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.
"A typical system administrator with minimal experience in Hyper-V, VMware, or Windows can do VSAN configuration and maintain VSAN operations."
"We are able to do maintenance by bringing down one node at a time, rather than having to schedule a complete shutdown."
"It has allowed me to effectively and confidently manage the maintenance of hosts where I can power off a host and have its VMs migrate to another one."
"The best feature is its ease of installation and integration within a current infrastructure."
"The ability to run the software virtually on every virtualization platform and the ability to eliminate all storage vendor locking are the most valuable features."
"Before VSAN, hypervisor configuration changes and updates resulted in VM outages. Now, downtime is dramatically reduced."
"One of the standout features of StarWind.com is its remarkable ability to seamlessly integrate with Dell systems. This integration provides users with an unmatched level of convenience and compatibility, allowing for streamlined operations within a Dell environment. This compatibility factor alone can save significant time and effort for IT professionals, ensuring a smooth integration process and optimized performance."
"It allows you to use ANY consumer or enterprise HDDs and SSDs, and that's a really great thing!"
"Continuous data protection (CDP), can be used to "protect" again ransomware by recording all write on disk in a log. You can recover your data with incredible time granularity."
"For us, fault tolerance is the most important feature of DataCore."
"I found the solution to be very stable."
"I'd have to say that the biggest improvement gained by using SANsymphony has to be the performance of the product."
"SANsymphony is flexible, with many potential options for implementation. SANsymphony's can be used with VMware, Hyper-V, or even with a hypervisor agnostic approach. It can also be used for strictly physical non-virtualized solutions."
"CDP is an important feature for avoiding data loss in the event of ransomware attacks. You need more storage capacity, however, you get the possibility to return at any time and use the data saved up to that point. The recovery is much faster than with a classic restore."
"It is a very stable solution."
"The most valuable feature for us is that we can adjust the size of the storage very easily, without stopping production."
"The vSAN features we've found most helpful are live application migrations and storage policies. It has storage, policies, application, and DRS policies. Automation is there."
"It easily integrates with all types of storage."
"The technical support is good. We are always thankful for the technical support from VMware. They are very supportive when we have a technical problem."
"There is not a lot of maintenance required."
"The product’s most valuable features are performance and expandability."
"The solution's technical support is good."
"Storage policies are used to perform operations in the VMs. This feature allows you to create storage policies for VMs to get performance, high availability, I/O policies, etc."
"VMware vSAN is an easy to use and easy to manage storage solution. Deploying and upgrading are easy. Technical support is very good."
"I would like an automated installation/configuration despite the fact that their service is very collaborative, a customer should be able to deploy the solution by themselves."
"I had issues locating the documentation that applied to my version of StarWind vSAN."
"Server-side snapshots are one thing the Linux appliance can't do yet."
"While we had no problems setting the system up, and service technicians from StarWind could assist us very well, they could provide some form of in-depth documentation."
"We have, in rare cases, received conflicting guidance between different support folks within StarWind."
"The software could benefit from more tooling to help with initial deployment."
"Some configuration options still demand service restarting."
"It would be helpful if StarWind provided more precise and detailed documentation explaining how to configure the solution in various scenarios, including the advantages and disadvantages of each."
"The alert system could have more features."
"It would be ideal if they were providing archive licensing with the ability to create a second pool on existing storage nodes."
"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."
"If you're dealing with big databases or transactional databases, it might not be the best-suited solution. The design of DataCore's solution isn't oriented towards this type of data."
"The main problem is there is no DataCore OS."
"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."
"Its interface could be better."
"We are waiting for container support (on the roadmap), as well as a user-friendly full web-administration capability, and an improved API."
"There's a lot that can be done to segregate. That may be available now in vSAN 7, I suppose, however, the deduplication and compression can be segregated."
"I lose a node in a cluster vSAN, which is also used as a cluster HA. I lose not only the storage part, which is not necessarily serious (depending on the configuration of the vSAN cluster), but on the other hand, I lose also a node of Compute, which can make things complicated quickly."
"I would like to see some of the more traditional SAN functions that are out the now. I can list them: being able to Snapshot on the back-end, better de-dupe, and better compression. Those are the major ones."
"The product's high price is an area of concern where improvements are required."
"vSAN does not have online dedup. When opening the inline dedupe, the performance will be lower than off inline."
"Its price could be improved. It is too expensive for our clients."
"Better options would be clustered nodes, or even cloud configuration. There is room for improvement in cloud configuration, we typically do web browsing for management."
"One thing in vSAN that I would like to improve is using vSAN as a repository for files or other things. For example, with Horizon, maybe we can save profiles with UEM on there. That would be a good feature that I would like."
DataCore SANsymphony is ranked 7th in HCI with 54 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 2nd in HCI with 226 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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