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."The StarWind tech support is extremely helpful, especially during the initial setup."
"The most valuable feature is the fact that the nodes are Active/Active, and allow us to do upgrades on any node without any downtime."
"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."
"Active-active work mode leads to true redundancy of storage and allows us to distribute the load between multiple nodes."
"It provides shared storage to multiple hypervisor hosts. Times had changed, however. StarWind Virtual SAN is the “software replaces hardware” for SAN. We have access control and CCTV systems up and running using Microsoft clustering and shared storage"
"High Availability is the best feature of product."
"This was a great implementation for a small to mid-size business."
"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."
"During the maintenance periods, on any part of the storage or VMware migration, we have had no downtime."
"It is a very stable solution."
"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."
"For us, fault tolerance is the most important feature of DataCore."
"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."
"It is a well-proven, automated management tool in all dynamic provisioning, auto-tiering, great performance, parallel I/O, cache speed mechanism, etc."
"The ability to pool the storage to leverage thin-provisioning is a huge saving in space and costs."
"The most valuable feature for us is that we can adjust the size of the storage very easily, without stopping production."
"We no longer need multiple staff members performing small, mundane tasks."
"Reliability and overall uptime are key as we're also hosting client environments in addition to our own."
"Servers came pre-configured for our environment and as soon as they were in the rack, Starwind got them up and running."
"Product functionality and performance are wonderful."
"The StarWind array has greatly improved our workflow internally as it is quite easy to use and provides robust features that allow us to provide anything our clients need quickly and efficiently."
"What makes it valuable is the high-availability. In the education field, when you've got students in classrooms, any loss of service disrupts the lessons to a point that the whole lesson is affected. For part of the business which isn't business-critical, to have a little bit of a hiccup wouldn't be such a big thing, but here, it's the high availability of service that is important."
"We were able to set it up via the documentation and only needed their support a handful of times."
"We have found the live migration to be the most valuable feature. It allows us to seamlessly maintain our servers, as well as have peace of mind if something goes wrong."
"It should be improved in the way it detects the right filesystem image after a complete shutdown of the system or in the case of disaster recovery."
"I would love to see more vendor selection to be available for the HCA/vSAN appliances."
"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"
"While it is possible to implement disk encryption in StarWind using Windows Bitlocker, such a solution can be a little tricky to manage."
"Perhaps the developer should refine the product management through PowerShell."
"I see no need for major improvements but there could be some improvements in the form of notifications and the simplifying of maintenance mode."
"I want to suggest that the complexity of the startup and shutdown procedure needs to be reduced."
"We don't really have any issues with this product."
"For customers or technicians who don't speak and understand English, it would be great to have other language support, all the more so given the number of countries in which SanSymphony is used."
"Datacore is developing a new WebUI with new dashboards. It is a good idea as the classic GUI is lacking dashboards."
"One limitation of this solution is that it's Windows-based, e.g. one requirement to install DataCore SANsymphony SDS is putting it on a Windows server machine. It relies on Windows and that is a limitation because there are some customers who are looking for non Windows systems."
"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."
"We'd like to manage the raid on the disk directly in SanSymphony."
"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."
"I think the performance reporting can be improved by adding historical statistics into a database for the purpose of comparing."
"The only issues are when Hyper V itself has limitations and I'd love to see support or enhancement in the area of direct-attached GPU cards."
"An emphasis on security can be improved."
"The only issue we have seen is with the StarWind Server Manager. We have had to continually reboot the server in order to use it."
"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 response time is usually several hours after the issue occurred."
"Maybe they could have a support portal that you can have direct access to a current support representative."
"In the future, it would be nice to be able to migrate from the Windows vSAN to the Linux vSAN without having to do a full restore from backups."
"The monitoring and reporting console can be improved in the sense that it can have more information on it."
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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.
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