DataCore SANsymphony Valuable Features

TempreviewerD - PeerSpot reviewer
Architecte Principal at Orange

Replication between servers is really the main function. It allows data to be available from two DataCore servers. Once the paths are discovered, the configured storage areas are automatically presented on the front-end links. 

Data and access protection is truly a product that can be trusted and is robust. Many large companies have trusted this solution for several years. Thanks to its simplicity of administration, the procedures for teams who do not know the solution are simple to carry out. This is also an important point for the publisher.

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Emmanuele Ciscato - PeerSpot reviewer
Tecnico at Array System S.r.l.

The data synchronization is spectacular. This is the fundamental characteristic of the solution which allows it to overcome the majority of hardware failures or electrical interruptions.

The continuous data protection feature also allows you to have protection from any malicious data encryption attacks, allowing you to perform timely recovery of storage data.

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.

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Fernando Villamil - PeerSpot reviewer
LAN Engineer at Maimonides Medical Center

Active-active is the most valuable aspect for us. The reason being, we can run our clusters on one side knowing our data is available in the other data center. There is simple management via GUI or command line. 

The software just works and is reliable. Downtime due to storage maintenance or upgrades is long gone. We have multiple types of software running to differentiate our applications. This gives us more value due to the fact that we can segment by application if needed. The bottom line is the software is what runs our applications on whatever storage vendor we choose - and it does so reliably.

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Buyer's Guide
DataCore SANsymphony
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about DataCore SANsymphony. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Malte Lübkemann - PeerSpot reviewer
IT-Systemadministrator at Abat AG

A key feature that makes DataCore SANsymphony an extremely useful solution for our storage infrastructure is its synchronous mirroring capability. This feature enables seamless and fast switching between mirrored data sets, which is critical for maintaining business continuity and minimizing downtime. Especially in critical situations where immediate recovery is required, synchronous mirroring proves to be indispensable. 

Another advantage of SANsymphony is its ease of use, especially when installing or upgrading the system. The processes are relatively simple and intuitive. This saves valuable time and resources and reduces the likelihood of errors when implementing such processes. 

I also appreciate the direct contact with DataCore at events. These opportunities are invaluable as they give me the chance to speak directly to the people who are sometimes responsible. Such conversations not only provide the opportunity to gain deeper insights into the workings and future developments of SANsymphony, but also to clarify specific questions or concerns directly with the experts. This direct exchange is particularly advantageous as it enables a personal and individual approach.

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Mike Felber - PeerSpot reviewer
Works at Kommunaler Sozialverband Sachsen

The most important features of DataCore SANsymphony are the scalability and flexibility of this system. 

The infrastructure provides high fault tolerance through redundancy mechanisms such as memory mirroring or parity. 

What should be emphasized is the minimization of downtime. Our central storage has very high availability. 

Another advantage of DataCore SANsymphony is its ease of use, especially when presenting storage to virtual machines via Fibre-Channel. 

Ultimately, the sum of the excellent individual functions ensures the economical and safe operation of the storage system for our employees.

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Florian Schmid - PeerSpot reviewer
Systemadministrator at Jura-Werkstätten Amberg-Sulzbach

Our redundant file space is a reliable and robust system that has been serving us well for many years. We have been using it without any issues, and it has been working smoothly and efficiently. The system has been designed to ensure that there is no data loss, and we have not experienced any problems with it. Our redundant file space is a testament to our commitment to providing the best possible service to our users, and we are proud of its performance over the years.

Our system is designed to be scalable and flexible, so it can grow and adapt to meet the changing needs of our clients.

We regularly update our software and hardware to ensure that we are using the latest technology and security protocols. We monitor our system 24/7 to ensure that it is always running smoothly.

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SigfridCecillon - PeerSpot reviewer
Director at Arsium

I find its high performance, total cost of ownership, strong availability, and simplicity to be the most valuable features.

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AM
IT Administrator at Anton Häring KG Werk für Präzisionstechnik

For us, fault tolerance is the most important feature of DataCore. 

Redundancy mechanisms, such as mirroring or parity, help maintain the integrity of stored data even if one or more components fail. This is essential for mission-critical applications and services that require continuous operation. In the event of a hardware failure or other disruptions, fault tolerant systems enable seamless and uninterrupted access to data, minimizing downtime and associated business impacts. This is especially critical in environments where any interruption in data access can result in significant financial or operational losses. Fault tolerance protects against the loss of data due to hardware failures, ensuring that critical information remains intact. The associated business disruptions can outweigh these initial investments.

