DataCore SANsymphony Reviews

We exchanged our standard storage (conventional storage) with a software-defined solution. We wanted to use something that corresponds to the time, something modern and hardware-independent. 

We had many small problems, but with time, we were on the way. Only once did we have a total failure of the storage, and this was a bug in the software. 

The Disaster Recovery (DR) site helped us to recover the data. This was a one and only case and we were disappointed. In the end, we have two DataCore systems, a two-node system, and a three-node system. Over time I must say, we have been satisfied. It has advanced storage knowledge and good administrators.

DataCore SANsymphony is our main storage system. We were using it in combination with VMware vSphere. Each data store is mirrored; many critical data stores have a 3^rd mirror in their Disaster Recovery site. On the 3^rd mirror copy, we are using continuous protection. The data stores are set to get a maximum of 14 days. Some special data stores have additional snapshots to keep the full backups. We tried to use vFilo. However, this solution was not as good as the NetApp ONTAP software-defined version. I do not know what we will use in the future when choosing the next storage solution. Right now, we are split between NetApp and DataCore.

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.

The main problem is there is no DataCore OS itself; there is nothing better than one complete solution from one solution provider. We had a lot of issues. It was really disappointing to see that DataCore blamed Microsoft for the problems, Microsoft blamed Lenovo hardware, and Lenovo blamed Datacore.

DataCore should have an OS specifically designed and optimized for managing storage workloads. Only the storage system should have access to encryption and authentication mechanisms to safeguard stored data. The future DC system should be integrated with the DC Hardware, this will enhances interoperability and simplifies the deployment and management of all storage products.

I've used the solution for over ten years.

We did use a different solution; at the time, DataCore was more modern than other competitors.

Don’t do it on your own. You need someone with some DCSA experience and five or more years of experience.

We did not evaluate other options. We wanted DataCore.

This is not a solution for administrators without storage experience; however, if all requirements are met, it is very stable, fast, and flexible.

My primary use case for DataCore SANsymphony is SAN rapid storage for virtual machines and the high availability for infrastructure.

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

There is room for improvement in the graphical interface. 

I have been using the DataCore solution for about 12 years.

My impression is that it is a very stable solution. However, I did have one encounter with this solution's crash as the result of a wrong action taken by a user. The crash resulted in some data being lost. We had to restore some data.

My opinion is that it's a very easy solution and that it's very scalable. I am very happy with this product's ability to adapt, increase, and modify existing infrastructures.

We have about 20 clients who are using this solution.

I would rate DataCore's technical support a nine, on a scale from one to 10, with one being the worst and 10 being the best. Each time I requested help, they would call me back in 20 minutes or less.

Positive

I think that the initial setup is quite simple.

The deployment of DataCore depends on many factors, but for us, it took about one day for each server.

The license is paid twice per year.

This solution is quite fluent and stable and very easy to administer and use. I would recommend it to other people.

I'm working on a SanSymphony infrastructure. I use it for my company, and this is also what we install for our clients.

All of the clients have to do maintenance operations during business hours, and they have to schedule it never to disturb their users. Thanks to San Symphony, they can do whatever they want, whenever they want.

I really like to dissociate virtual volumes from any virtual machines. It allows you to manage granularly the storage of your virtual machines. I separated VMs and files on different volumes in my case

Before using San Symphony, I had to work late to improve my IT infrastructure. Now, I can do it at any time of day.

We also won on availability. When one of the servers crashes, there is no effect on our production. It rarely happens; however, we would have been out of production with our previous infrastructure.

We do things differently now. We use our backup solution to backup storage rather than to backup machines, and I find it has less impact on the performance of our virtual infrastructure.

I really like the Rollback option, which is like a video of my storage. Administrators benefit from being able to return to 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 many counters to diagnose what happens during a short period (like when a backup is in progress).

The product can be improved by making better filters to search event logs. When everybody shows the last event at the top of their board, San Symphony does it at the bottom, and sometimes, we don't see an alert that needs to be checked.

The service is still available every day and at every time of the day, yet only in English. 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.

I've used the solution for three years.

I'm working on a San Symphony Infrastructure. I use it for my company, and this is also what we install for our clients. 

All of the clients have to do maintenance operations during business hours, and they have to schedule it never to disturb their users. Thanks to San Symphony, they can do whatever they want, whenever they want. 

I really like to dissociate virtual volumes from any virtual machines. It allows you to manage granularly the storage of your virtual machines. I separated VMs and files on different volumes in my case

Before using San Symphony, I had to work late to improve my IT infrastructure. Now, I can do it at any time of day. 

