DataCore SANsymphony Reviews

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.

We work with the enterprise edition, SANsymphony V SDS.

The solution is geared towards small and medium-sized businesses, with two or three node clusters supporting business continuity and nonstop operations of virtual machines or servers. This makes the solution very stable, cost effective and simple to administer and maintain. 

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.

The so-called hyperconverged infrastructure edition, sometimes knows as vSan, should be addressed. It is one component of the solution. Yet, DataCore is less competitive than certain other manufacturers, such as EMC, Cisco, and VMware vSan. It is competitive when it comes to a general purpose software defined storage solution. As such, a hyperconverged infrastructure solution could be improved.   

The solution could be better packaged and marketed. 

When it comes to a simple 2 node cluster business continuity solution for SMB companies, the downtime can be expensive.

We have been working with DataCore SANsymphony SDS for eight or nine years, although we are talking about a relatively new edition which was published several years ago, possessing similar technology. 

We have worked with the solution over the course of the past 12 months. 

DataCore SANsymphony SDSOne should not hurry with Microsoft patching and should try to use newer, stable versions of DataCore and Microsoft Windows server.

These are the perquisites. When fulfilled, DataCore works really well and is stable.

The stability is high and extremely good. Once set up properly, the stability really works. 

The scalability is excellent. 

We provide support. As such, we usually help to resolve issues arising with vendor DataCore.

DataCore's technical support is very good and I rate it as a nine out of ten. 

The installation is nice and straightforward. 

The length of deployment varies with the complexity of the customer's environment and can last from three to five days, including the planning and optimization.

Generally speaking, we do installation.

There are usually two people involved in the deployment and the main channels of the solution, one of whom is experienced with the Microsoft infrastructure and server, the set up and the configuration. The other person has experience in networking and the configuration of the network, interconnecting the nodes. So, there are not a lot of people involved. 

The solution is cost effective. 

When it comes to a simple 2 node cluster business continuity solution for SMB companies, the downtime can be expensive.

The solution has very advanced storage features, accompanied by a cost effective application or license.

We are a reseller.

There is DataCore and we are Datatek. We are just talking about similar names, Datatek being a DataCore reseller.

I rate DataCore SANsymphony SDS as a nine out of ten. 

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're using SANsymphnony for our primary storage in a HA environment for sensitive production data. Storage nodes are HPE servers with SSD drives in them. They serve storage to two servers blades enclosures in a Fibre Channel storage network. We have a total of 50TB in a mirror. 16 servers use this storage in a VMware vSphere environment.

This infrastructure has run without any issues since 2017 and we update it twice a year.

Before that, we had other SANsymphony infrastructure running on an old HMP MSA storage array. We migrated without any interruption.

DataCore SANsymphony brings the ability to work on almost every hardware platform and to build a storage node with high precision (disks, interfaces, protocols). We can choose what hardware we want to put in and it brings a high-performance throughput from it. The ability to build exactly what you need is a major advantage of SANsymphony over other solutions.

Hardware maintenance is easy since it is a simple server. There's no need for a storage hardware expert. On top of that, the Software-Defined Storage is easy to manage.

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.

We would like to see a real "sexy" storage dashboard with capacity, usage, performance, and error tracking.

The cloud reporting interface is quite poor compared to other vendors. We are far from an HPE Infosight, for example.

Using a classic storage array constructor allows clients to have a single point of contact in case of an issue. With DataCore, we have to deal with them for the software part and with the hardware vendor for the hardware part. Sometimes, in a complex environment, we have to deal with storage array vendors, servers vendors, and software vendors and that can be exhausting.

We've been using SANsymphony for almost 10 years now. We followed all of its great evolution so far.

This solution is stable. Depending on the two rooms' interconnection, we have to deal with redundancy and maybe a witness. Losing the connection completely between the nodes can lead to a complete rebuild of a side.

The scalability is almost infinite. I cannot think of a more scalable solution.

The customer service is quick and efficient. Sometimes we have to deal with some trivial questions but that seems to be the basis of every support query right now.

We previously used an HPE 3PAR storage array. We switched to have more performance and more flexibility. The maintenance is quite easier too.

