We performed a comparison between Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series and DataCore SANsymphony 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 biggest benefit was that it allowed us to provide SAN services on a limited hardware budget."
"They offer top-tier support."
"The StarWind Virtual SAN provides a clever and unique solution to the Computing Split Brain problem."
"It allows you to use ANY consumer or enterprise HDDs and SSDs, and that's a really great thing!"
"Besides being 80% cheaper than the other alternatives, the simplicity makes reconfiguration and support much easier."
"The top-notch support before, during, and after deployments are better than any other vendor I have come across."
"Before VSAN, hypervisor configuration changes and updates resulted in VM outages. Now, downtime is dramatically reduced."
"You can build cheap, reliable, replicated virtual machines clusters using simple servers with an all flash disk or SAS\SATA hybrid tiered by performance storage."
"The solution can scale up and out."
"The most important benefits that we've seen from this solution is that it reduces the cost of management and it has easy monitoring systems."
"The possibility to share the workload is one of its most valuable features. We have many applications which have need of workloads only a few times in a month, so we share HyperFlex with them."
"This is not the only product we use, so we have other solutions to compare it with. We can compare different products and different vendors and tell our customers which products have which advantages and disadvantages so that they can leverage these products in their own environment. This product helps us to understand the customer's needs and what issues they can run into."
"Stretch cluster allows us to warranty a service for the customer."
"The most valuable feature of Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is its performance."
"The storage system is its most valuable feature. It has eliminated our entire need for having to worry about storage. We were storing a lot of syslog data and using a lot of templates in our data center. With the storage system, we are now saving an enormous amount of space."
"Performance-wise, everything is good. So far, we haven't had any issues. There has been no downtime at all."
"Mirroring is the most valuable feature because I can provide a high-level of service and optimize the use of obsolete storage."
"The dashboard is very intuitive, and there are many counters to diagnose what happens during a short period (like when a backup is in progress)."
"The interface is user-friendly."
"Our system is designed to be scalable and flexible, so it can grow and adapt to meet the changing needs of our clients."
"The documentation repository is really useful and kept updated."
"The ability to pool the storage to leverage thin-provisioning is a huge saving in space and costs."
"Active-active is the most valuable aspect for us."
"For us, fault tolerance is the most important feature of DataCore."
"While we had no problems setting the system up, and service technicians from StarWind could assist us very well, they could provide some form of in-depth documentation."
"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."
"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."
"There should be some kind of active monitoring connected to StarWind vSAN, so you will be able to act when needed."
"The documentation could be clearer in terms of explaining the installation."
"It would help if the manufacturer provided clearer and more detailed documentation, with explanations of how the application can be installed in various HA configurations."
"Security on the ISCSI protocol could be improved by adding features like OS-type control access, especially for the data center environment."
"For the StarWind VSA vSphere solution, I would like to see a simpler and automated virtual machine installation process in terms of network settings."
"The initial setup could be faster, due to the prerequisites."
"The primary improvements should be made in the cluster storage controller VMs so that they don't break the upgrade process."
"We would like HyperFlex to connect the storage directly into Fabric Interconnect along with the features of the solution. We have enough ports in HyperFlex. We don't want to buy another set of switches to connect to Fabric Interconnect, complicating the solution."
"We had a bit of complexity to think about how to migrate our legacy infrastructure into Cisco HyperFlex."
"We are moving further out with more cloud solutions, so we need HyperFlex to be more cloud-connected. They should develop more connection to Amazon Web Services and Google cloud because our customers use their services and are moving in that direction."
"If we could have just a single pane of glass, where everything can be managed through that one app, rather than have multiple apps, it would be great."
"HyperFlex could be improved by reducing the minimum number of nodes supported from three to two."
"The solution could improve by having more customization."
"If you're dealing with big databases or transactional databases, it might not be the best-suited solution. The design of DataCore's solution isn't oriented towards this type of data."
"Having an enterprise "Storage Dashboard" that can show capacity, usage, performance, and any issues would be very beneficial."
"DataCore SANsymphony should integrate file servers at a good price into the solution."
"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."
"I would like to see SMPA (Shared Multi-Port Array) technology developed with the aim of allowing a configuration identical to other storage arrays."
"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."
"I still see room for improvement with DataCore SANsymphony in the area of alarm and task management."
"The solution is constantly evolving."
Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is ranked 8th in HCI with 90 reviews while DataCore SANsymphony is ranked 7th in HCI with 54 reviews. Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is rated 8.0, while DataCore SANsymphony is rated 9.2. The top reviewer of Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series writes "A fast and easy deployment that allows secure access to our medical applications ". On the other hand, the top reviewer of DataCore SANsymphony writes "Robust with good replication and access protection ". Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is most compared with VMware vSAN, VxRail, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), Dell PowerFlex and HPE SimpliVity, whereas DataCore SANsymphony is most compared with VMware vSAN, HPE SimpliVity, StorMagic SvSAN, Red Hat Ceph Storage and VxRail. See our Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series vs. DataCore SANsymphony report.
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