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JG
Chief Technical Officer at INTEGRA SYSTEMS

The synchronous mirroring is great. Storage is always available. This is the main feature of DataCore SANsymphony SDS which allows very high storage availability and better protection against environmental incidents (electrical, flooding, etc.).

Continuous data protection reduces data loss. This functionality makes it possible to restore the data to the moment before loss.

Caching and parallel I/O offer more performance. The cache is done with the RAM of the server. To add cache you just have to add RAM.

The parallelization of the IOs allows us to have much better performance with the same hardware by accelerating the processing of the IOs.

The compression and deduplication are now suitable for a production environment. Additionally, this allows us to use logical RAID for NVMe drives in ZFS clusters.

The architecture has been revised with cache and metadata disks to improve overall performance.

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SigfridCecillon - PeerSpot reviewer
Director at Arsium

The feature I found most valuable was the high availability with mirroring.

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CP
Technical Director at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

The first valuable aspect is the software-defined storage. We like the fact that we are not dependent on a constructor. We can mix them as we wish. We can also mix the storage class as we want. 

The second thing we like is the cache which is the RAM of the server so we can choose the cache we need and we want. It provides us with a real performance for the writers but also for the readers.

Next, today, Continuous Data protection is mandatory for us. These days, with the multiplication of crypto lockers, we are more confident in the protection of our data.

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KC
Administrateur Systèmes et réseaux at Centre Hospitalier de PAU
  • The better features are the synchronous replication and the management console.
  • The synchronous replication gives us the ability to make business continuity planning.
  • I like the management console which is very easy to use.
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Christian Baldauf - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior IT Consultant / Architect at Mightycare Solutions GmbH

It is the sum of the many, often outstanding, individual functions that help us to ensure economical and safe operation for us and our customers. The most important functions for us are

The synchronous mirror allows us to operate a fully redundant storage solution that is distributed across two sites. It can even cover the failure of an entire site. This also benefits us during complex maintenance work, as no downtime is required.

Auto-tiering enables us to store the data on the storage tier that is optimal for it. This also works within a vDisk, so old or cold data ends up on cheaper data carriers than the new or hot data accessed more frequently.

SANsymphony is being continuously developed. This makes it easier for us to respond to new challenges.

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TE
Sales representative for A customers / key accounts at a comms service provider with 501-1,000 employees

DataCore SANsymphony's stability is okay.

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DF
Systems engineer at Monaco Digital | Avangarde

Auto-tiering to obtain performance at a lower cost without the customer having to purchase ultra-fast storage is great. The ease of increasing the volume of storage without interruption of services and without impact on users is helpful. At the same time, they are leaving the choice to adapt storage technology according to a user’s needs. The abstraction of the hardware layer, especially when it is necessary to change the brand and/or model of equipment during infrastructure renewal is good. The possibility of installing the solution in HCI mode for small structures makes it possible to address large accounts as well as small businesses.

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Raphaël Julmy - PeerSpot reviewer
Architecte Infrastructures at IT-Med

We used the wizard to deploy SANsymphony in a virtual environment for hyper-converged infrastructure and it is quite useful. We can deploy virtual high-available infrastructure for running tests in less than an hour.

Continuous data protection is a powerful feature that can save your data in several cases. It is good protection against ransomware.

The ability to use the RAM of the server node as a read and write cache brings a lot of performance to the storage. We can reach high IOPS from slow disks through the huge amount of cache.

The documentation repository is really useful and kept updated.

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YD
Systems and networks engineer at EOS Informatique

Continuous data protection (CDP), can be used to "protect" again ransomware by recording all write on disk in a log. You can recover your data with incredible time granularity.

The parallel I/O function is very useful to have good storage performance.

The ability to do asynchronous replication to a third site is a easy way to create a disaster recovery plan. 

Veeam Backup integration is a good new option. Now we can leverage a Datacore storage snapshot to do our backup without VM by using vsphere snapshot.

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JP
IT Consultant at Power Source Sdn Bhd

The most useful feature of SANsymphony is that it's able to manage any brand of block storage.

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AV
General Manager at Datatek

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. This translates into very advanced storage features, accompanied by a cost effective application or license.

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RF
Technical Services Manager (Enterprise Systems) at Maimonides Medical Center

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. DataCore's auto-tiering feature also allows us to use our SSD arrays efficiently.

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DW
Datacenter Architect, Sen. Systemadministrator, virt. environment Solution Architect at AKF Leasing GmbH & Co KG

The caching functionality, which could speed up your attached storage, is great.

