We performed a comparison between DataCore SANsymphony and Dell PowerFlex based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two HCI solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."This software lets us maintain storage redundancy across both of our Hyper-V hosts, so if one goes down the environment fails over to the other and we have minimal to no downtime."
"It has a nice, simple control panel. You can clearly see the state and health of storage along with the synchronization."
"StarWind saved us about 80% of our storage costs over our old solution."
"The management interface on the software is very simple. It is insanely simple compared to most SANs. The interface is also powerful when used to complete tasks that an IT administrator needs to complete."
"The most valuable feature is the managed service, which has been an important part of monitoring our critical infrastructure."
"Their support staff is comprised of true experts who can also communicate clearly."
"This solution has a very good user interface, with simple administration/management."
"Immediately we noticed huge performance gains, even on older hardware and once we implemented a 10GB link between both servers, the sync was near-instant after the initial sync was complete."
"Auto-tiering to obtain performance at a lower cost without the customer having to purchase ultra-fast storage is great."
"The DataCore system has been rock solid since we have been using it - from 2007 on."
"The most valuable feature of DataCore SANsymphony SDS is its high availability. This solution also exhibits good performance and has high stability."
"The features I have found most valuable are the active-active, or so-called grid technology, and the integration into our VMware-vCenter."
"It is a stable solution."
"Storage is always available."
"Mirroring is the most valuable feature because I can provide a high-level of service and optimize the use of obsolete storage."
"DataCore's ability to seamlessly move virtual volume data between storage pools as well as their synchronous mirroring has made maintenance and disaster recovery planning achievable."
"It has reduced downtime. Before, on our previous solution, we used to have downtime on some of the servers because of the sort of convention. But currently I've not experienced any downtime on any of the servers, and there is no more resource congestion."
"Saves us a lot of space in the data center."
"The solution is scalable."
"The catalog of APIs for automation has been most valuable, although they are quite limited."
"The solution was connected to alternate storage. It provides great scalability and reliability."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is integration."
"The most valuable feature is the overall integration and just seeing the three different layers which make up the machine software. Altogether, it's something that I would say is much better than any other solution that I have experienced before."
"Dell PowerFlex is a one-stop-shop solution. Storage, compute, network, application monitoring, and support cases are all combined into one solution. It's very easy to administer compared to when you have a reference architecture where you need to design and build everything yourself. You would also then have to work with multiple vendors."
"It would be great to have more automated tooling around managing the iSCSI connections in Windows"
"There is a general lack of documentation, especially up-to-date documentation to get started."
"I would like an automated installation/configuration despite the fact that their service is very collaborative, a customer should be able to deploy the solution by themselves."
"A better overall view of the different deployments could be beneficial, although this is difficult due to how flexible the solution is."
"The console is something that I believe could be enhanced."
"The number of different ways you can set it up can make it a little daunting."
"When StarWind Virtual SAN for vSphere nodes go offline unexpectedly, the nodes have to re-sync disks fully which takes a long time. We had a power failure and when both nodes came online, VMware vSphere didn't see StarWind disks before I manually re-scanned them form ESXi administration console even though it should happen automatically"
"I would like to see some additional, and possibly clearer, implementation videos with some slower and possibly more detailed descriptions of what the various steps of implementation are for someone who is unfamiliar with high availability and failover clustering in Windows."
"I think the performance reporting can be improved by adding historical statistics into a database for the purpose of comparing."
"When I sometimes reboot for maintenance, the connectivity from the iSCSI initiator host could be improved."
"If it could integrate to a cloud gateway, then we could carry it directly to storage, instead of having middleware in between the storage and the cloud."
"If you're dealing with big databases or transactional databases, it might not be the best-suited solution. The design of DataCore's solution isn't oriented towards this type of data."
"I would like to see SMPA (Shared Multi-Port Array) technology developed with the aim of allowing a configuration identical to other storage arrays."
"DataCore should integrate its own file server into SANsymphony."
"Its interface could be better."
"For customers or technicians that don't speak and understand English, it could be great to have other languages support, all the more so given the number of countries in which SanSymphony is used."
"The support of containers needs to be improved. At present, it is limited to VMware. There needs to be direct communication with the hardware rather than through a hypervisor."
"Including instrumentation would be a helpful improvement."
"We're also running Hyper-V virtual machines. But we recently discovered that migration of the Hyper-V virtual machines is a bit challenging. Maybe if Dell EMC can come out with a tool that will make it very easy for us to migrate the Microsoft Hyper-V machine, that may be an improvement."
"It would be great to get earlier access to beta builds because we have to develop providers on our own. The APIs and enablers for custom automation could also be improved."
"The biggest issue with the solution is that it doesn't support Hyper V. It's a big problem."
"The installation is complex."
"Licensing restrictions can be frustrating."
"There should be more functionality available for routing."
DataCore SANsymphony is ranked 7th in HCI with 54 reviews while Dell PowerFlex is ranked 8th in HCI with 19 reviews. DataCore SANsymphony is rated 9.2, while Dell PowerFlex is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of DataCore SANsymphony writes "Robust with good replication and access protection ". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Dell PowerFlex writes "Infrastructure management solution that offers rapid provisioning of computer storage but the APIs and enablers for custom automation could be improved". DataCore SANsymphony is most compared with VMware vSAN, HPE SimpliVity, Red Hat Ceph Storage, StorMagic SvSAN and VxRail, whereas Dell PowerFlex is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) and HPE SimpliVity. See our DataCore SANsymphony vs. Dell PowerFlex report.
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