The initial setup is easy via the use of a comprehensible wizard.

We implemented the solution ourselves after a formation from the vendor.

The ROI is high as we can change or update hardware without changing our licencing. 

The main work in building a SANsymphony solution is to design and select the correct hardware parts. The setup is quite easy and the configuration is too.

The licensing is by terabyte and can be quite expensive. 

We evaluated other hardware vendors but stuck to a software-defined solution.

VMware VSAN was not mature enough for us and we did not want to use a hardware vendor solution.

You must keep in mind that you'll have to qualify the hardware you use with SANsymphony compatibility.

Usually, our clients want to replace some storage units from NetApp. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't because NetApp still has some features that DataCore SANsymphony would like to have.

DataCore SANsymphony's stability is okay.

DataCore SANsymphony should integrate file servers at a good price into the solution. The licensing is expensive, and you cannot manage a big file server with DataCore SANsymphony without paying a lot of money. NetApp is easier to sell, and we have had projects where NetApp was a lot cheaper than DataCore.

Our customers want their block storage to be fast, redundant, and highly available. You also might have a large fire storage for data that the customer does not need to access urgently. When you want to enclose this in the DataCore architecture, you have to pay the full amount of money as with block storage, which can be very expensive. Sometimes, it is very expensive to use DataCore SANsymphony.

I have been using DataCore SANsymphony for about one year.

I didn't notice any problems with the solution's stability. DataCore SANsymphony's stability is okay.

The first installation of DataCore SANsymphony took a long time. I am not sure if that was due to a lack of experience or software issues, as I was part of the sales team. I am not mounting DataCore SANsymphony. I am just selling the solution to the customers.

I rate DataCore SANsymphony a seven out of ten for stability.

You can scale DataCore SANsymphony as much as you want if you are willing to pay the price. The solution’s scalability is high and theoretically has no limit.

We won three or four projects last year but also lost some. In some cases, the decision was to go back to maintaining NetApp. Our clients are enterprise businesses.

I rate DataCore SANsymphony a six out of ten for scalability.

I have to contact the sales team and system engineers. I'm quite content with DataCore SANsymphony's system engineers.

Positive

I am not completely satisfied with the initial setup. I rate DataCore SANsymphony a five out of ten for its initial setup.

DataCore SANsymphony’s deployment takes around eight weeks.

DataCore SANsymphony's pricing is very high and should be much cheaper. You buy a license of DataCore SANsymphony, and then you have to add three or four times the price in hardware.

You have several SLAs. You have to buy the hardware equipment because DataCore SANsymphony doesn't run independently but on server hardware.

On a scale of one to ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive, I rate DataCore SANsymphony's pricing a seven or eight out of ten.

We sell DataCore with the package that permits to use the latest version. We wouldn’t install another version.

NetApp is very good compared to DataCore SANsymphony in terms of flexibility and licensing.

I don’t know. I would ask them to compare.

DataCore SANsymphony is a good product, but there's room for improvement.

Overall, I rate DataCore SANsymphony a seven out of ten.

I run two servers with DataCore doing what it does. I then run VMware on top of that for my Window servers. I currently have roughly 50 users that are constantly using the various servers.

DataCore gave us speed, redundancy, reliability, and works great with our backup system.

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

Installing updates could be a bit more straightforward and easier to install. I have only installed one update on the systems, and for that, I had to bring in outside help that was more knowledgeable with the product than I currently am. He also had to contact DataCore support for assistance as the update did not go smooth. I also did Windows updates at this same time as it was strongly suggested to me not to do the Windows updates as they are released. The Windows updates were installed with no problems and caused no problems to the system.

Very pleased. This system should last me for another five years. That is my hope.

I only run two systems, and I have not had any problems. Nor have I needed to add additional hard drives, but I have been informed that they can be added as needed. I have talked with other DataCore users in my area that have hundreds of terabytes, and they are very happy with the scalability.

I have only needed to contact them once, and they were quick to assist. Excellent support was provided locally and directly from DataCore.

No. This is my first time using software-defined storage.

