We performed a comparison between DataCore SANsymphony and VxRail 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."Immediately we noticed huge performance gains, even on older hardware and once we implemented a 10GB link between both servers, the sync was near-instant after the initial sync was complete."
"Being hardware agnostic is a must and definitely scored points for us."
"This was a great implementation for a small to mid-size business."
"StarWind Virtual SAN for vSphere is a software-defined storage solution that has reduced administration time for storage. It's pretty straightforward to install and setup it and so far it has been robust and worked as advertised from StarWind."
"It is easy to use and can monitor system synchronization and check Storage status. StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN) combines flash and disks of the cluster and forms a virtual shared storage “pool” accessible by all hosts. StarWind cuts down virtualization cost and complexity by eliminating the need for a physical shared storage (SAN). -StarWind offers the Enterprise-level high availability (HA), deployed and easily configured . we get technical support from star wind team when implementation software and after setup if we face any issue."
"The most valuable feature is the fact that the nodes are Active/Active, and allow us to do upgrades on any node without any downtime."
"StarWind Virtual SAN can improve an organization's storage infrastructure by providing high availability, scalability, cost-effectiveness, performance, and ease of use."
"The StarWind Virtual SAN provides a clever and unique solution to the Computing Split Brain problem."
"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."
"It is a very stable solution."
"During the maintenance periods, on any part of the storage or VMware migration, we have had no downtime."
"The interface is user-friendly."
"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."
"I found the solution to be very stable."
"Auto-tiering to obtain performance at a lower cost without the customer having to purchase ultra-fast storage is great."
"It is a stable solution."
"We were able to speed up our gaming software, which was a big plus."
"What I like the most in terms of features is the fact that the VxRail update can be done in one week. It takes much less time to do a whole server upgrade and an infrastructure update as well."
"VxRail is very cost-effective and affordable in the long term. It is more recommended when it comes to financial life, but it may depend upon the license. VxRail comes with VMware licensing, which may not be that cost-effective as compared to others. With VMware, it's an auto check competition. VMware is an expensive solution, especially for Nutanix. Nutanix have their own hypervisor called Acronis, which is very cost-effective against the VMware. Nutanix is cheaper for the hardware but not for the software. If you ask the Nutanix partners to deploy Nutanix over Cisco servers or Dell EMC servers, the cost will be higher. Nutanix wants to compete financially. Therefore, they propose their software over the Supermicro server, which is a very cheap Chinese server. In fact, I don't like their terms of service. HyperFlex has the highest price, and it is very expensive. I don't know why. It may be because this is a UCS system, which comes from Cisco and is already expensive. When it comes to HyperFlex, they need the labor to deploy Hyper-V, Citrix, or any other hypervisor."
"This product has given us clear visibility into what we need technology-wise to grow."
"Cost-effective and easy to install."
"VxRail's integration with VMware environments is very good. Our VxRail is built on VMware, and the integration is seamless. We haven't faced any challenges. We can migrate VMs between servers in real-time and replicate them to our DR site without any problems."
"It has a valuable deduplication feature."
"This solution optimizes our clients' resources."
"I see no need for major improvements but there could be some improvements in the form of notifications and the simplifying of maintenance mode."
"It took a bit of knowledge and support to put in place but once installed it works fine. Migration (HyperV) from one server to another sometimes takes longer than expected but there is no data loss even if the host crashes."
"It would be great if it provided thin provisioned virtual disks."
"For the StarWind VSA vSphere solution, I would like to see a simpler and automated virtual machine installation process in terms of network settings."
"I am expecting to see it more user-friendly in the future."
"Other vendors such as VMware vSAN have a bigger community of users, so it is easier to find more pre-sale or post-sale information from users."
"The documentation could be a little more concise, but, for the most part, it just works."
"The documentation could be better."
"Having an enterprise "Storage Dashboard" that can show capacity, usage, performance, and any issues would be very beneficial."
"We'd like to manage the raid on the disk directly in SanSymphony."
"When I sometimes reboot for maintenance, the connectivity from the iSCSI initiator host could be improved."
"Management could be improved. The management console sometimes reacts very slowly."
"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."
"The alert system could have more features."
"SANsymphony is missing some features that vSAN has. For example, vSAN has a special feature called continuous data protection. It provides the ability to go back in time to a given moment. You can see what was on your disk in the past up to two weeks. That's a great feature because ransomware attacks are increasingly common, and that provides you some kind of protection."
"The main problem is there is no DataCore OS."
"One challenge customers face with VxRail is the high cost of scalability. The price is higher if they want to add memory or capacity after purchasing the tool for three or five years. Each drive and RAM module is licensed separately, making the architecture costly. It would benefit Dell to review this licensing model and make it more cost-effective and flexible for customers."
"When we have a vulnerability or we need to upgrade VxRail, it takes a long time. It takes eight hours each time we upgrade."
"VxRail is a closed system with an out-of-the -box solution approach, it has basic 3 layers, Hardware, Network, Storage, Software, (Virtualizing) Applications. Release notes and improvement tips, patches from the back office, the business units, should be frequent and up to the patches which are coming from different vendors as far as the operating system application and also the technology itself is concerned."
"If VxRail could also offer file services in addition to virtualization, that would be nice because sometimes people want to complement their environment with file services, and you don't have that in VxRail."
"The solution is okay to scale vertically but a bit difficult to expend horizontally. For example, increasing RAM."
"All updates are supposed to be done through VxRail, however, the vCenter actually showed that there was an update it needed. I've just started using the product. I didn't know what I was doing. I actually updated my vCenter and that actually threw the VxRail system offline. We had to spend some time trying to get that working again. If possible, they should make the process a bit more clear so we don't make mistakes like this in the future. There should maybe be some sort of pop-up that can direct you."
"The licensing needs to be improved upon."
"My main issue so far is that the installation created a default datacenter name of "Marvin" and it cannot be changed."
DataCore SANsymphony is ranked 7th in HCI with 54 reviews while VxRail is ranked 1st in HCI with 120 reviews. DataCore SANsymphony is rated 9.2, while VxRail is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of DataCore SANsymphony writes "Robust with good replication and access protection ". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VxRail writes "Offers a hassle-free, complete package, and is energy-efficient". DataCore SANsymphony is most compared with VMware vSAN, HPE SimpliVity, Red Hat Ceph Storage, StorMagic SvSAN and Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), whereas VxRail is most compared with VMware vSAN, Dell PowerFlex, HPE SimpliVity, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) and HPE Hyper Converged. See our DataCore SANsymphony vs. VxRail report.
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