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."User friendly interface and straight forward implementation."
"This software lets us maintain storage redundancy across both of our Hyper-V hosts, so if one goes down the environment fails over to the other and we have minimal to no downtime."
"StarWind Virtual SAN is a highly flexible solution, as it can be deployed on physical servers or on top of virtual machines running on hypervisors such as VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V."
"In addition to the main functions of the software, I want to note the excellent work of technical support."
"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."
"The fact that we can expand our storage and add on to our compute nodes easily and how amazing the StarWind technical support team is really adding value to our purchase."
"The primary purpose of this software is to create a virtual SAN between local storage on Hyper-V hosts. I find this feature most valuable since it accomplishes this quite well."
"The StarWind Virtual SAN provides a clever and unique solution to the Computing Split Brain problem."
"The ability to pool the storage to leverage thin-provisioning is a huge saving in space and costs."
"The DataCore system has been rock solid since we have been using it - from 2007 on."
"Storage is always available."
"Our central storage has very high availability. DataCore SANsymphony ensures high business continuity."
"Our system is designed to be scalable and flexible, so it can grow and adapt to meet the changing needs of our clients."
"I am very happy with this product's ability to adapt, increase, and modify existing infrastructures."
"The synchronous mirror allows us to operate a fully redundant storage solution that is distributed across two sites."
"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."
"The product’s ecosystem is better than Nutanix’s."
"Being hyperconverged, it simplifies what equipment we have to buy."
"It is user-friendly, and its performance is good."
"The scalability has been quite good."
"The ability to have a disaster recovery option for our end-users by being able to use VDI and the vSANs, and the ability to do replication across multiple data centers, are valuable to us."
"This product has very good performance when it comes to virtualization storage and works well with solutions such as SAP HANA, Exadata, Hadoop, and Big Data Analytics."
"Technical support is good."
"VMware vSAN is easy to configure, with basic functionality and the customer can maintain the solution."
"StarWind offers the Enterprise-level high availability (HA), deployed and easily configured .maintain and update and with little to no fuss, even the free version is incredibly capable whilst it brings a the cost of a Highly Available HCI solution down to a very cost effective point" Having used Starwind Virtual SAN for many years both for clients and for internal systems it has always done exactly what it set out to do, provide a cost effect way to run a HCI storage platform for almost any hypervisor, but it is most effective with Hyper-V, simple, easy to use, -.software monitoring should be web based to be reachable from any workstation in VLAN."
"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 number of different ways you can set it up can make it a little daunting."
"You have to do a "full" sync on write-back cache disks instead of a quick sync if there is an issue."
"I would say that the documentation is mostly great, however, some features could be expanded upon a bit."
"I'm sure it needs bug fixes..."
"I would like to see options for automated notifications of any changes, including, for example, synchronization issues."
"Though I have learned some of the nuances with the upgrading of firmware/windows/etc., it would be nice to have a more efficient method of doing so."
"The solution is constantly evolving."
"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 think the performance reporting can be improved by adding historical statistics into a database for the purpose of comparing."
"I would like to see reporting added, such as a monthly connectivity report."
"The cloud reporting interface is quite poor compared to other vendors."
"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."
"We'd like to manage the raid on the disk directly in SanSymphony."
"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."
"vSAN does not have online dedup. When opening the inline dedupe, the performance will be lower than off inline."
"The pricing model is sometimes a challenge for us because their licenses are very costly."
"Its price could be improved. It is too expensive for our clients."
"I would have liked it to have been more scalable. It's scalable but not as much as, for example, the ScaleIO systems were or the Kaminario"
"I would like to see it be more hardware-agnostic. Other than that, the only other complication is - and it has gotten better with the newer versions - that lately, once you're running an all-flash, if you need to grow or scale down your infrastructure, it's a long process. You need to evacuate all data and make sure you have enough space on the host, then add more hosts or take out hosts. That process is a little bit complex. You cannot scale as needed or shrink as needed."
"Improvements can be made with respect to scalability."
"We want see a better monitoring tool in vSAN. Monitoring is not that great as of now because it shows us false alarms in the Health status. We would like that to be improved."
"Enterprise customers get discounts on the solution's licensing pricing, but it is too expensive for SMB customers."
DataCore SANsymphony is ranked 7th in HCI with 54 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 2nd in HCI with 227 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, Red Hat Ceph Storage, StorMagic SvSAN, 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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