We also won on availability. When one of the servers crashes, there is no effect on our production. It rarely happens, but we would have been out of production with our previous infrastructure.

We do things differently now. We use our backup solution to backup storage rather than to backup machines, and I find it has less impact on the performance of our virtual infrastructure.

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).

The product can be improved by making better filters to search event logs. When everybody shows the last event at the top of their board, San Symphony does it at the bottom, and sometimes, we don't see an alert that needs to be checked.

The service is still available every day and at every time of the day, but only in English. 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.

I've used the solution for six months.

I have never heard one of my customers complain about the stability of San Symphony.

I knew about San Symphony six months ago, and this is the second update that I can see. Developers are working in line with what customers are asking for.

Every time I needed support, they gave me a solution.

Positive

I did not use a different solution previously.

The initial setup is very simple. There are documents to send to Datacore Support, and these were a little bit difficult to fill.

We are the vendor team, so for our use, we did it ourselves

The ROI is difficult to estimate.

I did not evaluate other options; my company already has a partnership with Datacore.

The primary use case is the provisioning of high-performance and redundant storage for our VMware platform. With the help of auto-tiering, the data lands on the optimal storage tier for it. Furthermore, integration into the backup system is very important to us. We use Veeam B&R, which, with SANsymphony integration, is able to work much more efficiently via storage snapshots. 

We use SANsymphony within a data center distributed over two locations. This was very easy to implement. This also includes settings that optimize the data traffic between the locations.

With SANsymphony, we were able to set up fully redundant storage across two locations. We use SANsymphony as the main storage for our cloud and dedicated customer environments. 

We were impressed by the integration into virtualization and the backup system. SANsymphony integrates seamlessly into our VMware platforms. Auto-tiering enables us to keep the storage content on the optimal storage tier easily. 

Synchronous mirroring ensures very high availability for us and our customers. In the event of maintenance or failure, an automatic failover takes place. The automatic failback is the cherry on top of the cake.

Integration with Veeam Backup & Replication has enabled us to improve our backup infrastructure significantly. 

The use of storage snapshots and backup via Fibre Channel reduces the load on the productive infrastructure.

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.

I see potential here in the support of NVMeoF, both as a target and in the backend. In addition, there should be new ways to improve the redundancy of the pools created with it - e.g. through extended RAID functionality (RAID5 or RAID6) or erasure coding.

Management could be improved. The management console sometimes reacts very slowly.

In the area of the HCI solution, I could imagine a different mode of operation. For example, a group of servers form a pool in which the data can be stored. 

Protection could also be guaranteed here via replication and erasure coding.

We have been using Datacore SANsymphony since 2007.

The systems are very stable. No great administrative effort is required to keep the system in good condition. Provided it is well-sized, it optimizes itself.

SANsymphony is very adaptable. Increasing the storage capacity and/or improving performance through faster systems in the backend are no problem.

Datacore support is one of the best in the industry. They offer a fast response and competent answers or even remote sessions. Support is always available 24/7/365.

Positive

We used StoreAge SVM with Dothill storage systems. 

SANsymphony has more and better functions. The TCO is also better.

The setup is quite simple if you are familiar with the storage environment. Certification as a DCIE is required. This ensures that you are sufficiently familiar with the system to install and administer it.

We did implement it in-house.

I can't give an exact ROI. The stability, availability, and performance pay for themselves immediately.

Good sizing is the basis for a stable and high-performance environment. It is important to plan in sufficient reserves.

It can make sense to license a higher number of TB if this puts you in a better price category.

We did not evaluate other options.

SANsymphony is best in class. It's flexible, like a Swiss army knife.

DataCore is our main Enterprise SAN solution. We serve all workloads among five different DataCore server groups. These workloads include all hypervisors, SQL and Oracle Databases, file shares, archive, and backups. DataCore helps us achieve disaster recovery by allowing us to mirror our data between two sites.

DataCore has been doing software-defined storage since back before SDS was even a buzzword. It has provided a great deal of flexibility, performance, and efficiency for our Enterprise SAN. We are not tied to any one hardware vendor and over the nineteen years that we've had DataCore, we have gone through various models of IBM servers to Dell servers as well as various storage arrays from IBM, Dot Hill, XIO, Kaminario, and Dell (all with some of the same data from year one).

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.

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. Datacore has some functionality where you can send performance metrics to a SQL database however it has not always worked well for us. We actually had to turn it off because we were actually collecting too much data, but in my opinion we sometimes want this data. Ideally if there was a way to see metrics for current and specific points in time it would be great for troubleshooting and any type of trend analysis.

