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."We test live failovers every week, and so far, everything has been running smoothly without anything unexpected."
"StarWind SANs come with outstanding support."
"Being hardware agnostic is a must and definitely scored points for us."
"The license price is one of the cheapest in the market."
"As the client had acquired another company some distance away, they were concerned about having a single SAN in one location or the other. StarWind vSAN allowed us to keep a copy of the data local to each site without asking the client to pay for two SANs in addition to the two new servers they needed."
"Having the ability to migrate machines live in our environment was made possible by this software."
"Active-active HA provides top performance and redundancy."
"StarWind vSAN has allowed us to leverage our server infrastructure more completely without the need to add more hardware."
"The documentation repository is really useful and kept updated."
"It's a software storage solution that can scale as we like. There is also has a parallel feature that enhances the performance of the storage solution. We can separate storage and computing, and we can scale these two parts of the platform to meet business needs efficiently."
"It is a very stable solution."
"An advantage of SANsymphony is its ease of use, especially when installing or upgrading the system."
"It allows data to be available from two DataCore servers."
"The use of the RAM cache allows you to speed up the writing and reading of data while also allowing for a possible increase in performance by increasing the RAM on the servers."
"During the maintenance periods, on any part of the storage or VMware migration, we have had no downtime."
"The most valuable feature of DataCore SANsymphony SDS is its high availability. This solution also exhibits good performance and has high stability."
"Its ease of administration is extremely valuable. It allows me to make better use of my time for other tasks instead of maintaining systems through multiple administration consoles."
"The initial setup was very easy."
"VxRail has improved out organization because we are trying to be a little more proactive and elastic. We are trying to change our conventional approach to development."
"VxRail alleviates the operational constraints within an organization."
"The stability is very nice. We haven't had any issues with the cluster. The cluster is very stable. No problems with slowness. Everything has been stable. It was well-architectured."
"It gives us tons of flexibility. We can create new machines, then destroy them if they don't work out. We test a lot of use cases that may or may not play out. We can build all types of scenarios into virtual machines that we may or may not use. If we don't use them, we just turn them off, no using up resources."
"The update capability of VxRail is crucial for us."
"A valuable feature of the solution is that it allows everything to be integrated into a single model, comprised of hardware and software."
"Some configuration options still demand service restarting."
"I would love to see more vendor selection to be available for the HCA/vSAN appliances."
"Feature-wise we are only waiting for the release of a "planned disaster" feature that would allow us to patch a hypervisor node without having to take the full storage offline."
"It would be nice if we could designate pools, or tiers, for storage of different speeds, and then assign rules to new VMs that would automatically place them into the proper pool."
"The documentation is good. However, if compared with competitors, it could be enhanced and made more professional."
"The only thing that I have any difficulty with is that in order to perform upgrades, it is required that the SANs be detached from the Hosts before that can happen."
"I would like to see improvements in the documentation area."
"The console is something that I believe could be enhanced."
"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."
"SANsymphony is missing some features that vSAN has. For example, vSAN has a special feature called continuous data protection. It provides the ability to go back in time to a given moment. You can see what was on your disk in the past up to two weeks. That's a great feature because ransomware attacks are increasingly common, and that provides you some kind of protection."
"The solution could be better packaged and marketed."
"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."
"Datacore is developing a new WebUI with new dashboards. It is a good idea as the classic GUI is lacking dashboards."
"NVMeoF should be implemented. This protocol will play a major role in storage infrastructure in the future."
"I would like to see SMPA (Shared Multi-Port Array) technology developed with the aim of allowing a configuration identical to other storage arrays."
"The solution is constantly evolving."
"We spend around six months waiting for a confirmation and firmware upgrade to confirm this step."
"There could be better documentation and they should allow everyone to access the simulator."
"It needs faster deployment of security patches."
"The price could be better. The backup mechanism could also be better. Some of our clients prefer to work with backup software from a different vendor. They don't do a built-in backup solution. It would be better if they had guidelines on proper sizing and the whole life cycle from the requirement collection. If there aren't any proper guidelines, how do I go to the customer and evaluate their existing infrastructure? How can you do appropriate sizing to migrate to a hyper-converged environment? I think this is a requirement because most of our clients are migrating to a hyper-converged environment. In the next release, they can improve absolutely anything you can think of to improve the product in general—for example, the clusters and backup software."
"I would love to see license migration from one host to another."
"I would like to see VxRail add duplication features to its hybrid solution."
"A disadvantage is that the initial first deployment can be complicated."
"You have to buy a new server if you want to scale up."
DataCore SANsymphony is ranked 7th in HCI with 54 reviews while VxRail is ranked 1st in HCI with 119 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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