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."The product gave us a cost-effective way to deploy a highly available server environment."
"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 management was very easy and I was able to find all that I need in the software dashboard."
"The control panel is nice. It gives you a lot of good feedback as to the status and health of the VSAN."
"We have been able to use more on-prem hardware to reduce cost and also use old disks that we do not trust enough for ordinary RAID or usage."
"Being hardware agnostic is a must and definitely scored points for us."
"Active-active work mode leads to true redundancy of storage and allows us to distribute the load between multiple nodes."
"The solution is also quite flexible. As an example, other vSAN solutions that we looked at had more stringent requirements regarding mixed HDD/SSD storage which wouldn't have worked in our environment."
"The DataCore system has been rock solid since we have been using it - from 2007 on."
"It is a well-proven, automated management tool in all dynamic provisioning, auto-tiering, great performance, parallel I/O, cache speed mechanism, etc."
"Our system is designed to be scalable and flexible, so it can grow and adapt to meet the changing needs of our clients."
"Oracle OLTP benchmark to test how it improves the performance while using flash drive NVMe."
"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."
"The dashboard is very intuitive, and there are a lot of counters to diagnose what happens during a short period (like when a backup is in progress)."
"I'd have to say that the biggest improvement gained by using SANsymphony has to be the performance of the product."
"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 most valuable feature is fhe flexibility, the ability to move the machines around without hesitation."
"It is user-friendly, and its performance is good."
"The solution has high performance."
"The feature that I have found most valuable is that it is easy to deploy. It is easy to create and delete virtual servers. It is easy to create the load balancing and the clustering."
"I like the orchestration feature."
"Being able to deploy multiple applications with virtual servers is the most valuable for us. The capacity of the system is quite constant so it's got some of the good features."
"The solution is easy to use."
"It completely removes the need for a storage network and for a storage administrator and all of that infrastructure and the costs that are involved with them."
"The number of different ways you can set it up can make it a little daunting."
"It is hard to find adequate technical documentation on their support website."
"I would like to see improvements in the documentation area."
"High availability for direct attached hardware drives could be useful for increasing the performance of a storage appliance."
"Server-side snapshots are one thing the Linux appliance can't do yet."
"It took a bit of knowledge and support to put in place but once installed it works fine. Migration (HyperV) from one server to another sometimes takes longer than expected but there is no data loss even if the host crashes."
"They recommend RAID10 for HDD, which reduces the usable storage capacity."
"I would like an automated installation/configuration despite the fact that their service is very collaborative, a customer should be able to deploy the solution by themselves."
"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."
"DataCore SANsymphony should integrate file servers at a good price into the solution."
"Management could be improved. The management console sometimes reacts very slowly."
"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."
"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."
"The cloud reporting interface is quite poor compared to other vendors."
"The alert system could have more features."
"The solution is constantly evolving."
"I would like to see some of the more traditional SAN functions that are out the now. I can list them: being able to Snapshot on the back-end, better de-dupe, and better compression. Those are the major ones."
"They should make the software updates easier. We should be able to upgrade it more easily."
"If we have some complicated issues, you have to use the command lines interface. Not everything is possible to be fixed in the GUI. This is a drawback, that some things have to be fixed via command-line interface and should be able to be done in the GUI."
"The interface is a little complicated, it could be simplified with more graphical gadgets. We have many servers, and the built-in functions, such as rate configuration, are a bit complex."
"The usability is pretty good but it could use a little tweaking on the UI, with a clearer definition of exactly what some of the things do."
"Hackers are able to manage to leak information or data from the product using some corrupt files, making it an area of major concern where improvements are required."
"The technical support, it's not satisfactory. Whenever we raise a ticket it takes a lot of time to have an engineer get involved sometimes, or we receive a less experienced engineer. We then have to repeat the situation to the next engineer which all takes time."
"If one node out of your ten nodes fails, it takes a lot of time to replicate and rebalance VMware vSAN. This time can be reduced. When a node fails and the data is not accessible, vSAN has to be rebalanced to make the redundancy level of two again. However, if it is taking a lot of time and any other hardware fails during that time, then we have a problem. Two disk failures mean that all data will be lost, and we may have to recover it from the backup. So, the number of threads that run to do the rebalancing could be more so that the time taken to make it fully redundant again is not so much."
DataCore SANsymphony is ranked 7th in HCI with 54 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 3rd 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, StorMagic SvSAN, Red Hat Ceph Storage, 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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