DataCore SANsymphony vs Dell XC Appliance [EOL] comparison

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between DataCore SANsymphony and Dell XC Appliance [EOL] based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, Nutanix, VMware and others in HCI.
To learn more, read our detailed HCI Report (Updated: March 2024).
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Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"The ability to choose our own hardware and our own vendors for this was hugely beneficial, as we had pre-existing relationships with vendors we wanted to maintain.""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.""The StarWind Virtual SAN provides a clever and unique solution to the Computing Split Brain problem.""Their support goes above and beyond with the integration of their software.""It integrates (fully) with VMware and Veeam, my hypervisor, and backup vendors, so for me, all the puzzle pieces simply fit and work smoothly.""Their support staff is comprised of true experts who can also communicate clearly.""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.""It's very easy to resize disks and they show up in VMware almost instantly."

More StarWind Virtual SAN Pros →

"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's ability to seamlessly move virtual volume data between storage pools as well as their synchronous mirroring has made maintenance and disaster recovery planning achievable.""The synchronous mirror allows us to operate a fully redundant storage solution that is distributed across two sites.""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 documentation repository is really useful and kept updated.""During the maintenance periods, on any part of the storage or VMware migration, we have had no downtime.""Active-active is the most valuable aspect for us.""I found the solution to be very stable."

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"The most valuable feature is the low management overhead, and the lower skill set required to manage it.""The most valuable features are the deduplication and the compression features.""The solution's best feature is its simplicity. It's so simple to deploy it. You've got the VMware, and it's own appliance. It is really helpful. The system is online within half a day and saves so much time.""When we compare it to normal hardware servers, I'd say it is quite easy to configure and deploy.""The solution's hardware is great.""The most valuable feature is that you can assign a volume to an off-shore workload on the fly.""What I like the most is that it is easy to implement, easy deployment and that it's easy to manage."

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Cons
"There is no IPv6 support. That is our only issue at this time.""A great feature would be a wizard and to include a new disk in the SAN. At the moment, including a new disk requires several steps - some that must be done at the OS level and others in each node.""The main issue we ran into was the documentation. We attempted to set up the product in our test environment by ourselves and ran into several areas of the documentation that were unclear to us.""It would be nice to see a new UI for the windows client, as it is not the easiest to find settings.""The platform needs to improve user management and the web console.""Being able to run StarWind vSAN on top of any free UNIX operating system to build a resilient iSCSI/FTP/SMB storage system would be useful.""I think the setup could be streamlined a bit.""It would be helpful to have a little more insight into what kind of performance the VSAN cluster is utilizing; something that would be more proactive on our side, versus their ProActive Support."

More StarWind Virtual SAN Cons →

"I would like for it to improve into a more ergonomic management console and a translation into the French language. It should have some process for a shutdown of a VM properly in case of a problem.""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.""When I sometimes reboot for maintenance, the connectivity from the iSCSI initiator host could be improved.""The cloud reporting interface is quite poor compared to other vendors.""There is no way of quickly matching the exact size of a vDisk to a disk pool.""I'd like to see the company make the renewal of the software cheaper.""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.""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."

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"Currently, there is no support for the servers that are not in the cluster.""There should be more provisioning capabilities within the solution.""In the next release, I would like to see support for Docker and containers.""We are not always advised of new features or updates, so we must research to stay up to date.""Dell needs to do a lot of work to simplify the maintenance and life-cycle upgrades for the product.""The cost of using the public cloud deployment is astronomical.""The solution's storage size could be improved."

More Dell XC Appliance [EOL] Cons →

Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "The setup cost is very low. The pricing is great."
  • "We are happy with the price."
  • "The license is reusable. We can always rebuild it and apply the license. Then, boom, we get new servers, apply the license, and we're back up and running."
  • "The pricing is fine for the work that it does."
  • "When we did all the analysis for StarWind, it was approximately 20 percent less than any of the other solutions that we looked at."
  • "The scalability limitation for us is its licensing. At some point in the fairly near future, we will probably have to upgrade our license so we can store eight terabytes instead of four. We are currently at four terabytes, but we're starting to knock on the door of that capacity."
  • "The pricing is excellent. It will run on anything. You don't have to buy a $100,000 server, with hardware you don't need. You just pay for the license and you're good to go."
  • "The licensing is a bit weird. If you license the standard version of StarWind, it allows you four terabytes. Then, they have a pro version, but with the pro version, the only difference is it doubles the terabytes to eight."
  • More StarWind Virtual SAN Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "In my case, the licensing per terabytes is very high and it must be licensed for each extra functionality."
  • "The pricing and licensing are better with DataCore."
  • "The cost is at the same level as other storage solutions and it is easy to understand the licensing."
  • "Make sure you are made aware of the annual subscription cost when purchasing."
  • "Pricing has improved but it is still expensive."
  • "This product has a good ratio between quality and price. In many cases, it's less expensive to work with DataCore than other storage systems."
  • "This solution allows the use of off-the-shelf hardware and charges by the TB of storage."
  • "The solution is cost effective."
  • More DataCore SANsymphony Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "The price point is very fair for a product in this category but can vary depending on the components selected within the family of products."
  • "We received a good price from Dell."
  • "The pricing is dependent on the technology and is in direct relation to the manufacturer and the components."
  • "The pricing is good."
  • "The pricing for Dell EMC solutions is quite expensive and not really made for small or medium-sized businesses."
  • More Dell XC Appliance [EOL] Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:It is easy to use and can monitor system synchronization and check Storage status. StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN) combines… more »
    Top Answer:The cost of this is less than you expect. Since they're selling a software stack, you do need to consider your own… more »
    Top Answer:You can maintain and update it with little to no fuss, even the free version is incredibly capable whilst it brings the… more »
    Top Answer:Good sizing is the basis for a stable and high-performance environment. It is important to plan in sufficient reserves… more »
    Top Answer:It's difficult to say if something is missing in this solution. Maybe we'd like to manage the raid on the disk directly… more »
    Top Answer:My advice for people who are selling this product is to first make sure that you educate the customers. The customer… more »
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    StarWind SAN & NAS
    DataCore Virtual SAN
    Learn More
    Overview

