DataCore SANsymphony vs NetApp ONTAP comparison

DataCore and NetApp are both solutions in the Storage Software category. DataCore is ranked #2 with an average rating of 9.5, while NetApp is ranked #1 with an average rating of 8.7. DataCore holds a 30.2% mindshare in SS, compared to NetApp’s 42.9% mindshare. Additionally, 97% of DataCore users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 98% of NetApp users who would recommend it.

DataCore SANsymphony

Read 55 DataCore SANsymphony reviews

279 Views
155 Comparison Views

97% willing to recommend

NetApp ONTAP

Read 76 NetApp ONTAP reviews

798 Views
230 Comparison Views

98% willing to recommend

DataCore SANsymphony

NetApp ONTAP

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between DataCore SANsymphony and NetApp ONTAP based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Storage Software solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed DataCore SANsymphony vs. NetApp ONTAP Report (Updated: January 2025).

Buyer's Guide

DataCore SANsymphony vs. NetApp ONTAP

January 2025

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Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

DataCore SANsymphony

Ranking in Storage Software

2nd

Average Rating

9.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Software Defined Storage (SDS) (5th), HCI (7th), Storage Performance (1st)

NetApp ONTAP

Ranking in Storage Software

1st

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2025, in the Storage Software category, the mindshare of DataCore SANsymphony is 30.2%, up from 27.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of NetApp ONTAP is 42.9%, up from 42.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Storage Software

Featured Reviews

TempreviewerD

Architecte Principal at Orange

Robust with good replication and access protection

The solution is constantly evolving. Recently, deduplication and compression have been further improved to meet customer needs, and updates are easily implemented without stopping production. The update assistant checks the state of health before using good practices, during checks that the data is still presented for service continuity, and afterward, if the actions carried out are indeed active. Technical support is truly available even without a production incident. This is really essential right now.

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Christopher Cagayan

IT Server and Storage Engineer at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees

A solution that comes with several valuable features and excellent SAN storage

NetApp ONTAP is scalable. They have two types of scalability, "scale up" and "scale out." With "scale up," you can get up to petabytes of data if you have the money to buy those servers and add them to the system. And "scale out" also, you can buy additional controllers, up to 12 nodes, which is pretty good when you are a big company. I rate the scalability a nine out of ten. NetApp is one of our organization's main storage systems. Every application is scattered on all of our NetApp devices. Applications won't run without it because they need to pull data from NetApp ONTAP.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"I found the solution to be very stable."

"The features I have found most valuable are the active-active, or so-called grid technology, and the integration into our VMware-vCenter."

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

"Auto-tiering to obtain performance at a lower cost without the customer having to purchase ultra-fast storage is great."

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

"Good security with this solution."

"The platform's most valuable feature is its synchronous mirroring capability, which ensures bit-identical copies of data and offers excellent failover capacity."

"The most valuable feature for us is that we can adjust the size of the storage very easily, without stopping production."

More DataCore SANsymphony pros

"The most valuable features of NetApp ONTAP are its data redundancy, performance, storage catering, snapshot technology, and NetApp Insight."

"Scalability is perfectly fine. Right now I only have the two nodes and one shelf. I'll be able to easily upgrade additional shelves. They gave me plenty of cabling when I got the unit so all I have to do is disconnect and reconnect the cabling and that's it."

"It has also helped us reduce our overall cost of storage. Through dedupe and compression, we save a lot of capacity. Without that, we'd obviously have to buy more capacity. The last time I checked we were saving about 40 percent over our previous storage."

"It is very easy to scale, so we started with a four-node cluster and added it to a six-node cluster. We've also done some other modifications in between."

"Deduplication, data protection, and NetApp block are some of the valuable features of the product."

"ONTAP has really reduced our costs because we learned that we could use our storage with fewer machines and drive down data center costs."

"The MFS report is the best feature for us."

"Today, because NetApp listened to their customers and improved their GUI, we can perform a firmware upgrade within minutes."

More NetApp ONTAP pros

Cons

"The cloud reporting interface is quite poor compared to other vendors."

"We'd like to manage the raid on the disk directly in SanSymphony."

"For customers or technicians who don't speak and understand English, it would be great to have other language support, all the more so given the number of countries in which SanSymphony is used."

"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."

"I would like to see reporting added, such as a monthly connectivity report."

"I would like to see SMPA (Shared Multi-Port Array) technology developed with the aim of allowing a configuration identical to other storage arrays."

"DataCore needs a more efficient and better way to keep track of metrics and counters so that we can do baseline analysis to measure performance."

"We are waiting for container support (on the roadmap), as well as a user-friendly full web-administration capability, and an improved API."

More DataCore SANsymphony cons

"It should be easier to put in tech support cases. They should streamline the online support and chat."

"I could see the GUI being a little bit more refined, the presentation layer being a little stronger, a little less sluggish."

"Sometimes, we face problems with support."

