We performed a comparison between DataCore SANsymphony and VxRail 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 features that I found most valuable are ease of use of the software that StarWind offers - with the first setup being a bit painful."
"The failover protection and the ability to expand storage and nodes with no downtime are by far the best physical features we have benefited from."
"Active-active HA provides top performance and redundancy."
"StarWind vSAN is easy to deploy and administer."
"The most valuable feature is the reliable storage replication, which enables me to create a robust infrastructure to run our 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."
"It's quite easy to manage."
"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."
"Mirroring is the most valuable feature because I can provide a high-level of service and optimize the use of obsolete storage."
"Our central storage has very high availability. DataCore SANsymphony ensures high business continuity."
"I am very happy with this product's ability to adapt, increase, and modify existing infrastructures."
"The dashboard is very intuitive, and there are a lot of counters to diagnose what happens during a short period (like when a backup is in progress)."
"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 DataCore system has been rock solid since we have been using it - from 2007 on."
"During the maintenance periods, on any part of the storage or VMware migration, we have had no downtime."
"DataCore has helped provide flexible, highly available, high-performance storage that otherwise would have been outside our price range."
"I like the new releases that Dell EMC is doing with VMware. They are allowing for flexibility across the hybrid cloud. This allows organizations to use containers and to be able to move into the public cloud, but also not have lock-in. They can come back to the private cloud when they want to, so it's creating a lot of flexibility across the stack."
"We like the design and that it meets data storage needs."
"It helps our servers and it is very efficient."
"It is scalable. When you are buying it, you have to buy a minimum of three nodes. After that, if you want to add more nodes, you can buy can buy them. You can also add-on additional compute and storage."
"The support has been excellent, especially if you compare it to IBM."
"My customers use it for VDI. It has been very usable and very fast to use with VDI. On the VxRail side also, it has been very fast."
"With VxRail, we can manage the life cycle of a virtual machine."
"VxRail's integration with VMware environments is very good. Our VxRail is built on VMware, and the integration is seamless. We haven't faced any challenges. We can migrate VMs between servers in real-time and replicate them to our DR site without any problems."
"The gathering of monthly consumption and performance reports for future dissemination to concerned parties is very important. Unfortunately, StarWinds vSAN doesn't offer this functionality."
"Perhaps more reporting features on the utilization, usage, and performance of the configured high-availability images and underlying physical disks would be helpful."
"If there was one thing we could request, it would be the ability to shrink volumes. For example, we want to be able to decrease in the size of the volume."
"One main thing this product needs to work on is reporting."
"When you will cease your contract with StarWind (for support) your product won't be updated and that is a big selling point, especially for us, as we have loads of products from StarWind."
"The only way I can see this product needing improvement is the consultation level of the StarWind sales and engineers."
"I would like to see more advanced free versions."
"I'm sure it needs bug fixes..."
"The graphical interface is not always very stable."
"It would be ideal if they were providing archive licensing with the ability to create a second pool on existing storage nodes."
"Management could be improved. The management console sometimes reacts very slowly."
"I think the performance reporting can be improved by adding historical statistics into a database for the purpose of comparing."
"Having an enterprise "Storage Dashboard" that can show capacity, usage, performance, and any issues would be very beneficial."
"NVMeoF should be implemented. This protocol will play a major role in storage infrastructure in the future."
"DataCore SANsymphony should integrate file servers at a good price into the solution."
"Right now, the version used is run on Microsoft Windows Server. Having a Linux version or even an appliance would be better as it would eliminate the use of additional licensing for another piece of hardware."
"We'd like to see more automation capabilities in the future."
"Having a native replication would be an improvement."
"The fact that is based on vSAN is the main issue of this solution."
"One challenge customers face with VxRail is the high cost of scalability. The price is higher if they want to add memory or capacity after purchasing the tool for three or five years. Each drive and RAM module is licensed separately, making the architecture costly. It would benefit Dell to review this licensing model and make it more cost-effective and flexible for customers."
"VxRail is a closed system with an out-of-the -box solution approach, it has basic 3 layers, Hardware, Network, Storage, Software, (Virtualizing) Applications. Release notes and improvement tips, patches from the back office, the business units, should be frequent and up to the patches which are coming from different vendors as far as the operating system application and also the technology itself is concerned."
"It should not be deployed on one hypervisor. There should be multiple hypervisors supported like Hyper-V or KVM."
"It's not really flexible with different use cases."
"It would be nice if the update process was shortened and that patching would be simpler."
DataCore SANsymphony is ranked 7th in HCI with 54 reviews while VxRail is ranked 1st in HCI with 117 reviews. DataCore SANsymphony is rated 9.2, while VxRail is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of DataCore SANsymphony writes "Robust with good replication and access protection ". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VxRail writes "Offers a hassle-free, complete package, and is energy-efficient". DataCore SANsymphony is most compared with VMware vSAN, HPE SimpliVity, Red Hat Ceph Storage, StorMagic SvSAN and Dell vSAN Ready Nodes, whereas VxRail is most compared with VMware vSAN, Dell PowerFlex, HPE SimpliVity, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) and HPE Hyper Converged. See our DataCore SANsymphony vs. VxRail report.
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