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."Integration with virtualization platforms helped us to resolve many issues we were facing while using the physical storage."
"When using new (warranty) servers, you can forget about the storage service for several years. The users will not even notice the failure of two servers out of three."
"PowerShell library is pretty good feature as I created with APC PowerChute a script to put volumes on maintenance mode then turning off the StarWind nodes together with the VM and Hosts when UPS reaches 15 percent, this way after a blackout or electrical problems when turning servers on again, there is no issues for syncing or data loss due to energy interrupts."
"The product's core feature of virtualizing our storage is by far the most valuable."
"The backup is readily available for use, and the restoration process is easy."
"StarWind Virtual SAN is a very mature software that supersedes its capabilities with my use cases."
"It integrates (fully) with VMware and Veeam, my hypervisor, and backup vendors, so for me, all the puzzle pieces simply fit and work smoothly."
"The most useful aspect is the hyper-converged SD SAN and the ease to expand it by just adding cheap SSD or NVME disks."
"An advantage of SANsymphony is its ease of use, especially when installing or upgrading the system."
"Storage is always available."
"It allows data to be available from two DataCore servers."
"The documentation repository is really useful and kept updated."
"The solution's most valuable feature is its versatility, with there being support for all new hardware technologies and platforms, disc mirroring and very effective auto tiering."
"The most valuable feature of DataCore SANsymphony SDS is its high availability. This solution also exhibits good performance and has high stability."
"Oracle OLTP benchmark to test how it improves the performance while using flash drive NVMe."
"Active-active is the most valuable aspect for us."
"The most important feature to me, in my role, is cost. In the renewal cycle for storage, it was about a 40 percent saving compared to going to an all-flash array, which is what we first looked at doing. Secondly, performance: we need clinical data access in five seconds and need to do everything we can to retain that metric. Thirdly, I was really pleasantly surprised during the data migration across to vSAN, that it happened almost instantly whereas, in the past, migrating from array to array was an arduous and fraught process."
"The solution's unified administration is its most valuable aspect."
"In my opinion, vSAN is the most natural way to migrate to a fully hyperconverged solution. If a customer needs a more scalable solution with consolidated management, vSAN is excellent."
"The technical support is good. We are always thankful for the technical support from VMware. They are very supportive when we have a technical problem."
"The solution fits well with my requirements."
"The ability to have an HA cluster in the absence of a shared storage device or SAN."
"The product's initial setup phase was very straightforward."
"The product’s most valuable features are performance and expandability."
"It would be nice to add the ability to use raw partitions instead of file containers."
"I would say that the documentation is mostly great, however, some features could be expanded upon a bit."
"The system failovers properly on its own without too much worry."
"The setup and documentation for the installation with the free version could definitely be improved."
"If it's possible to make a driver/solution that does not make use of the iSCSI targets of Windows, that would be great. I don't know if that's possible, however, it could make the configuration a little easier."
"New versions of this solution should be tested more thoroughly before the release as we had a few problems with one version due to a bug."
"The number of different ways you can set it up can make it a little daunting."
"Android app for monitoring and receiving push notifications as alarms or monitoring I/O from any mobile device could be a good feature and nice to have as we are not always on our desk."
"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."
"DataCore should integrate its own file server into SANsymphony."
"The cost is becoming prohibitive since they moved to a subscription model."
"I'd like to see the company make the renewal of the software cheaper."
"Its interface could be better."
"There is no way of quickly matching the exact size of a vDisk to a disk pool."
"When I sometimes reboot for maintenance, the connectivity from the iSCSI initiator host could be improved."
"The solution is constantly evolving."
"We do see weird things crop up every now and again. It will say that a drive gets kicked off even though it's fine, and we have to re-add it."
"I would like compression and deduplication to be offered for offloading hardware, instead of doing it with software. That would be nice."
"I would like for the next release to be a bit cheaper."
"Based on my testing, I would like to expand deduplication to include hybrid deployments and not just for all-flash deployments."
"Because of virtual storage, the system reaches reserve storage for its functions. It also consumes a certain amount of storage, which then results in the creation of a fault tolerance for the system. All of this adds to a lot of capacity being consumed in terms of storage for each drive for vSan. I find this to be one drawback of using vSan."
"Its installation should be easier, and its price should be cheaper. It would be good for the product if they can include the data locality feature."
"The solution could be improved by having more filtered and multiple view volumes instead of a single view."
"It is an expensive solution."
DataCore SANsymphony is ranked 7th in HCI with 54 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 2nd in HCI with 226 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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