We use the reserved x% of space for free for new writes as additional speed improvement for multiple tier pools.

DataCore will reserve a percentage of your storage tier and tried to keep it free to write directly new data into it. In that case, your new writes will go directly in the free space of tier 1, which is the most common and fastest one. Afterward, data will be kept in tier1 or destaged to other tiers (2, 3, 4, etc.). This setting improved our SAN Speed for the complete pool.

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SG
Presales Engineer at a computer software company with 5,001-10,000 employees

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.

The most important thing is the work we do on the new management interface called DIS. You can follow the evolution of this platform, and it's very important for me because the customer has to manage the platform. 

We add the workload on this platform, and they need the platform to evolve. It's very important to the customer, and we have to work on the DIS to realize the customer's this vision.

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SL
System Administrator at Superior Water And Air

It is easy to create storage and assign them to the various datastores in my VMware environment.

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Christian Baldauf - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior IT Consultant / Architect at Mightycare Solutions GmbH

Synchronous mirroring was a prerequisite for the project. Two data centers are used, which are connected via two different WAN routes. 16G FC is used via the WAN. The "Systems managed Mirroring" feature was used for this.

Another feature that makes high performance possible is "pool striping", where accesses are distributed over a larger number of external data volumes (LUNs). The limiting factor for performance here is the external storage that is connected to the DataCore servers.

Snapshots are also an important feature. In connection with external applications, these enable an improvement in data protection.

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.

With dedupe and compression, we can now save considerable capacity. An expansion of the capacity and thus the purchase of new licenses are thus avoided.

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reviewer1090101 - PeerSpot reviewer
Works

The most valuable feature is auto-tiering, which allows for storage pools containing different speed storage systems and the data automatically moved to the most appropriate pool.

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MichaelP - PeerSpot reviewer
Head of IT at United Planet GmbH
  • Redundancy of vdisk: It provides less downtime.
  • Continuous data protection: It is always good to have a possibility to "go back".
  • Technical support: Technical support is amazing. It is very fast and always has a solution in no time.
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SL
Senior Manager at Leisse & Soehne GmbH
  • High availability of storage
  • Stability and performance
  • Fast implementation and integration.

Installation time was about one day. Since then, it runs stable.

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Joé Biava - PeerSpot reviewer
Ingénieur Cloud & Sécurité at INTEGRA SYSTEMS

I really like the Rollback option, which is like a video of my storage. The benefit is for administrators because they can return at a single previous point, as precisely as they want.

I also find that the support team is a real quality of the Datacore SanSymphony environment. Opening a case is very simple, and the answers of support are always detailed with precision.

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).

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MO
IT System Administrator at Molkerei Ammerland eG
  • Three-way mirror synchronization of the data over three sections
  • Auto-tiering: effective utilization of fast to slow memory areas
  • CDP: Continuous data protection is an important part of our backup strategy.
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Pavol Schreiber - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager at TCX

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.

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DD
System Engineering at Patriot LLC

No more vendor lock-in, overpriced drives, or forklift upgrades. With DataCore SANsymphony, you can utilize just about any storage you wish with this product such as another SAN, NAS, JBOD, FusionIO, etc. If Windows can see it as a non-removable drive, you can use it with SANsymphony. Also, you can use this to mirror any of these various types of storage, which is awesome for migration. Say, for example, you have an HP SAN and you want to migrate off it to your own JBOD-type storage, or you have two sites with two different storage SANs that you want to replicate data between. With DataCore, it is possible to mix and match just about any storage platform you want to use.

As software-defined storage, the system is designed to run on top of Windows Server OS (which can be virtual or physical) and can utilize the server's RAM to provide disk cache. This makes our 7.2K HDDs class storage run really fast, allowing us to use a bottom-tier class of drive and get the performance of a much higher class of drive. Also, if we have to add capacity or replace drives then we can just order replacement drives off the web, saving us quite a bit of money. Of course, we still use "enterprise-class" drives but we don't pay through the nose to buy hardware. If we want to upgrade the Ethernet ports from 1Gb to 10Gb then we just do it. The same goes for FC. If we want to upgrade from 4Gb FC to 16Gb, we don't have to do a forklift upgrade. We just buy the HBAs and we're off the to races.

The other great thing is DataCore keeps their product on VMware's approved HCL. So even if you have a SAN (backend storage) that falls off the HCL with VMware, because it's virtualized storage behind DataCore, you're covered. If you put the storage behind DataCore then you won't have to worry about VMware's HCL any longer. Because of this fundamental practice, DataCore was one of the first storage vendors to support VVOLs.

