures are good when compared to the legacy **What problems is IBM Storage Scale solving and how is that benefiting you?** Data aware intelligence and Scaling are the benefits ### 14. Provides extreme scalability **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Capital Markets | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 30, 2020 **What do you like best about IBM Storage Scale?** Global file sharing with active file management Storage usage in Autonomous Driving **What do you dislike about IBM Storage Scale?** I don't have dislike not as of now for this product **Recommendations to others considering IBM Storage Scale:** very good storage **What problems is IBM Storage Scale solving and how is that benefiting you?** Improves security and management efficiency Global file sharing with active file management Available on Amazon Web Services ### 15. Infinite File System **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Gokhan Y. | Consultant and Founder of Spektrum Teknoloji, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 29, 2019 **What do you like best about IBM Storage Scale?** Scalability and reduced storage costs, **What do you dislike about IBM Storage Scale?** I dislike nothing with IBM Spectrum Scale. **Recommendations to others considering IBM Storage Scale:** For cold and hot data grading it is a good choice. Why are you going to store your cold archive data in the expensive storages? **What problems is IBM Storage Scale solving and how is that benefiting you?** Scalability, starting from small size and you can grow as your needs. Comparing to NAS box there are many gains. ### 16. Great concept, mostly based on your business partner **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Alexis T. | Business Administration, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 19, 2018 **What do you like best about IBM Storage Scale?** Technology is good but complex at times, and getting helpful support can be a struggle.Excellent team members, information, services, and products. **What do you dislike about IBM Storage Scale?** Receiving support was frustrating, couldn't contact or get a hold of any customer service. **Recommendations to others considering IBM Storage Scale:** Do you research and make sure you're partner is informed prior. **What problems is IBM Storage Scale solving and how is that benefiting you?** This is a great way to protect your data in an online data base. It also helps share files quickly ### 17. IBM Spectrum Scale/GPFS is the BEST clustered filesystem **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Media Production | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 26, 2018 **What do you like best about IBM Storage Scale?** Stability, Speed, Capabilities, Performance. I've used SS/GPFS for 12 years and it has never failed to perform.. Cluster form Gigabytes to >10 PETABytes run, run fast, and never fail **What do you dislike about IBM Storage Scale?** GPFS/SS can be complicated to setup properly. **Recommendations to others considering IBM Storage Scale:** use it! **What problems is IBM Storage Scale solving and how is that benefiting you?** at my previous employer, ESPN, we setup >20 clusters for uses in Capture, direct-to-air playout, rendering, and "Normal" file sharing ## IBM Storage Scale Discussions - [What is IBM spectrum accelerate?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-is-ibm-spectrum-accelerate) - [What is the relationship between spectrum scale and ESS?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-is-the-relationship-between-spectrum-scale-and-ess) - [What are the main use cases for IBM spectrum discover?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-are-the-main-use-cases-for-ibm-spectrum-discover) - [What does IBM Spectrum Scale do?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-does-ibm-spectrum-scale-do) - [View IBM Storage Scale pricing details and edition comparison](https://www.g2.com/products/ibm-storage-scale/reviews?section=pricing&secure%5Bexpires_at%5D=2026-05-14+03%3A25%3A30+-0500&secure%5Bsession_id%5D=bef9ea20-ab8a-48e6-8df5-9644db9b0e89&secure%5Btoken%5D=8f79f4a51890b7b3aae34295662b6fc6194aaa58228f494662f9f276a93fcc33&format=llm_user) ## IBM Storage Scale Features **Automation** - Workload Processing - Scalability - Intelligent Automation **Administration** - Administration Console - Workflow Management - IT Issue Identification - Proactive Workflow - Error Alerts - Service Management **Functionality** - Job Scheduling - API / Integrations - Integrations **Agentic AI - Workload Automation** - Autonomous Task Execution - Multi-step Planning - Cross-system Integration - Adaptive Learning - Natural Language Interaction - Proactive Assistance - Decision Making ## Top IBM Storage Scale Alternatives - [PagerDuty](https://www.g2.com/products/pagerduty/reviews) - 4.5/5.0 (904 reviews) - [Tines](https://www.g2.com/products/tines/reviews) - 4.7/5.0 (392 reviews) - [RunMyJobs](https://www.g2.com/products/runmyjobs/reviews) - 4.8/5.0 (310 reviews)