We performed a comparison between DataCore SANsymphony and StarWind HyperConverged Appliance 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."StarWind Virtual SAN can improve an organization's storage infrastructure by providing high availability, scalability, cost-effectiveness, performance, and ease of use."
"The product's core feature of virtualizing our storage is by far the most valuable."
"Before VSAN, hypervisor configuration changes and updates resulted in VM outages. Now, downtime is dramatically reduced."
"The most useful aspect is the hyper-converged SD SAN and the ease to expand it by just adding cheap SSD or NVME disks."
"The backup is readily available for use, and the restoration process is easy."
"It also provides a high degree of mobility, as the virtual SAN can be moved relatively painlessly between on-site devices and the cloud."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the support. They are excellent and you can learn a lot from the support team."
"StarWind vSAN is a great solution to create a redundant two-node-only Hyper-V cluster, both for domain or workgroup scenarios."
"Our central storage has very high availability. DataCore SANsymphony ensures high business continuity."
"It is a stable solution."
"I am very happy with this product's ability to adapt, increase, and modify existing infrastructures."
"The most valuable feature for us is that we can adjust the size of the storage very easily, without stopping production."
"DataCore has helped provide flexible, highly available, high-performance storage that otherwise would have been outside our price range."
"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 synchronous mirror allows us to operate a fully redundant storage solution that is distributed across two sites."
"SANsymphony is flexible, with many potential options for implementation. SANsymphony's can be used with VMware, Hyper-V, or even with a hypervisor agnostic approach. It can also be used for strictly physical non-virtualized solutions."
"Customer service has been excellent. Any questions we have had have been answered quickly."
"Overall, the solution has improved our system's performance. I was concerned about the physical-to-virtual conversion of our database server. It's actually much faster now, as a virtualized host on this Hyper-V cluster."
"We no longer need multiple staff members performing small, mundane tasks."
"Being able to upgrade machines and software during business operations just by switching nodes has been a huge improvement. We"
"Reliability and overall uptime are key as we're also hosting client environments in addition to our own."
"I do like that I can manage StarWind with a console running on my local desktop."
"The solution has provided our company with a fully redundant virtual environment at half the cost of a traditional SAN implementation."
"The hardware footprint is perfect. It fits in our rack perfectly, and we were able to condense a lot of physical servers we had. It has greatly eliminated the excess stuff in our server rack..."
"I think the setup could be streamlined a bit."
"High availability for direct attached hardware drives could be useful for increasing the performance of a storage appliance."
"StarWind currently has a Windows native application that it uses for management. There is not a web-based GUI at this time."
"It would be nice to see a new UI for the windows client, as it is not the easiest to find settings."
"There is a general lack of documentation, especially up-to-date documentation to get started."
"While it is possible to implement disk encryption in StarWind using Windows Bitlocker, such a solution can be a little tricky to manage."
"While we had little to no issues in setting up StarWind and received excellent support from the StarWind technicians, we would have appreciated a clearer guideline for a setup with the free version of StarWind Management Console or, in other words - for the setup with the PowerShell."
"The StarWind Management Console is available only for Microsoft Windows/Windows Server, and should also be available for Linux and macOS, as it would reduce implementation costs."
"DataCore should integrate its own file server into SANsymphony."
"I think the performance reporting can be improved by adding historical statistics into a database for the purpose of comparing."
"SANsymphony is missing some features that vSAN has. For example, vSAN has a special feature called continuous data protection. It provides the ability to go back in time to a given moment. You can see what was on your disk in the past up to two weeks. That's a great feature because ransomware attacks are increasingly common, and that provides you some kind of protection."
"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."
"It would be ideal if they were providing archive licensing with the ability to create a second pool on existing storage nodes."
"The solution is constantly evolving."
"When I sometimes reboot for maintenance, the connectivity from the iSCSI initiator host could be improved."
"The alert system could have more features."
"Multi cluster support for their Command Console would be very beneficial. Currently, you can only work with a single cluster at a time. The console is new so I expect much growth in this area in the near future. The other area that could be improved is the tech support locale."
"I think some performance metrics would be nice to see, especially on the storage side."
"Shipping options should be explained in detail and offer more white glove delivery options even if it comes at an additional cost for some SMBs without docks."
"Most meetings are done via Zoom, and I'm sure you could switch to a text based conversation if needed as they seem like a very accommodating team. It's not something I would worry about if you are a potential client."
"There is room for improvement in the setup and installation phase. We had massive problems connecting the StarWind appliances to our network infrastructure. That wasn't necessarily a StarWind problem. I don't know if their business partner in the UK wasn't used to having to deal with the supply of the cabling infrastructure, but that's where the problems started."
"The web-managed interface (a separate VM) could be better."
"What would have to be done urgently is the adaptation of the hardware to the configuration."
"It would be nice if the software told you a new version was available and prompted you to do the upgrade to keep everything up to date."
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DataCore SANsymphony is ranked 4th in Software Defined Storage (SDS) with 54 reviews while StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is ranked 5th in Software Defined Storage (SDS) with 65 reviews. DataCore SANsymphony is rated 9.2, while StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is rated 9.6. The top reviewer of DataCore SANsymphony writes "Robust with good replication and access protection ". On the other hand, the top reviewer of StarWind HyperConverged Appliance writes "Straightforward to use with good remote management and a simple GUI". DataCore SANsymphony is most compared with VMware vSAN, HPE SimpliVity, Red Hat Ceph Storage, StorMagic SvSAN and VxRail, whereas StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is most compared with Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), VMware vSAN, Dell PowerFlex, VxRail and StorMagic SvSAN. See our DataCore SANsymphony vs. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance report.
See our list of best Software Defined Storage (SDS) vendors and best HCI vendors.
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