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."I like StarWind's high availability. The failover is almost immediate, so the end users have no idea the guest VM moved at all. We can failover all guest VMs onto a single hypervisor, place it into maintenance mode, install updates, and reboot a hypervisor all during the daytime and remotely, with confidence the process will be successful."
"StarWind Virtual SAN is essentially hardware agnostic, allowing us to build out a specific hardware layer based upon the customer's unique requirements."
"It has allowed us to save a lot of time and money by letting us create a vSAN within a Windows VM on the environment it controls."
"In our case, the cost and high availability are the two most important factors which we were looking for in a solution."
"One of the most valuable features is the way it sets up the virtual SAN, because we don't have to buy a separate appliance for storage. It uses the existing storage on the servers, which is definitely a cost savings for us."
"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 StarWind Virtual SAN provides a clever and unique solution to the Computing Split Brain problem."
"This product now allows us to migrate virtual machines between nodes as if we had a dedicated $100,000 SAN in the mix without the additional cost and management of the SAN."
"It is a stable solution."
"The documentation repository is really useful and kept updated."
"The most valuable feature for us is that we can adjust the size of the storage very easily, without stopping production."
"Mirroring is the most valuable feature because I can provide a high-level of service and optimize the use of obsolete storage."
"It is a very stable solution."
"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."
"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."
"Our system is designed to be scalable and flexible, so it can grow and adapt to meet the changing needs of our clients."
"The solution is scalable."
"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."
"The support is highly responsive."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is integration."
"The most valuable feature is high availability."
"It is easy to use for management and operations teams because the tools are in one place."
"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 is quite stable."
"Currently, the StarWind management console is a bit clunky to navigate and isn't the most user-intuitive interface."
"There is no IPv6 support. That is our only issue at this time."
"Some configuration options still demand service restarting."
"There should be some kind of active monitoring connected to StarWind vSAN, so you will be able to act when needed."
"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."
"The main thing I would like to see improved is the level of documentation."
"Ongoing improvements in read and write performance would help meet increasingly demanding workloads."
"I'd love to see more clarification for us folks who are smart enough to do some damage yet not smart enough to use CLI."
"I think the performance reporting can be improved by adding historical statistics into a database for the purpose of comparing."
"I think an easier way to open a service call, right through the DataCore GUI, would be an improvement, especially when there is an urgent issue."
"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."
"Management could be improved. The management console sometimes reacts very slowly."
"We are waiting for container support (on the roadmap), as well as a user-friendly full web-administration capability, and an improved API."
"There is no way of quickly matching the exact size of a vDisk to a disk pool."
"I found it a little unnecessary to have to rename the configurations within the graphics console in order to have unique names."
"Problem detection could be easier. It should help customers identify problems very quickly because it's not easy to analyze on the platform today."
"The solution needs to offer more documentation and educational materials."
"Including instrumentation would be a helpful improvement."
"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."
"I am not really impressed by the technical support of this solution."
"The storage capability must be improved."
"Compared to similar solutions, Dell PowerFlex is not cost-effective and has room for improvement."
"I think there might be some room for improvement when it comes to pricing, because although I know how to convert customers, at the end of day, it's quite expensive. Sometimes your feature architecture is still coming out much cheaper than hardware costs for your infrastructure."
"We're also running Hyper-V virtual machines. But we recently discovered that migration of the Hyper-V virtual machines is a bit challenging. Maybe if Dell EMC can come out with a tool that will make it very easy for us to migrate the Microsoft Hyper-V machine, that may be an improvement."
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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