DataCore SANsymphony vs Nexenta comparison

DataCore and Nexenta by DDN are both solutions in the Software Defined Storage (SDS) category. DataCore is ranked #4 with an average rating of 9.4, while Nexenta by DDN is ranked #16 with an average rating of 9.0. DataCore holds a 6.9% mindshare in SDS, compared to Nexenta by DDN’s 1.2% mindshare. Additionally, 97% of DataCore users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 66% of Nexenta by DDN users who would recommend it.

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 5, 2024

DataCore SANsymphony and Nexenta compete in storage virtualization. SANsymphony generally has stronger pricing and support, while Nexenta offers superior features.

Features: DataCore SANsymphony provides exceptional storage virtualization with auto-tiering, synchronous mirroring, and high performance. Nexenta offers unified file and block storage, integrated data management tools, and a diverse feature set.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: SANsymphony has straightforward deployment and responsive customer service, facilitating easier implementation. Nexenta allows scalable deployment but often involves more setup complexity and expertise, with customer service less responsive than DataCore.

Pricing and ROI: DataCore SANsymphony has competitive pricing with substantial ROI, benefiting from low entry costs. Nexenta has higher initial setup costs justified by its extensive data management features, potentially leading to higher ROI in feature-rich environments.

To learn more, read our detailed DataCore SANsymphony vs. Nexenta Report (Updated: July 2025).

Buyer's Guide

DataCore SANsymphony vs. Nexenta

July 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

Pure Storage FlashBlade

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Software Defined Storage (SDS) category, the mindshare of Pure Storage FlashBlade is 4.2%, down from 4.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of DataCore SANsymphony is 6.9%, up from 6.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Nexenta is 1.2%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Software Defined Storage (SDS)

Featured Reviews

Eric Black

Solutions Architect at Recovery Point Systems

The ability to leverage multi-tenancy along with immutability is a huge benefit for us

The only thing I feel FlashBlade is missing is the SOS API. If it had SOS API, that would put it well over the top. Veeam Backup specifically has started to streamline their API, and they are doing that with SOS API. They have optimized it. Any of the S3 devices out there that support this SOS API can have far more API calls at once. On our side, that translates to better restoration. With SOS API, it can leverage far more restorations at a single given time or read from the device in simple terms. That results in maximizing the output and throughput from the device itself.

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OliverPalz

Senior Consultant at SJT SOLUTIONS GMBH

Provides efficient synchronous mirroring capability and dynamic data management functionality

The initial setup is relatively easy but requires a certified DataCore implementation engineer to deploy the solution in a production environment. The deployment following the qualified procedure, typically takes about a week, depending on the amount of storage and the specific environment. With my experience, I can set up the system within two to four hours; however, the qualification process, which includes detailed planning and testing, adds additional time. It involves gathering the customer's requirements, preparing comprehensive documentation for validation, and conducting tests in collaboration with the customer. This documentation includes a site planning checklist, a pre-installation checklist, and a functional test plan to ensure everything is in order before deployment. Overall, I rate the process an eight.

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Anil Rahulwar

Storage Engineer at Movate

Offers good features like Fusion and stable product with better customer service

Fusion is the only best feature, but it's a very good feature. Nexenta is a very old product. Nexenta is a well-established product used in the UK, US, India, Dubai, Qatar, and other countries. It is very good. The interface is up to date. Everything is up to date. The OS version was recently upgraded to 5.5 FP3. AI features: DataDirect Networks owns Nexenta and has won awards for AI. They continuously work on AI features. DDN also has a product called Tintri Infinia with AI features. And NVIDIA product also has AI features. I look forward to working on those products.

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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

"The initial setup is pretty quick."

"It performs well and it is also very fast."

"The tool's most valuable features are data warehousing, speedy recovery, and analytics. Its latest release is cost-effective."

"Approximately 40% to 50% of my time is saved using Pure Storage FlashBlade compared to different products."

"The most valuable feature is Safe Mode."

"The most valuable features include the ease of implementation, ease of use and the speed that you can do backup and recovery on."

"The main feature I have found to be product replication."

"We can capacity plan at a greater level than we used to."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade pros

"The documentation repository is really useful and kept updated."

"The DataCore system has been rock solid since we have been using it - from 2007 on."

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

"The most valuable feature for us is that we can adjust the size of the storage very easily, without stopping production."

"Auto-tiering to obtain performance at a lower cost without the customer having to purchase ultra-fast storage is great."

"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)."

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

"SANsymphony is flexible, with many potential options for implementation. SANsymphony's can be used with VMware, Hyper-V, or even with a hypervisor agnostic approach. It can also be used for strictly physical non-virtualized solutions."

More DataCore SANsymphony pros

"It has a feature called Fusion that makes it more secure and productive."

Cons

"There is some room for new features related to authentication and integration with Kubernetes, and other solution using S3 Bucket."

"To improve FlashBlade, some analysts suggest enhancing its handling of relational database management systems and SQL queries."

"The features provided for SMB customers are limited."

"On our dedupe during our initial buy, we were expecting a number a little higher like 4x. However, we are getting about 3.6. While it is close enough, it doesn't quite hit the numbers. So, this has been a challenge."

