We performed a comparison between DataCore SANsymphony and Dell PowerFlex 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."StarWind Virtual SAN can improve an organization's storage infrastructure by providing high availability, scalability, cost-effectiveness, performance, and ease of use."
"It has great free trials that allow end users to test a large variety of their products before deciding to buy the full product."
"The support team is available to solve any problem efficiently."
"Updates to server hardware are now painless and done during working hours with zero stress. We had a RAID failure a few months back, and nobody in the building even noticed and there was no after hours time used for repair."
"The vSAN provides full redundancy for storage while reclaiming some rack space."
"It includes every feature that a traditional SAN offers and so much more."
"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."
"We have been able to use more on-prem hardware to reduce cost and also use old disks that we do not trust enough for ordinary RAID or usage."
"Storage is always available."
"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)."
"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."
"The ability to pool the storage to leverage thin-provisioning is a huge saving in space and costs."
"The interface is user-friendly."
"The synchronous mirror allows us to operate a fully redundant storage solution that is distributed across two sites."
"Active-active is the most valuable aspect for us."
"During the maintenance periods, on any part of the storage or VMware migration, we have had no downtime."
"It has reduced downtime. Before, on our previous solution, we used to have downtime on some of the servers because of the sort of convention. But currently I've not experienced any downtime on any of the servers, and there is no more resource congestion."
"The solution is quite stable."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is integration."
"It is easy to use for management and operations teams because the tools are in one place."
"The catalog of APIs for automation has been most valuable, although they are quite limited."
"The program is stable."
"The solution is scalable."
"The integration with AWS is a valuable feature."
"Updating the software can be a bit tricky."
"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."
"A great feature would be a wizard and to include a new disk in the SAN. At the moment, including a new disk requires several steps - some that must be done at the OS level and others in each node."
"The documentation is good. However, if compared with competitors, it could be enhanced and made more professional."
"It would be great if the Linux version of the management console offered the same features as Windows."
"The software could benefit from more tooling to help with initial deployment."
"The software monitoring should be web-based to be reachable from any VLAN workstation."
"I'm sure it needs bug fixes..."
"If it could integrate to a cloud gateway, then we could carry it directly to storage, instead of having middleware in between the storage and the cloud."
"DataCore SANsymphony should integrate file servers at a good price into the solution."
"I would like to see reporting added, such as a monthly connectivity report."
"One limitation of this solution is that it's Windows-based, e.g. one requirement to install DataCore SANsymphony SDS is putting it on a Windows server machine. It relies on Windows and that is a limitation because there are some customers who are looking for non Windows systems."
"I'd like to see the company make the renewal of the software cheaper."
"I would like for it to improve into a more ergonomic management console and a translation into the French language. It should have some process for a shutdown of a VM properly in case of a problem."
"The alert system could have more features."
"Its interface could be better."
"We're also running Hyper-V virtual machines. But we recently discovered that migration of the Hyper-V virtual machines is a bit challenging. Maybe if Dell EMC can come out with a tool that will make it very easy for us to migrate the Microsoft Hyper-V machine, that may be an improvement."
"The support of containers needs to be improved. At present, it is limited to VMware. There needs to be direct communication with the hardware rather than through a hypervisor."
"I am not really impressed by the technical support of this solution."
"They should provide continuous support for data migration."
"Needs some more monitoring tools."
"I think there might be some room for improvement when it comes to pricing, because although I know how to convert customers, at the end of day, it's quite expensive. Sometimes your feature architecture is still coming out much cheaper than hardware costs for your infrastructure."
"It would be great to get earlier access to beta builds because we have to develop providers on our own. The APIs and enablers for custom automation could also be improved."
"We've had some issues around the licensing."
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DataCore SANsymphony is ranked 7th in HCI with 53 reviews while Dell PowerFlex is ranked 11th in HCI with 19 reviews. DataCore SANsymphony is rated 9.2, while Dell PowerFlex is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of DataCore SANsymphony writes "Robust with good replication and access protection ". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Dell PowerFlex writes "Infrastructure management solution that offers rapid provisioning of computer storage but the APIs and enablers for custom automation could be improved". DataCore SANsymphony is most compared with VMware vSAN, HPE SimpliVity, StorMagic SvSAN, Red Hat Ceph Storage and VxRail, whereas Dell PowerFlex is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) and HPE SimpliVity. See our DataCore SANsymphony vs. Dell PowerFlex report.
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