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Azure Local vs DataCore SANsymphony comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 21, 2026

Review summaries and opinions

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

ROI

Sentiment score
3.8
Azure Local boosts ROI by reducing costs and support reliance, integrating well with Microsoft, enhancing business efficiency and engagement.
Sentiment score
6.8
DataCore SANsymphony enhances security and availability, offering high ROI through hardware reuse and cost-effective storage and uptime savings.
There has been some return on investment in terms of just time usability and reduction of footprint.
Solution Architect DC at Natilik
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
4.8
Azure Local's customer service is praised for effectiveness, but delays occur with resellers; Premier Support recommended for best outcomes.
Sentiment score
6.4
DataCore SANsymphony's support is praised for being rapid, knowledgeable, effective, and highly rated, despite occasional inconsistencies.
They have more advantages than VMware, especially for containerization, and they provide good support as well.
Iinfrastructure Architect at Ministry Of Justice
Not every support team member is very knowledgeable about Azure Stack HCI, creating delays in resolution.
IT Solution Architect at a educational organization with 11-50 employees
They always help me quickly and with great knowledge, which is essential for central storage.
System Engineer at Bechtle
I would rate technical support from DataCore SANsymphony a 10.
Owner at Arsium
The customer support is perfect.
Sales Manager at MSDSYSTEMS S.R.L.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
5.3
Azure Local provides scalable, reliable performance with effective cloud integration and seamless transitions, supporting numerous VMs and user demands effortlessly.
Sentiment score
8.5
DataCore SANsymphony is praised for its scalability, hardware independence, and adaptability to both small and large environments.
There are no limits to scalability, which is essential for central storage.
System Engineer at Bechtle
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
5.9
Azure Local, stable and scalable with Hyper-V, has improved installation speed and matches VMware's performance despite minor issues.
Sentiment score
8.3
DataCore SANsymphony is highly stable and reliable, with minimal downtime, requiring proper configuration and minimal maintenance.
It does not feel like a well-oiled machine yet, with too many idiosyncrasies and insufficient documentation and integration, feeling more like software that is still in beta.
IT Solution Architect at a educational organization with 11-50 employees
After achieving good maturity, it became easier.
Iinfrastructure Architect at Ministry Of Justice
 

Room For Improvement

Azure Local needs improvements in setup, management, integration, architecture, performance, disaster recovery, and competitive pricing.
DataCore SANsymphony struggles with tech support, pricing, Windows dependence, and needs better integration, interface, and enterprise features.
Microsoft has decided to discontinue stretched cluster technology completely, which is disappointing.
IT Solution Architect at a educational organization with 11-50 employees
Hyper V seems to lag behind compared to VMware.
Solution Architect DC at Natilik
There could be improvements with Azure Stack HCI regarding the license and price, as they have significantly higher prices compared to other competitors.
Iinfrastructure Architect at Ministry Of Justice
there should be improvements in how to get and filter logs
System Engineer at Bechtle
DataCore SANsymphony can be improved with high availability as it offers synchronous mirroring between physical and separate sites to ensure business continuity and disaster recovery.
Sales Manager at MSDSYSTEMS S.R.L.
The area of DataCore SANsymphony that has room for improvement is the support.
Owner at Arsium
 

Setup Cost

Azure Local users find costs high but competitive, with potential savings on total stack via Windows Server Datacenter rental.
DataCore SANsymphony's pricing is high, but offers favorable price-performance, with careful planning advised to optimize costs.
The licensing is quite expensive because it's per call.
Solution Architect DC at Natilik
They have made some improvements regarding the pricing, but it's still too expensive.
Owner at Arsium
The cost changed from a perpetual license to a subscription model.
System Engineer at Bechtle
 