"I would like to have Snapshots and Snapmail in the next release. People who came from a NetApp background, especially expect these features."

"It's on the expensive side, as expected for a niche product."

"Commvault has mainly driven the Analytics, providing data and reports. However, the product has room for improvement, especially regarding storage analytics. Upgrading firmware has caused issues, requiring feature disabling to revert to traditional backups. The firmware upgrades sometimes affect Commvault backups."

"The only thing I feel FlashBlade is missing is the SOS API. If it had SOS API, that would put it well over the top."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade cons

"The cloud reporting interface is quite poor compared to other vendors."

"Unified storage (all block, objects, and files) should be in a single storage pool with unified storage concepts, hence providing the user with whatever they want."

"I would like to see reporting added, such as a monthly connectivity report."

"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."

"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."

"Problem detection could be easier. It should help customers identify problems very quickly because it's not easy to analyze on the platform today."

"The alert system could have more features."

More DataCore SANsymphony cons

"There were some SMB issues, but they were resolved."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing is relatively expensive due to the FlashBlade technology. However, for companies needing quick and reliable data access, the cost is justified."

"I rate the tool's pricing a seven to eight out of ten."

"I have seen ROI. It has allowed me to increase the density of my VMs without having to purchase anything additional."

"It is within reason for what you get. From what we have found comparing it to other vendors, it is in the same range as others. Given the choice, we would definitely redeploy it based on the cost."

"The price could be cheaper."

"The price of this solution could be made more affordable."

"In my opinion, we have paid the right price for the product. I don't think that it is too much or too little."

"We used a reseller for the purchase."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade pricing and cost advice

"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."

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

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

"Pricing has improved but it is still expensive."

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

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

"DataCore SANsymphony's pricing is very high and should be much cheaper."

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

More DataCore SANsymphony pricing and cost advice

Information not available

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

14%

Financial Services Firm

12%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Government

Computer Software Company

17%

Manufacturing Company

14%

Comms Service Provider

Government

No data available

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Pure Storage FlashBlade?

The tool's most valuable feature is its fast performance, especially in handling snapshots. It helps during power out...

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pure Storage FlashBlade?

The pricing of Pure Storage FlashBlade is expensive compared to other products I used from other companies in the pas...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashBlade?

I believe there is not much improvement needed because they have everything we need, but the interface is a little bi...

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

The cost changed from a perpetual license to a subscription model, and it seems reasonable. I am technical personnel ...

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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...

See all answers

What needs improvement with DataCore SANsymphony?

In my opinion, there should be improvements in how to get and filter logs. However, this is not a frequent need becau...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Nexenta?

There were some SMB issues, but they were resolved in the latest version. Four to five customers faced intermittent i...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Nexenta?

It's for file systems. It's a NAS solution, and it has flexibility. There shouldn't be any outages because if one nod...

See all answers

What advice do you have for others considering Nexenta?

Overall, I would rate it an eight out of ten. I would recommend using it.

See all answers

Comparisons

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 19% of the time

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

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MinIO vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 11% of the time

Pure Storage FlashArray vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 9% of the time

VAST Data vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 9% of the time

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StarWind Virtual SAN vs DataCore SANsymphony

Compared 12% of the time

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs DataCore SANsymphony

Compared 11% of the time

VMware vSAN vs DataCore SANsymphony

Compared 11% of the time

StorMagic SvSAN vs DataCore SANsymphony

Compared 8% of the time

HPE SimpliVity vs DataCore SANsymphony

Compared 8% of the time

More DataCore SANsymphony Competitors

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs Nexenta

Compared 70% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs Nexenta

Compared 30% of the time

More Nexenta Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Pure Storage FlashBlade

July 2025

Download Pure Storage FlashBlade product report

Buyer's Guide

DataCore SANsymphony

July 2025

Download DataCore SANsymphony product report

Buyer's Guide

Software Defined Storage (SDS)

July 2025

Download Nexenta product report

Also Known As

No data available

DataCore Virtual SAN

No data available

Overview

FlashBlade is the industry’s most advanced scale-out storage for unstructured data, powered by a modern, massively parallel architecture to consolidate complex data silos (like backup appliances and data lakes) and accelerate tomorrow’s discoveries and insights.

Pure Storage

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

Nexenta is the global leader in Open Source-driven Software-Defined Storage - what we call Open Software-Defined Storage (OpenSDS).We uniquely integrate software-only "Open Source" collaboration with commodity hardware-centric "Software-Defined Storage" (SDS) innovation.

Nexenta by DDN

Sample Customers

ServiceNow, Mercedes-AMG Petronas Motorsport, Dominos, Man AHL

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.

GMO, Northern Backup, Cox Communications, University of Toronto, ScaleMatrix, Wipro, Ruhr University, Drillinginfo, George Washington University, Walton Electric, Faculty of Physics, NAU, ServerCentral

Buyer's Guide

DataCore SANsymphony vs. Nexenta

July 2025

Free Report: DataCore SANsymphony vs. Nexenta

Find out what your peers are saying about DataCore SANsymphony vs. Nexenta and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.

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