DataCore SANsymphony Reviews

I needed to protect the storage of my virtual machines in my VMware vSphere cluster. The simplicity of management and the increase in its capacity were a mandatory technological choice. I don't have a large infrastructure; I wanted to secure it on two sites. This choice allowed me not to invest in two large storage bays at the time of purchase, to invest a large sum at the time of purchase, and to continue paying for the entire lifespan and use. The savings can be used for other investments.

The solution is made up of two servers loaded with several hard drives with several third parties. it is possible to use different types of hard drives (SATA, SAS, SSD, NVME) and even reuse storage bays on iSCSI or FCP protocols. A simple network with protection thanks to multipathing on the front end but also the back end and mirror links. Its console allows you to administer the entire solution from 1 administrator station but also from the servers themselves if you partition the storage infrastructure for security reasons.

We use the product for customers seeking a simple yet highly redundant storage solution independent of any specific hardware. It supports synchronous mirroring and enables storage migrations across different hardware platforms, making it versatile.

The platform's most valuable feature is its synchronous mirroring capability, which ensures bit-identical copies of data and offers excellent failover capacity. Additionally, the storage migration feature with pass-through functionality is useful.

Our company uses SANSymphony as the central storage system for our ESXi servers, which is characterized by a redundant structure. We deploy five hosts in each of our two data centers, resulting in a total of ten ESXi hosts. Together, these hosts manage over 300 virtual machines (VMs) that support a variety of business-critical applications and services. The servers in our data centers are interconnected via 16G Fiber Channel (FC) switches, which ensures fast and reliable data transfer between the hosts. The connections between the data centers are implemented using dark fiber. 

DataCore, the provider of our storage system, provides 40 TB of storage space per node. As we have two nodes per data center, this results in a total of 80 TB per server. This capacity is essential to cover the storage requirements of our extensive VM environment. 

To ensure optimum performance, we have distributed the VMs across five logical units (LUNs). This distribution allows us to better control and optimize performance as each LUN can support specific workloads and requirements. This setup provides us with a robust, scalable and high-performance infrastructure that is critical to maintaining our daily operations and supporting our continued growth.

From 2023, we have significantly improved our storage infrastructure with the new DataCore system, which is equipped exclusively with NVMe SSDs. The impact of this technology upgrade was immediate. 

Before implementing NVMe SSDs, the response times of our virtual machines (VMs) were 30-40 milliseconds. After switching to the new DataCore system with NVMe SSDs, we saw a dramatic improvement: Response times dropped to an impressive one to four milliseconds. This significant performance improvement has allowed us to increase the density of our VMs. We can now run even more VMs on the same hosts without sacrificing performance.

Another important aspect of the new DataCore system is its synchronous mirroring feature. This feature provides us with improved data security as it creates an exact copy of our data on a secondary system in real-time. This is particularly valuable for maintaining business continuity and for disaster recovery scenarios. In addition, synchronous mirroring simplifies maintenance and patching operations considerably. As an exact copy of our

SANsymphony is our software-defined storage platform that provides the best scalable high availability of our files, and it seems to have the best data protection. 

It enables us to deploy multiple servers and multiple sites to increase data availability. 

SANsymphony ensures business continuity with three lines of defense: transparent bypass of storage problems, reactivation at another location, and secure recovery of an earlier ‘healthy’ data state.

We have had no problems with our files for more than ten years.

Our filesystem has been 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 only experienced short downtimes for updates, which can be done part by part. This means that the company users don’t even notice any service downtimes. 

Our filesystem is a testament to our commitment to providing the best possible service to our employees, and we are proud of its performance over the years.

The solution allows you to virtualize storage via software and not at hardware level, allowing you to also implement hyper-convergence and hardware-independent solutions.

Since the data is written on two distinct nodes yet mirrored between them, this allows for easier maintenance of the individual nodes.

We have implemented the solution to replace the infrastructure consisting of two physical VMware servers and shared storage, thus removing the single point of failure for the connection with the storage.

This solution allows us to have greater data continuity as the data is synchronized between two servers.

In some installations, this solution allows us to have the IT infrastructure replicated between two different sites within our company, and by implementing a third server, it also allows us to have a disaster recovery site external to the company, thus allowing us to have maximum data continuity.

We use it to ensure the availability and reliability of our clients' storage. It's deployed in environments with VMware, tech servers, and other equipment to establish a highly available infrastructure for our clients.

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

Our primary use case is to provide central storage for our VMware virtualization environment. 

We use DataCore SANsymphony within a data center spread over two locations. In the main data center, the storage is mirrored and asynchronously replicated in the second data center. 

DataCore SANsymphony provides us with a high-performance and redundant storage environment for our VMware platform. Hardware independence is a great advantage. With the help of auto-tiering in three levels, the data is available at optimal speed.

DataCore SANsymphony ensures high business continuity. For example, through the possible reactivation of vDisks at another location and the secure restoration of a previous “healthy” data state. 

The synchronous mirroring of the vDisks ensures very high data availability for employees. Company users do not notice service or maintenance; hardware replacement and updates can be carried out virtually unnoticed. 

In addition, synchronous mirroring simplifies maintenance and patching operations considerably.