Valuable Features

Azure Local offers robust features for efficient networking, container management, cost-effectiveness, and seamless integration with Azure services.
DataCore SANsymphony enhances storage management, performance, and reliability with high availability, flexibility, scalability, and hardware-agnostic versatility.
Azure Stack HCI has been very beneficial for disaster recovery operations.
Iinfrastructure Architect at Ministry Of Justice
The integration with Azure using Azure Arc is excellent.
Solution Architect DC at Natilik
Customers can extend storage with flexibility, as one is not obligated to purchase hard disks or controllers from the same storage vendor.
System Engineer at Bechtle
DataCore SANsymphony has positively impacted our organization because it is scalable and has a fundamental concept that aggregates and pools available storage resources, hiding the complexity, which makes it very simple.
Sales Manager at MSDSYSTEMS S.R.L.
DataCore SANsymphony's ability to enhance storage utilization is very good because it's agnostic and it can be deployed on every environment, which is perfect for my clients.
Owner at Arsium
 

Categories and Ranking

Azure Local
Ranking in HCI
13th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
5.8
Number of Reviews
8
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
DataCore SANsymphony
Ranking in HCI
7th
Average Rating
9.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
58
Ranking in other categories
Storage Software (2nd), Software Defined Storage (SDS) (4th), Storage Performance (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the HCI category, the mindshare of Azure Local is 3.2%, up from 1.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of DataCore SANsymphony is 2.6%, up from 1.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
HCI Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
DataCore SANsymphony2.6%
Azure Stack HCI3.2%
Other94.2%
HCI
 

Featured Reviews

MC
IT Solution Architect at a educational organization with 11-50 employees
Experience with seamless cost-saving capacity, though integration and support need refinement
An area that could be possibly improved with Azure Stack HCI is the stretched cluster functionality, which was included in version 23H2 for disaster recovery purposes. However, this functionality has been put on hold for the next release, and Microsoft has decided to discontinue stretched cluster technology completely, which is disappointing. They promise to bring back a significant or similar solution in a future release, but currently, there is no such functionality for stretched clusters between two sites in the latest versions of Azure Stack HCI, which poses a problem as we were looking forward to utilizing it. The integration with Azure Arc provides a unified management experience, but I find it to be fairly clunky. The integration exists, but it is not smooth or very easy to use. While they've started to integrate the two, the integration lacks maturity and makes it difficult to manage effectively. There are discrepancies between managing VMs through Azure Arc versus managing them directly, as changes made not using the Azure Arc integration are not easily reflected in Azure Arc. For instance, if I have an Arc-enabled VM and make changes to it outside the Arc interface, those changes may not be registered directly in Azure Arc, leading to issues in fully viewing the status and configuration of VMs depending on the management tool used. You either manage VMs fully through Arc or not at all because mixing the two methods results in incomplete visibility and inconsistencies.
SigfridCecillon - PeerSpot reviewer
Owner at Arsium
High availability and user-friendliness enhance infrastructure health and redundancy
I would rate technical support from DataCore SANsymphony a 10. Each time I contact the technical support, it's when I don't have a choice because it's very difficult for me on site, and each time, I have good people online who are able to help me solve the problem. Usually, the problems are not very technically difficult, but sometimes they are, and the support team is still there to help us resolve them. The majority of the problems are linked to licensing, so when the license has expired or the number is not correct, they are proactive and change things live, which is very good.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
9%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
14%
Computer Software Company
14%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Performing Arts
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise3
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business36
Midsize Enterprise12
Large Enterprise21
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Azure Stack HCI?
This solution costs €10 per core per month. The whole stack is free if you are renting Windows Server Datacenter.
What needs improvement with Azure Stack HCI?
There could be improvements with Azure Stack HCI regarding the license and price, as they have significantly higher prices compared to other competitors. The end-to-end encryption provided by Azure...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for DataCore SANsymphony SDS?
Before choosing DataCore SANsymphony, I did not evaluate other options.
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).
What needs improvement with DataCore SANsymphony?
DataCore SANsymphony can be improved with high availability as it offers synchronous mirroring between physical and separate sites to ensure business continuity and disaster recovery. I do not have...
 

Also Known As

No data available
DataCore Virtual SAN
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
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.
Find out what your peers are saying about Azure Local vs. DataCore SANsymphony and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
880,745 professionals have used our research since 2012.