I used to say the problem with DataCore was that it ran on Windows. However, with 2012 R2 and now Windows 2016, things have become much more stable. In general, stability has improved over the years. Most of the problems we've had in the past were due to Windows blue screen errors stemming from our HBA cards.

Scalability has worked well so far. We are up to managing about 2PB of data across five different DataCore Groups.

Technical Support is responsive. They could be a little faster when there is a critical emergency, but for the most part, technical support is good.

We have always had DataCore as our Enterprise SAN.

We've always had DataCore come in with Professional Services to do the initial setup.

In regards to Fibre Channel, buy a server that can handle the highest number of Quad Port HBA cards. Purchase as much memory for the server as you can afford. Anything you spec out, you will need to double if you want redundancy.

We did not evaluate other solutions prior to selecting this one.

We have two VMware servers attached to two DataCore SanSymphony servers. The two SanSymphony servers are in high availability. Each server has two NVMe cards and some SAS disk in RAID5. 

We use the auto-tiering function to manage the two kinds of storage and place the dormant blocks on the SAS disks. 

We also use the Continuous Data Protection function to protect our volumes against crypto lockers, for example. 

The solution allows us to have real Business Continuity Planning on our storage system.

DataCore SanSymphony helps us to have a real performant and secure storage system. We can use the storage technology of our choice because SanSymphony can manage any storage that Windows accept.

The solution helps us to protect the data with the high availability function, which synchronizes in real-time the block between the servers. The continuous data protection function can log all the changes on the storage to allow us to go back in time within the last 72 hours.

We thought about replacing our two VMware servers and the two DataCore servers with the hyper-converged DataCore solution. 

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.

It's difficult to say if something is missing in this solution. Maybe we'd like to manage the raid on the disk directly in SanSymphony. 

We essentially use RAID5 for our SAS disk and SSD, and now we need to create this RAID on the raid card. If we could bypass this card, we could really manage all the storage from the solution, which would be ideal.

The graphical interface needs to be improved. We have noticed some bugs in it.

A vCenter integration just appeared in the last version. However, we have only some functions within it. I am confident that many new things will arrive in the next few months to make it more robust.

I have been using this solution for 14 years.

I found the solution to be very stable.

The scalability is very good; we can add a disk or RAM if we need it.

The support is very good. They are fast and efficient.

Positive

We used EMC SAN. We switch due to the fact that, at the time, there was not high availability on the EMC side and the management of the storage was simpler.

The initial setup is very simple; there is a wizard to help you deploy the solution. 

I implemented the solution myself.

We evaluated EMC's MirrorView and recently Huawei with Dorado Hypermetro.

The product is primarily used for providing block storage space for the virtualization environment.

The server nodes caching algorithms will speed up your SAN storage performance, even if you are already using a high-class FC attached enterprise storage system.

The DataCore is open in order to attach a lot of different storage subcomponents.

The SDS is not dependent on a special hardware vendor. You will be able to mirror between different vendor systems if you like/need to. For example, to mirror data between one node with locally attached storage and the opposite node with an FC attached NetApp system. The data migration between old and new HW is quite simple.

The DataCore system has been rock solid since we have been using it - from 2007 on.

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.

It would be ideal if they were providing archive licensing with the ability to create a second pool on existing storage nodes. Maybe they could do it with limited max IO and/or without auto-tiering capabilities for the archive pool - to avoid interference with the performance pool.

I've used the solution since 2007 when the product was called SAN Melody.

The solution has 100% storage availability and we've had that for more than ten years.

There is scalability without any limit.

Customer Service is very fast. There is a high level of expertise and they are willing to help and assist you. They are industry-leading, I would say.

Positive

The local storage was used before and we found that it was not flexible enough.

The initial setup was straightforward and easy. With good planning and knowledge of your own environment, the setup works like a charm.

DataCore provides well-documented configuration guides.

It was a combined installation. Would like to say that the vendor assisted us.
Their knowledge and support were great, as was our internal expertise.

The availability is the best ROI.

DataCore is a good and valuable solution. The licensing costs depend on the storage and the volume of use. They were leveling on a good basis.

We did not evaluate any other solution.

DataCore is only as good as your plan for your environment. First, you need to know your own environment, including: 
- storage space
- throughput
- burst IO
- avarage IO. 
- good planning and testing.

Perfect choosen hardware is one that fits your needs. If you have that combined with DataCore, you will guarantee a success story.