I had to bring in outside support as I was not familiar with the setup. I believe it took about two days to set everything up.

Vendor team did the setup, and the individual that did the setup was a complete professional. I will continue to use this same individual.

I'm sorry, I don't know this.

I had the vendor that sold me the software and hardware assist with setting up the systems. I also paid for three years of support at the same time when I purchased the software. Again, I found it affordable.

I did look at using VSAN from VMware, but that was going to be more money, hardware, and time involved to implement.

As a side note, I use Veeam to backup my servers, including the DataCore servers, and I have had no problem doing so.

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

If it could integrate to a cloud gateway, then we could carry it directly to storage, instead of having middleware in between the storage and the cloud.

It's a very expensive solution, and the licensing costs should be lower.

I've been dealing with this solution for seven to eight months.

It's very stable, but you must know what you are doing because you need to have sufficient memory processing in order for SANsymphony to work properly. Once you have that down, it's actually quite easy to manage.

Scalability is easier because everything comes in pairs. Everything you need to do, you have to do in pairs. For DataCore SANsymphony, you don't need a witness node. You can actually run in pairs, and you can upgrade in pairs. You can find support for up to 64 nodes, if I'm not mistaken. It depends on how you want to design your architecture.

Based on my experience, their technical support is very good.

The initial setup is very straightforward.

One person can easily manage the entire software. There is a learning curve, and you need to understand the features, how it works, how to create your storage pool, and how to tier your storage pool. Once you understand those things, everything is actually quite easy and streamlined. You just need to know the basic architecture.

We have licensing costs on a yearly basis. They charge per terabyte, so in terms of cost, it can be very costly.

They have three different features, and you have to pay extra for those.

If you have multiple block storage, as in a silo, then you can use SANsymphony to manage the storage from one management portal. You can also tier the data from storage, say, for example, from HP storage to Dell storage, transparently. You can also do storage migration without any downtime.

Compared to VMware vSAN on Nutanix or VxRail, you need a minimum of three nodes, two nodes and one witness. However, for DataCore SANsymphony you don't need a witness node.

DataCore SANsymphony is very good and very solid. In fact, it's almost 20 years old, but the pricing can be an issue.

DataCore is the primary storage solution for all of our VMware hosts, installed on a Dell EMC RX740 server with a combination of spinning and NVMe storage. We have just moved to a 2-host, hyperconverged solution utilizing DataCore. All of our servers and services are running off the 2-node DataCore solution.

DataCore has helped provide flexible, highly available, high-performance storage that otherwise would have been outside our price range.

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.

The cost is becoming prohibitive since they moved to a subscription model.  'Education' pricing is such in name only (we are a school).

When we originally purchased Datacore (in 2014) it was on a perpetual basis and provided exceptional value for money. We have renewed our DataCore solution this year, in 2019, and have found that DataCore has moved to a subscription model. Not only was the initial licensing far higher than previously, partly due to additional storage requirements but also because we can no longer acquire a 'limited' license and we also find we now have a large subscription to pay each year.

DataCore has been incredibly stable in the last six years that we've been using it, with zero downtime due to a failure in the DataCore component.

DataCore gives me the impression that it is hugely scalable. We currently use it on a tiny scale of two nodes, but this would be expandable to many many more.

DataCore support has always been top-notch whenever we've called on their services, although this has admittedly been rarely due to the stability of the product.

Previously we had local storage on separate physical servers. DataCore seemed the ideal solution for our vSAN when moving to a virtualized environment in VMware.

The initial setup of a conventional vSAN is straightforward.

Our recent setup of a two-node hyperconverged solution was a little more complicated, though this was mainly due to the Dell servers we had ordered as hosts, rather than DataCore itself. The DataCore consultants setting up the solution were very knowledgable and it was completed without too much trouble.

Our solution was implemented through a DataCore specialist, external contractor, who helped configure the whole solution.

When we initially purchased DataCore, it was extremely cost-effective with a perpetual license. They have since moved to a subscription model, which may prove too expensive for us in the future.

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

DataCore appeared to be the most suitable, best-value solution at the time and as such, we did not evaluate other alternatives.