We performed a comparison between DataCore SANsymphony and VMware vSAN 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."StarWind saved us about 80% of our storage costs over our old solution."
"Active-active work mode leads to true redundancy of storage and allows us to distribute the load between multiple nodes."
"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 includes every feature that a traditional SAN offers and so much more."
"The solution is also quite flexible. As an example, other vSAN solutions that we looked at had more stringent requirements regarding mixed HDD/SSD storage which wouldn't have worked in our environment."
"The configuration is so much simpler than that of a traditional SAN with fewer points of failure to worry about."
"The product creates opportunities with hybrid on-premise solutions."
"DataCore SANsymphony's stability is okay."
"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."
"The most valuable feature for us is that we can adjust the size of the storage very easily, without stopping production."
"CDP is an important feature for avoiding data loss in the event of ransomware attacks. You need more storage capacity, however, you get the possibility to return at any time and use the data saved up to that point. The recovery is much faster than with a classic restore."
"The DataCore system has been rock solid since we have been using it - from 2007 on."
"Oracle OLTP benchmark to test how it improves the performance while using flash drive NVMe."
"It allows data to be available from two DataCore servers."
"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."
"VMware comes with different stacks like VMware Cloud Foundation, which is integrated with different VMware modules. There's interoperability between VMware products."
"The solution fits well with my requirements."
"The valuable feature of the solution is the total hyperconverged facility."
"The product's initial setup phase is simple."
"I like vSAN because they release features incrementally, every year, and you don't have to upgrade your hardware to get those features. If you bought a traditional SAN, you would have to upgrade your hardware constantly, every three years: You would get it, and it is how it is for three years. But on vSAN, you upgrade when you have to, when your hardware gets old or when you need more capacity. It's great, you get new features constantly."
"It is very easy to set up and very easy to use. It is very useful."
"VMware vSAN's most valuable features are the capability to consolidate standalone physical infrastructure into virtualization and the ease of management."
"VMware vSAN is easy to implement in a VMware environment and it is not expensive."
"Scaling the product is fairly easy except for the computing aspect. It would entail another appliance. While not a show stopper, it isn't as easy as dropping in a few extra SSDs."
"I would like to see options for automated notifications of any changes, including, for example, synchronization issues."
"Some of the documentation seems to be a bit older and refers to deprecated items."
"I would like additional documentation regarding possible networking configurations with 10GbE switching."
"For improvement, I would like to see how the software determines which networks to use for which purpose. It seems like the naming terminology changes a bit from here to there."
"There is no Italian-language version of the software available."
"If there was one feature I would like to see it would be a built-in subsystem for managing UPS backups shutdown procedures providing a way to initiate VM shutdown on all host servers, shut down the host servers, then put the fault-tolerant mirroring in standby, and finally shut down the StarWind SANs."
"The documentation could be clearer in terms of explaining the installation."
"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."
"NVMeoF should be implemented. This protocol will play a major role in storage infrastructure in the future."
"I think the performance reporting can be improved by adding historical statistics into a database for the purpose of comparing."
"Datacore is developing a new WebUI with new dashboards. It is a good idea as the classic GUI is lacking dashboards."
"DataCore should integrate its own file server into SANsymphony."
"The cloud reporting interface is quite poor compared to other vendors."
"I think an easier way to open a service call, right through the DataCore GUI, would be an improvement, especially when there is an urgent issue."
"The solution could be better packaged and marketed."
"There is always a challenge with their firmware."
"I think it needs to be more cost-effective. I would also say that even though the capacity is good, there is also room for improvement there. Also, they could improve the security of the system."
"The UI could certainly be better. The inside into what's actually going on with vSAN would be nice to know."
"Its integration with a hybrid cloud can be improved. Its scalability can also be improved so that it can be integrated with more than 32 nodes. The maximum number of nodes is okay, but our use cases could probably do with more nodes, probably up to 64. In terms of new features, it should probably have the basic support for high-speed networking spaces."
"Based on my testing, I would like to expand deduplication to include hybrid deployments and not just for all-flash deployments."
"The only thing I can think of at this time is to improve the performance monitoring and performance visibility within the GUI."
"The platform's cost affects the business. This particular area needs improvement."
"This solution would benefit from better collaboration with Cisco for driver updates."
DataCore SANsymphony is ranked 7th in HCI with 54 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 2nd in HCI with 227 reviews. DataCore SANsymphony is rated 9.2, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of DataCore SANsymphony writes "Robust with good replication and access protection ". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSAN writes "Very stable, easy to set up, and easy to use". DataCore SANsymphony is most compared with HPE SimpliVity, Red Hat Ceph Storage, StorMagic SvSAN, NetApp ONTAP and VxRail, whereas VMware vSAN is most compared with VxRail, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, HPE SimpliVity, Red Hat Ceph Storage and HPE Nimble Storage. See our DataCore SANsymphony vs. VMware vSAN report.
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