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."The StarWind products have enabled our organization to modernize stations where larger and more expensive equipment was not an option."
"The vSAN provides full redundancy for storage while reclaiming some rack space."
"We went from "no way DB applications would have good performance" to "Wow! We can now actually have a DB running and have some VMs running at the same time.""
"The main benefit is that StarWind is almost maintenance-free."
"It has reduced our overall maintenance and overhead by having to only maintain physical boxes for one cluster instead of having to manage physical boxes for two clusters."
"PowerShell library is pretty good feature as I created with APC PowerChute a script to put volumes on maintenance mode then turning off the StarWind nodes together with the VM and Hosts when UPS reaches 15 percent, this way after a blackout or electrical problems when turning servers on again, there is no issues for syncing or data loss due to energy interrupts."
"This solution enables us to make better cost-effective use of our existing hardware and leverage the current infrastructure at a higher level than we could before."
"Virtualizing data infrastructure with StarWind Virtual SAN improves efficiency and reduces operational costs."
"The most valuable feature for us is that we can adjust the size of the storage very easily, without stopping production."
"Auto-tiering to obtain performance at a lower cost without the customer having to purchase ultra-fast storage is great."
"I found the solution to be very stable."
"DataCore has helped provide flexible, highly available, high-performance storage that otherwise would have been outside our price range."
"Our central storage has very high availability. DataCore SANsymphony ensures high business continuity."
"It allows data to be available from two DataCore servers."
"The solution's most valuable feature is its versatility, with there being support for all new hardware technologies and platforms, disc mirroring and very effective auto tiering."
"The synchronous mirror allows us to operate a fully redundant storage solution that is distributed across two sites."
"The integration with AWS is a valuable feature."
"We're doing a lot of VMware for IT so this solution is really valuable from a VMH point of view. We're trying to assist our customers mainly with management, because that's what they want. The most important aspects are ease of management, as well as ease of configuration, allowing them to attach additional nodes and resources for the applications."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is integration."
"The catalog of APIs for automation has been most valuable, although they are quite limited."
"The setup was very straightforward."
"The solution was connected to alternate storage. It provides great scalability and reliability."
"The program is stable."
"It is easy to use for management and operations teams because the tools are in one place."
"If there are domain controllers inside the cluster, there needs to be some sort of logic allowing them to boot independently so all the rest of the domain clients can gain the authority they need to come online."
"StarWind Virtual SAN architecture is slightly complex and requires the team to carefully identify and study how the solution integrates with VMware vSphere."
"Geolocation could be better, for example, for site mirroring for DR purposes."
"Ongoing improvements in read and write performance would help meet increasingly demanding workloads."
"Besides not being able to use any filesystem, I do not have any additional cons."
"It runs until it does not - and disaster recovery documentation is sparse and mostly unclear."
"A central management console may be nice to see all nodes."
"Proper training sessions should be included with the licensing."
"There is room for improvement in the graphical interface."
"We'd like to manage the raid on the disk directly in SanSymphony."
"DataCore needs a more efficient and better way to keep track of metrics and counters so that we can do baseline analysis to measure performance."
"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."
"The cost is becoming prohibitive since they moved to a subscription model."
"I found it a little unnecessary to have to rename the configurations within the graphics console in order to have unique names."
"Unified storage (all block, objects, and files) should be in a single storage pool with unified storage concepts, hence providing the user with whatever they want."
"The graphical interface is not always very stable."
"Needs some more monitoring tools."
"There should be more functionality available for routing."
"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."
"The solution must be more flexible."
"The biggest issue with the solution is that it doesn't support Hyper V. It's a big problem."
"They should provide continuous support for data migration."
"Including instrumentation would be a helpful improvement."
"The solution needs to offer more documentation and educational materials."
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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