Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] vs DataCore SANsymphony comparison

Cisco and DataCore are both solutions in the HCI category. Additionally, 89% of Cisco users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 97% of DataCore users who would recommend it.

Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [...

Read 90 Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] reviews

89% willing to recommend

DataCore SANsymphony

Read 58 DataCore SANsymphony reviews

3,905 Views
2,070 Comparison Views

97% willing to recommend

Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [...

DataCore SANsymphony

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] and DataCore SANsymphony based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

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Buyer's Guide

HCI

December 2025

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Review summaries and opinions

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

Categories and Ranking

Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [...

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

DataCore SANsymphony

Average Rating

9.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Storage Software (2nd), Software Defined Storage (SDS) (4th), HCI (7th), Storage Performance (3rd)

Featured Reviews

Nuno Mendes

IT Manager - Resp.Department at Parvalorem

High performance solution that makes it easy to efficiently manage VM resources

In our case as a credit recovery company working with the state, our infrastructure is fixed and stable as we don't have the same need for growth as other types of companies. That said, one of the biggest problems with HyperFlex HX is that if you want to adjust your solution in terms of processing power, memory, or disk capacity, you have to buy completely new hosts. From a financial perspective, it can be very expensive to do so, and from a legal perspective, there are all kinds of compliance issues we would have to sort out before buying any new solution or application. Since we as a company will only be operating for perhaps the next ten years, when our HyperFlex solution comes to its end-of-life in 2024 our next step will likely not be with HyperFlex or any other solution from Cisco. Instead, from a financial point of view, we will likely turn toward a cloud solution because, that way, we won't have to spend so much money on physical infrastructure. We are, after all, only a small company and HyperFlex can be very expensive for other companies of our size, whether in Portugal or elsewhere like the United States. One other area for improvement is in regard to HyperFlex's integration with VMware. HyperFlex integrates with a specific version of VMware in such a way that HyperFlex doesn't always resolve security issues with VMware at the same pace as what you see in native implementations of VMware. This has happened in one or two situations in the past. On the other hand, the integration is otherwise adequate, especially in terms of availability and virtualization features (such as being able to split up each of our four hosts within VMware).

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SigfridCecillon

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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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is simple to use, user-friendly and has been best for our purposes."

"The implementation process is okay."

"Deduplication is a valuable feature available in Cisco HyperFlex."

"There are some slight cost advantages when you need fewer resources to manage it."

"The most valuable feature is that it is something small that can be more easily deployed than a full data center set of servers."

"Great integration with backup software."

"Stretch cluster allows us to warranty a service for the customer."

"It is very scalable. It is also easy to scan."

More Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] pros

"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 support is excellent."

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

"Oracle OLTP benchmark to test how it improves the performance while using flash drive NVMe."

"The ability to pool the storage to leverage thin-provisioning is a huge saving in space and costs."

"An advantage of SANsymphony is its ease of use, especially when installing or upgrading the system."

"For us, fault tolerance is the most important feature of DataCore."

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

More DataCore SANsymphony pros

Cons

"I would like it to be easier to manage the server, create VMs, and manage the VMs on the client."

"The initial setup could be faster, due to the prerequisites."

"The initial setup of the Cisco HyperFlex HX platform was medium-level difficult. It's a little bit different from traditional servers. It takes getting used to the learning curve."

"Cisco HyperFlex should decrease the amount of memory needed from the Controller VM that controls the physical discs. They control the discs by using the virtual VM over every ESXi host and the VM consumes memory and consumes more hardware resources. They have to improve that by decreasing the amount of required memory and CPUs to control this disc on the server."

"We need to be able to scale out and not just up. When you want to scale up or scale out, you are quite limited."

"It needs more detailed documentation."

"They can't get a POC to work because there are big latencies between the two sites we have. Even though we have a private fiber connection and everything else works well, they can't get the two products to talk to each other. They are not able to build it up. It looks like it's a firmware issue. They said it isn't but now it's looking like it is. I hope we can sort it out."

"Stability is really poor, especially the storage stability. We lost data. There were disruptions of clusters and that's one big pain point of the solution. It's not stable enough, the documentation is not good, there's not much documentation available. For every call we need a tech engineer."

More Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] cons

"The graphical interface is not always very stable."

"The cost is becoming prohibitive since they moved to a subscription model."

"DataCore should integrate its own file server into SANsymphony."

"It would be ideal if they were providing archive licensing with the ability to create a second pool on existing storage nodes."

"NVMeoF should be implemented. This protocol will play a major role in storage infrastructure in the future."

"DataCore SANsymphony should integrate file servers at a good price into the solution."

"The solution could be better packaged and marketed."

