We performed a comparison between Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series and DataCore SANsymphony 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."We can lose a site or even two of our three, and we would lose no data and have no outage."
"I like the asynchronous replication and failover features. They are what I'm primarily using it for. The asynchronous replication is helpful because our servers are backed up continuously throughout the day. If anything goes wrong we just fail over immediately. That is a very nice feature to have."
"StarWind SANs come with outstanding support."
"This product now allows us to migrate virtual machines between nodes as if we had a dedicated $100,000 SAN in the mix without the additional cost and management of the SAN."
"Before VSAN, hypervisor configuration changes and updates resulted in VM outages. Now, downtime is dramatically reduced."
"It includes every feature that a traditional SAN offers and so much more."
"The support has been amazing and quick to reply."
"StarWind has provided us with a top-notch, well-supported, robust vSAN offering when other vendors have moved to hyper-converged solutions that are outside of our average clients' reach from a financial and resource perspective."
"The UCS, which is by far the best management tool there is on the market, regardless of vendor. It's the only tool I see that gives you the opportunity to size and scale all the assets and capacity you have in your data center, from a unified view."
"Performance-wise, everything is good. So far, we haven't had any issues. There has been no downtime at all."
"When we use it for VDI solutions, it is very easy to deploy and support."
"We used to have a single customer-facing data center, which was vulnerable to failure. This product has allowed us to create high availability between two private data centers."
"It saves space for data centers, which is good."
"The price of the solution is good, especially when it comes to complex network solutions, such as UCS and Connect."
"The solution is stable."
"Cisco provides the ability to configure BIOS, something that no one else can do, on a remote basis. That's really helpful sometimes. The bus-snooping alteration tool for BIOS is fantastic. That's one of the game-changing features that Cisco alone has at this point."
"Supporting of Automated-Storage-Tiering (AST) is a good feature that saves money."
"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 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."
"The use of the RAM cache allows you to speed up the writing and reading of data while also allowing for a possible increase in performance by increasing the RAM on the servers."
"The features I have found most valuable are the active-active, or so-called grid technology, and the integration into our VMware-vCenter."
"It is a stable solution."
"Our system is designed to be scalable and flexible, so it can grow and adapt to meet the changing needs of our clients."
"They need to invest more in the support documents for real issues happening when integrating the solution with the hypervisor."
"A web management interface would be good, especially for those coming from other solutions that have one."
"Scaling the product is fairly easy except for the computing aspect. It would entail another appliance. While not a show stopper, it isn't as easy as dropping in a few extra SSDs."
"I'm sure it needs bug fixes..."
"It would be nice to add the ability to use raw partitions instead of file containers."
"I wish there was online support because email return takes a long time and a faster solution should be found."
"The GUI deserves a little love."
"We would like the documentation to be more complete. Most items are covered, but if you don't know something, you may need to contact their support."
"A stretch function is really needed. Germans think that because of the high availability and the security that two data centers are better but we want edge all in one cluster. This is a needed feature, the cluster feature, and we'd also like to see a possibility for ROBO offices."
"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."
"Deployment scripts can be improved since several clans need to be created before the deployment effectively works."
"I would rate the installation of Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series an eight out of ten. It can be complex."
"The initial setup can be complex."
"The initial setup could be faster, due to the prerequisites."
"The initial setup of profiles and templates could be improved. Maybe some end profiles that you can use based on your type of deployment would be good."
"Sometimes when there are multiple technologies involved in a support case, this is when there is a bit of a lag."
"When I sometimes reboot for maintenance, the connectivity from the iSCSI initiator host could be improved."
"DataCore SANsymphony should integrate file servers at a good price into the solution."
"DataCore should integrate its own file server into SANsymphony."
"For customers or technicians that don't speak and understand English, it could be great to have other languages support, all the more so given the number of countries in which SanSymphony is used."
"The solution could be better packaged and marketed."
"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."
"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."
"It would be ideal if they were providing archive licensing with the ability to create a second pool on existing storage nodes."
Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is ranked 8th in HCI with 90 reviews while DataCore SANsymphony is ranked 7th in HCI with 54 reviews. Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is rated 8.0, while DataCore SANsymphony is rated 9.2. The top reviewer of Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series writes "A fast and easy deployment that allows secure access to our medical applications ". On the other hand, the top reviewer of DataCore SANsymphony writes "Robust with good replication and access protection ". Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is most compared with VMware vSAN, VxRail, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), Dell PowerFlex and HPE SimpliVity, whereas DataCore SANsymphony is most compared with VMware vSAN, HPE SimpliVity, StorMagic SvSAN, Red Hat Ceph Storage and VxRail. See our Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series vs. DataCore SANsymphony report.
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