    StarWind Virtual SAN provides high availability and fault tolerance for virtualized environments without the need for dedicated SAN hardware. It allows for real-time replication between servers, shared storage for Hyper-V clusters, and enables vMotion and High Availability features for VMware vSphere. The solution reduces costs and leverages existing hardware while providing a scalable and reliable infrastructure. Valuable features include ease of use, scalability, top-tier support, hardware agnosticism, and the ability to use off-the-shelf standard servers to increase storage space. StarWind VSAN has helped organizations improve performance, data availability, and data security while reducing downtime and providing cost-saving storage options.

    Experience peace of mind with DataCore SANsymphony, the ultimate software-defined storage solution alleviating storage management challenges. Say goodbye to the complexities of managing different storage tiers and disruptions with SANsymphony's block-level storage virtualization technology, empowering you to automate capacity provisioning and data placement across diverse storage environments including SAN, DAS, HCI, and JBOD. Break down silos, control data placement, meet business continuity objectives, boost performance, and seamlessly expand or refresh hardware with SANsymphony. Benefit from features like asynchronous replication for disaster recovery, minimizing data loss, accelerating application responsiveness, and integrating new technology non-disruptively. Trusted by industry leaders like NASA, Thorntons, Inc., and TUI Cruises, DataCore SANsymphony guarantees unparalleled flexibility, scalability, and reliability, ensuring uninterrupted data access and application availability while reducing storage costs and inefficiencies.

    XC Series hyper-converged appliances integrate Dell EMC 14th generation PowerEdge servers with Nutanix software to offer one of the industry’s most versatile and scalable hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) platforms. By supporting a choice of hypervisors, XC Series appliances can be deployed quickly for all virtualized workloads to reduce management complexity and total cost of ownership.

    Offer
    30-days for free

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    Learn more about DataCore SANsymphony
    Learn more about Dell XC Appliance [EOL]
    Sample Customers
    Baker Tilly BVI, CMS Internet, Board Harpeth Hall School
    Volkswagen , Maimonides Medical Center, NASA, Thorntons, Inc., TUI, ISCO Industries, Pee Dee Electric Cooperative, United Financial Credit Union, Derby Supply Chain Solutions, Mission Community Hospital, Bellarmine College Preparatory, Colby-Sawyer College, Mount Sinai Health System, The Royal Institute of International Affairs, Quorn Foods, Bitburger, University of Birmingham, Stadtverwaltung Heidelberg, NetEnt to name a few.
    Cardlytics, AEW Energie, Aubert, Zhongtong Information Service, Commune de Villepinte, Teikyo University Hospital
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Manufacturing Company10%
    Construction Company8%
    Educational Organization8%
    Computer Software Company8%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company18%
    Manufacturing Company9%
    Government9%
    Financial Services Firm8%
    REVIEWERS
    Non Profit27%
    Government11%
    Computer Software Company8%
    Transportation Company5%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company24%
    Comms Service Provider7%
    Government6%
    Manufacturing Company6%
    No Data Available
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business64%
    Midsize Enterprise22%
    Large Enterprise13%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business25%
    Midsize Enterprise17%
    Large Enterprise58%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business49%
    Midsize Enterprise16%
    Large Enterprise34%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business42%
    Midsize Enterprise15%
    Large Enterprise43%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business63%
    Midsize Enterprise13%
    Large Enterprise25%
    Buyer's Guide
    HCI
    March 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, Nutanix, VMware and others in HCI. Updated: March 2024.
    765,386 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    DataCore SANsymphony is ranked 7th in HCI with 53 reviews while Dell XC Appliance [EOL] doesn't meet the minimum requirements to be ranked in HCI. DataCore SANsymphony is rated 9.2, while Dell XC Appliance [EOL] 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 Dell XC Appliance [EOL] writes "Turnkey solution with low management costs that is easy to use". DataCore SANsymphony is most compared with VMware vSAN, HPE SimpliVity, StorMagic SvSAN, Red Hat Ceph Storage and VxRail, whereas Dell XC Appliance [EOL] is most compared with .

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