"When I sometimes reboot for maintenance, the connectivity from the iSCSI initiator host could be improved."

More DataCore SANsymphony cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Here in Brazil... it is very expensive. It's very hard for almost all companies to buy even the small version of this solution."

"They are not the cheapest on the market. But there's an old saying I like to quote: "If you know that you are getting what you pay for, it's fine if it's expensive.""

"Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is a bit pricier compared to other brands in the market...There is a need to make additional payments towards the maintenance and support of the solution."

"We negotiated with Cisco and we got some price benefit from that."

"HyperFlex is relatively expensive, but you get good value for money."

"One of the challenges we have with HyperFlex is that they have a subscription fee for the operating system that runs on it, and if I remember correctly, it costs approximately $15,000 USD per month."

"If you don't look at the costs of the systems, the scalability is quite good."

"The cost is expensive, but there is a chance to save money in the future."

More Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] pricing and cost advice

"The cost is at the same level as other storage solutions and it is easy to understand the licensing."

"In my case, the licensing per terabytes is very high and it must be licensed for each extra functionality."

"This solution allows the use of off-the-shelf hardware and charges by the TB of storage."

"The solution is cost effective."

"It is relatively expensive, and the additional costs for hardware and storage can make it a significant investment for customers."

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

"Pricing has improved but it is still expensive."

"This product has a good ratio between quality and price. In many cases, it's less expensive to work with DataCore than other storage systems."

More DataCore SANsymphony pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

13%

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

Construction Company

Computer Software Company

14%

Manufacturing Company

14%

Comms Service Provider

10%

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	24
Midsize Enterprise	17
Large Enterprise	57

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	36
Midsize Enterprise	12
Large Enterprise	21

Questions from the Community

How do I choose between Cisco Hyperflex HX Series and Nutanix Acropolis AOS?

Cisco HyperFlex HS series vs Nutanix Acropolis AOS Cisco HyperFlex gives extended hyper-convergence functions from core to edge and multi-cloud environments. It helps IT and OT teams deploy hyper...

See all answers

How does VxRail compare with Cisco HyperFlex HX Series?

VxRail provides stable solutions for technical problems while at the same time not being too expensive for a company to invest in. Even if you are working with a limited budget, this platform offer...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for DataCore SANsymphony SDS?

Before choosing DataCore SANsymphony, I did not evaluate other options.

See all answers

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).

See all answers

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...

See all answers

Comparisons

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Compared 13% of the time

Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure vs Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL]

Compared 13% of the time

HPE Alletra dHCI vs Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL]

Compared 11% of the time

More Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] Competitors

StarWind Virtual SAN vs DataCore SANsymphony

Compared 10% of the time

VMware vSAN vs DataCore SANsymphony

Compared 7% of the time

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs DataCore SANsymphony

Compared 6% of the time

NetApp ONTAP vs DataCore SANsymphony

Compared 6% of the time

Pure Storage FlashArray vs DataCore SANsymphony

Compared 5% of the time

More DataCore SANsymphony Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL]

January 2026

Download Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] product report

Buyer's Guide

DataCore SANsymphony

January 2026

Download DataCore SANsymphony product report

Also Known As

No data available

DataCore Virtual SAN

Overview

The Cisco HyperFlex HX Data Platform is a purpose-built, high-performance, scale-out file system with a wide array of enterprise-class data management services. The data platform’s innovations redefine distributed storage technology, giving you complete hyper-convergence with enterprise storage features:

Enterprise-class data management
Continuous data optimization
Securely encrypted storage
Dynamic data placement
Clusterwide parallel data distribution
Linear and incremental scaling
API-based data platform architecture
A simplified approach

Cisco

Experience peace of mind with DataCore SANsymphony, the ultimate software-defined storage solution alleviating storage management challenges. Say goodbye to the complexities of managing different storage tiers and disruptions with SANsymphony's block-level storage virtualization technology, empowering you to automate capacity provisioning and data placement across diverse storage environments including SAN, DAS, HCI, and JBOD. Break down silos, control data placement, meet business continuity objectives, boost performance, and seamlessly expand or refresh hardware with SANsymphony. Benefit from features like asynchronous replication for disaster recovery, minimizing data loss, accelerating application responsiveness, and integrating new technology non-disruptively. Trusted by industry leaders like NASA, Thorntons, Inc., and TUI Cruises, DataCore SANsymphony guarantees unparalleled flexibility, scalability, and reliability, ensuring uninterrupted data access and application availability while reducing storage costs and inefficiencies.

DataCore

Sample Customers

BluePearl Veterinary Partners, Ready Pac Foods, Bryant University, Bellevue Group, KPIT Technologies, City Harvest

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.

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