The ability to pool the storage to leverage thin-provisioning is a huge saving in space and costs.

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JN
Head of Repair at a logistics company with 5,001-10,000 employees

SANsymphony is a very versatile product and its vendor's agnostic nature allows us to pick and choose our hardware platform. Its redundancy allows us to perform maintenance 'on the fly' and protects our data from all manners of failure.

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SC
IT Service Manager at EKIUM

The performance is good.

The interface is user-friendly.

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reviewer1155771 - PeerSpot reviewer
Works

Performance boost (MegaCash, Parallel I/O technology) and Continuous data protection (CDP) are the features we love most because security and being productive are big points for us.

DataCore is helping us focus on our core business and keep it running, which is important for our customer success.

Supporting of Automated-Storage-Tiering (AST) is a good feature that saves money.

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KY
Information security cheif officer at DEPO Computers, OAO

It is a universal solution that manages multiple storage components for different vendors. It integrates well with old storage systems and efficiently synchronizes nodes.

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Larchevesque - PeerSpot reviewer
Administrator at CD93

The most useful feature is the continuity of service and the associated performance. It brings great flexibility.

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Mike Felber - PeerSpot reviewer
Works at Kommunaler Sozialverband Sachsen
  • The most useful features are the continuity of service, mirroring and auto-tiering, and the associated performance. 
  • We enjoy great reliability, flexibility, and performance. 
  • DataCore helps to use memory efficiently.
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kevinblachon - PeerSpot reviewer
IT manager at SRADDA

Redundancy and improved performance in terms of storage with auto-tiering are the most valuable features. 

It needs just two nodes for the operating system and licensing.

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jfourrier - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Manager at IMS
  • The parallel I/O function is very useful when there are many requests for read/write access to the disks.
    The administration is simple and easy.
  • It is possible to create a virtual disk very easily, and moving the virtual machines is fast.
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reviewer1068588 - PeerSpot reviewer
Works

The features I have found most valuable are the active-active, or so-called grid technology, and the integration into our VMware vCenter. Our vCenter is now much easier to manage.

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it_user811419 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Consultant at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

Parallel I/O, because there is no performance degrade nor cache hit when there is a 100% update and 70/30 read/write. There is no performance impact and latency is just 20 ms.

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DS
Owner at David Strom Inc.

Easy to manage disk pools, different storage tiers and virtual storage repositories Continuous data protection just takes a single click to enable

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SK
Sales Manager at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

The most valuable feature of DataCore SANsymphony SDS is its high availability.

I also like that this solution has high stability and good performance.

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Johann R. - PeerSpot reviewer
Works at Groupe d'Aucy

The most valuable feature of this solution is the ability to migrate from one storage area to another one easily. The evolution of the solution by adding new storage without having to go through a difficult migration is very helpful.

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MV
Technicien SIC at SDIS 58 - Service Départemental d'Incendie et de Secours

DataCore is very fast storage, applications start faster, and database access is improved. You can attach different storage pool and DataCore chooses where to store data (the most accessed data are on the faster storage automatically).

Replication helps us to replicate virtual servers on different sites easily.

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it_user1068330 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT manager at Sciences Po Bordeaux

We have gained in scalability. The most valuable feature for us is that we can adjust the size of the storage very easily, without stopping production. The product is easy to administrate.

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reviewer1003731 - PeerSpot reviewer
Works at a non-profit with 1,001-5,000 employees

Auto-tiering moves data to fast disk if needed. Works great. I don't have to think about the second set of data.

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reviewer1061202 - PeerSpot reviewer
Works

Mirrored vDisk, and creating a third node with asynchronous replication to get the data out of the datacenter. The new third node is great for an always-on experience.

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AndrewBouwhuis - PeerSpot reviewer
Network Administrator at Lan Professional

The ease with which I can create and manage storage for my entire network from one easy-to-use interface.

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LR
Jefe de Infraestructura Tecnológica at a non-tech company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Mirroring is the most valuable feature because I can provide a high-level of service and optimize the use of obsolete storage.

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it_user1032471 - PeerSpot reviewer
Commercial Director with 1-10 employees

Flexibility. You can install it on almost any hardware and/or hypervisor.

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it_user2193 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director of IT at a tech company with 51-200 employees
inexpensive for the amount of storage runs on commodity hardware View full review »
Buyer's Guide
DataCore SANsymphony
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about DataCore SANsymphony. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.