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 product gave us a cost-effective way to deploy a highly available server environment."
"Recovery and maintenance are now less stressful and most importantly, it allows our users to keep working."
"The control panel is nice. It gives you a lot of good feedback as to the status and health of the VSAN."
"StarWind vSAN is a great solution to create a redundant two-node-only Hyper-V cluster, both for domain or workgroup scenarios."
"It integrates (fully) with VMware and Veeam, my hypervisor, and backup vendors, so for me, all the puzzle pieces simply fit and work smoothly."
"The most useful aspect is the hyper-converged SD SAN and the ease to expand it by just adding cheap SSD or NVME disks."
"Quick setup, great support, stability is great"
"The solution offers easy one-click PowerShell scripts that are ready to run."
"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."
"Active-active is the most valuable aspect for us."
"For us, fault tolerance is the most important feature of DataCore."
"Good security with this solution."
"The dashboard is very intuitive, and there are many counters to diagnose what happens during a short period (like when a backup is in progress)."
"An advantage of SANsymphony is its ease of use, especially when installing or upgrading the system."
"The use of the RAM cache allows you to speed up the writing and reading of data while also allowing for a possible increase in performance by increasing the RAM on the servers."
"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."
"The catalog of APIs for automation has been most valuable, although they are quite limited."
"The setup was very straightforward."
"Perfectly suits customers dealing with the combination of future storage needs and, at the same time, keeping up their computing power."
"The resiliency and data protection are the most valuable features."
"The integration with AWS is a valuable feature."
"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."
"Saves us a lot of space in the data center."
"It would be nice to see a new UI for the windows client, as it is not the easiest to find settings."
"The main issue we ran into was the documentation. We attempted to set up the product in our test environment by ourselves and ran into several areas of the documentation that were unclear to us."
"I would like additional documentation regarding possible networking configurations with 10GbE switching."
"It is hard to find adequate technical documentation on their support website."
"There needs to be more visibility on how long the cloud replication will take as there is no current ETA."
"I found that certain browsers are not fully compatible with the administration web access portal."
"Perhaps the developer should refine the product management through PowerShell."
"I would like to see more advanced free versions."
"NVMeoF should be implemented. This protocol will play a major role in storage infrastructure in the future."
"We'd like to manage the raid on the disk directly in SanSymphony."
"The solution could be better packaged and marketed."
"I would like to see SMPA (Shared Multi-Port Array) technology developed with the aim of allowing a configuration identical to other storage arrays."
"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."
"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 found it a little unnecessary to have to rename the configurations within the graphics console in order to have unique names."
"There is no way of quickly matching the exact size of a vDisk to a disk pool."
"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."
"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."
"Exporting data from the dashboard is not very user-friendly. It's just designed in a way that it's going to cover let's say 90%, 80%, of the end-users needs. If you need more sophisticated reporting it's not easy to have."
"We've had some issues around the licensing."
"Needs some more monitoring tools."
"Including instrumentation would be a helpful improvement."
"The solution must be more flexible."
"Compared to similar solutions, Dell PowerFlex is not cost-effective and has room for improvement."
DataCore SANsymphony is ranked 6th in HCI with 54 reviews while Dell PowerFlex is ranked 8th in HCI with 20 reviews. DataCore SANsymphony is rated 9.2, while Dell PowerFlex is rated 8.0. 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 "Is very resilient and protects our data, but the solution is complex". 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), HPE Alletra dHCI and HPE SimpliVity. See our DataCore SANsymphony vs. Dell PowerFlex report.
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