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."The primary purpose of this software is to create a virtual SAN between local storage on Hyper-V hosts. I find this feature most valuable since it accomplishes this quite well."
"Immediately we noticed huge performance gains, even on older hardware and once we implemented a 10GB link between both servers, the sync was near-instant after the initial sync was complete."
"Their support staff is comprised of true experts who can also communicate clearly."
"It has been extremely stable for the three years we've been running it."
"The failover protection and the ability to expand storage and nodes with no downtime are by far the best physical features we have benefited from."
"The license price is one of the cheapest in the market."
"The most important feature is the ability to experience the loss of one node or one storage device, and not lose the entire cluster."
"The instant failover, with vSAN copying data to the second node, allowed for the continuous availability of our applications."
"DataCore SANsymphony's stability is okay."
"Supporting of Automated-Storage-Tiering (AST) is a good feature that saves money."
"I am very happy with this product's ability to adapt, increase, and modify existing infrastructures."
"Good security with this solution."
"Active-active is the most valuable aspect for us."
"Mirroring is the most valuable feature because I can provide a high-level of service and optimize the use of obsolete storage."
"Auto-tiering to obtain performance at a lower cost without the customer having to purchase ultra-fast storage is great."
"DataCore's ability to seamlessly move virtual volume data between storage pools as well as their synchronous mirroring has made maintenance and disaster recovery planning achievable."
"We've had no issues with scaling the solution."
"Dell PowerFlex is a one-stop-shop solution. Storage, compute, network, application monitoring, and support cases are all combined into one solution. It's very easy to administer compared to when you have a reference architecture where you need to design and build everything yourself. You would also then have to work with multiple vendors."
"Perfectly suits customers dealing with the combination of future storage needs and, at the same time, keeping up their computing power."
"It is easy to use for management and operations teams because the tools are in one place."
"The setup was very straightforward."
"The catalog of APIs for automation has been most valuable, although they are quite limited."
"We're doing a lot of VMware for IT so this solution is really valuable from a VMH point of view. We're trying to assist our customers mainly with management, because that's what they want. The most important aspects are ease of management, as well as ease of configuration, allowing them to attach additional nodes and resources for the applications."
"Saves us a lot of space in the data center."
"In the next release, they could make some graphs of the real-time loading, speed of storage, and interfaces. Of course, these can be viewed in other places. But, in the event of a malfunction or troubleshooting, this would be convenient."
"It runs until it does not - and disaster recovery documentation is sparse and mostly unclear."
"I would love to see more vendor selection to be available for the HCA/vSAN appliances."
"Perhaps the developer should refine the product management through PowerShell."
"We just need more integration with Veeam."
"Server-side snapshots are one thing the Linux appliance can't do yet."
"Ability to to test the virtual storage are network area and storage speed from StarWind Management Console."
"You have to do a "full" sync on write-back cache disks instead of a quick sync if there is an issue."
"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 cloud reporting interface is quite poor compared to other vendors."
"I would like to see SMPA (Shared Multi-Port Array) technology developed with the aim of allowing a configuration identical to other storage arrays."
"SANsymphony is missing some features that vSAN has. For example, vSAN has a special feature called continuous data protection. It provides the ability to go back in time to a given moment. You can see what was on your disk in the past up to two weeks. That's a great feature because ransomware attacks are increasingly common, and that provides you some kind of protection."
"NVMeoF should be implemented. This protocol will play a major role in storage infrastructure in the future."
"I found it a little unnecessary to have to rename the configurations within the graphics console in order to have unique names."
"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 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."
"I am not really impressed by the technical support of this solution."
"The biggest issue with the solution is that it doesn't support Hyper V. It's a big problem."
"Compared to similar solutions, Dell PowerFlex is not cost-effective and has room for improvement."
"The storage capability must be improved."
"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."
"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."
"They should provide continuous support for data migration."
"There should be more functionality available for routing."
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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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