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 most valuable feature of this solution is the support. They are excellent and you can learn a lot from the support team."
"We are running Hyper-V on twin servers in failover, and being able to manage servers from anywhere I need to, virtually, has been a game changer."
"It has improved our organization in terms of its uptime as our main cluster has never been offline due to a SAN failure."
"The primary purpose of this software is to create a virtual SAN between local storage on Hyper-V hosts. I find this feature most valuable since it accomplishes this quite well."
"StarWind Virtual SAN offers high availability and data resilience features to prevent data loss if hardware fails."
"The configuration is so much simpler than that of a traditional SAN with fewer points of failure to worry about."
"StarWind is very easy to use, even if you have had no experience using a SAN before."
"The StarWind Virtual SAN provides a clever and unique solution to the Computing Split Brain problem."
"Oracle OLTP benchmark to test how it improves the performance while using flash drive NVMe."
"For us, fault tolerance is the most important feature of DataCore."
"The synchronous mirror allows us to operate a fully redundant storage solution that is distributed across two sites."
"Auto-tiering to obtain performance at a lower cost without the customer having to purchase ultra-fast storage is great."
"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."
"DataCore SANsymphony's stability is okay."
"The most valuable feature of DataCore SANsymphony SDS is its high availability. This solution also exhibits good performance and has high stability."
"The DataCore system has been rock solid since we have been using it - from 2007 on."
"The setup was very straightforward."
"The solution is scalable."
"The solution is quite stable."
"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."
"The solution was connected to alternate storage. It provides great scalability and reliability."
"It is easy to use for management and operations teams because the tools are in one place."
"We're doing a lot of VMware for IT so this solution is really valuable from a VMH point of view. We're trying to assist our customers mainly with management, because that's what they want. The most important aspects are ease of management, as well as ease of configuration, allowing them to attach additional nodes and resources for the applications."
"It has reduced downtime. Before, on our previous solution, we used to have downtime on some of the servers because of the sort of convention. But currently I've not experienced any downtime on any of the servers, and there is no more resource congestion."
"Updates seem to be non-existent."
"It would be good to have a little more access to control certain aspects within the UI."
"There is one issue as far as licensing goes and that is a lack of documentation online for users when transitioning from the free version to the paid version, or vice versa."
"StarWind currently has a Windows native application that it uses for management. There is not a web-based GUI at this time."
"Geolocation could be better, for example, for site mirroring for DR purposes."
"I would love to see more vendor selection to be available for the HCA/vSAN appliances."
"The main thing I would like to see improved is the level of documentation."
"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."
"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."
"I would like to see reporting added, such as a monthly connectivity report."
"The alert system could have more features."
"There is room for improvement in the graphical interface."
"We are waiting for container support (on the roadmap), as well as a user-friendly full web-administration capability, and an improved API."
"The cost is becoming prohibitive since they moved to a subscription model."
"Having an enterprise "Storage Dashboard" that can show capacity, usage, performance, and any issues would be very beneficial."
"When I sometimes reboot for maintenance, the connectivity from the iSCSI initiator host could be improved."
"I am not really impressed by the technical support of this solution."
"Needs some more monitoring tools."
"The solution must be more flexible."
"We've had some issues around the licensing."
"Licensing restrictions can be frustrating."
"It would be great to get earlier access to beta builds because we have to develop providers on our own. The APIs and enablers for custom automation could also be improved."
"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."
"There should be more functionality available for routing."
DataCore SANsymphony is ranked 7th in HCI with 54 reviews while Dell PowerFlex is ranked 8th in HCI with 19 reviews. DataCore SANsymphony is rated 9.2, while Dell PowerFlex is rated 8.2. 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 "Infrastructure management solution that offers rapid provisioning of computer storage but the APIs and enablers for custom automation could be improved". 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) and HPE SimpliVity. See our DataCore SANsymphony vs. Dell PowerFlex report.
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