"The technical support hasn't been that great. A couple of times we have had to call support and it took a long time to get somebody on the phone, it took a long time for someone to call us back. That's the only downside, the support."

"They use a lot of PowerShell for managing things and there are still a few things that you can't do through PowerShell cmdlets that you can do in the native CLI. It would be nice if they got more of those added in."

"I would like to see FlexGroup volumes come to parity in terms of software features with Flex volumes. It seems like FlexGroup volumes have massive scalability, but their features set is not the same as Flex volumes, so we are currently unable to use it."

"The additional features I would like to see in ONTAP, and NetApp in general would probably be the single pane of glass software. Over the years that's probably the biggest area that we've struggled with. NetApp has had a lot of good products, but a lot of them haven't necessarily seamlessly integrated with each other and you have to go to multiple management consoles to manage their software or their hardware. From a customer point of view, I think that single pane of glass where you could just add modules and enable functionality would be the most beneficial thing that NetApp could add."

"The rate of technology could be improved."

More NetApp ONTAP cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"It is relatively expensive, and the additional costs for hardware and storage can make it a significant investment for customers."

"Make sure you are made aware of the annual subscription cost when purchasing."

"Pricing has improved but it is still expensive."

"DataCore SANsymphony's pricing is very high and should be much cheaper."

"In my case, the licensing per terabytes is very high and it must be licensed for each extra functionality."

"This solution allows the use of off-the-shelf hardware and charges by the TB of storage."

"The cost is at the same level as other storage solutions and it is easy to understand the licensing."

More DataCore SANsymphony pricing and cost advice

"Additional costs exist if you want a license for a feature like SnapMirror."

"We have been able to save about 3TB to 5TB of storage. We still need to do more on the compression bit, then provisioning, to save more going forward."

"I rate NetApp ONTAP's pricing a seven out of ten."

"The product is a bit expensive."

"This solution has helped our organization reduce our overall cost of storage. We're part of the NetApp OnDemand, where we lease it. Also, it doesn't take as many people to administer the solution as some other products."

"Our cost per IOP is three to four dollars, but we have a hybrid solution. Therefore, we have SSD and spinning disk running together."

"With the duplication and compression, we have been about a one and half to two times savings since we are not running all-flash."

"Because of the dedupe technologies and Data ONTAP servers, we have saved 20% on hardware. This is a lot of money for us."

More NetApp ONTAP pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

22%

Manufacturing Company

Comms Service Provider

Government

Manufacturing Company

20%

Computer Software Company

17%

Financial Services Firm

Retailer

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for DataCore SANsymphony SDS?

I rate the pricing of this solution as an eight. It is relatively expensive, and the additional costs for hardware and storage can make it a significant investment for customers.

See all answers

What do you like most about DataCore SANsymphony?

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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What needs improvement with DataCore SANsymphony?

One area where the solution could improve is its software platform. Many customers have expressed dissatisfaction with the software running on Microsoft Windows. Although an attempt was made to dev...

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How does Azure NetApp Files compare to NetApp ONTAP?

Azure NetApp Files is a Microsoft Azure file storage service built on NetApp technology. The platform combines the file capabilities of Azure and NetApp to move critical file-based applications to ...

See all answers

What do you like most about NetApp ONTAP?

We do not face any glitches or downtime.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for NetApp ONTAP?

NetApp ONTAP is moderately priced. The tag price is more competitive for the value we get.

See all answers

Comparisons

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs DataCore SANsymphony

Compared 14% of the time

VMware vSAN vs DataCore SANsymphony

Compared 14% of the time

HPE SimpliVity vs DataCore SANsymphony

Compared 11% of the time

Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct vs DataCore SANsymphony

Compared 11% of the time

Pure Storage FlashArray vs DataCore SANsymphony

Compared 7% of the time

More DataCore SANsymphony Competitors

Dell PowerPath vs NetApp ONTAP

Compared 19% of the time

Azure NetApp Files vs NetApp ONTAP

Compared 19% of the time

Cloudian HyperStore vs NetApp ONTAP

Compared 12% of the time

More NetApp ONTAP Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

DataCore SANsymphony

February 2025

Download DataCore SANsymphony product report

Buyer's Guide

NetApp ONTAP

February 2025

Download NetApp ONTAP product report

Also Known As

DataCore Virtual SAN

No data available

Overview

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.

DataCore

NetApp is the data authority for hybrid cloud. We provide a full range of hybrid cloud data services that simplify management of applications and data across cloud and on-premises environments to accelerate digital transformation. Together with our partners, we empower global organizations to unleash the full potential of their data to expand customer touchpoints, foster greater innovation and optimize their operations.

NetApp

Sample Customers

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.

1&1 IONOS, Acıbadem Healthcare Group, Adder Technologies, Aero Vodochody Aerospace

Buyer's Guide

DataCore SANsymphony vs. NetApp ONTAP

January 2025

Free Report: DataCore SANsymphony vs. NetApp ONTAP

Find out what your peers are saying about DataCore SANsymphony vs. NetApp ONTAP and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.

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