We performed a comparison between DataCore SANsymphony and HPE Hyper Converged 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 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."
"Virtual SAN runs on iSCSI, which is free and easy to configure. It's easy to manage from StarWind's GUI console, and it only required a few extra switch ports."
"StarWind allows us to move virtual machines from one physical host to another, which greatly reduces the downtime required for maintenance."
"The main benefit is that StarWind is almost maintenance-free."
"The ROI is great on this product."
"StarWind Virtual SAN offers high availability and data resilience features to prevent data loss if hardware fails."
"The installation of StarWind Virtual SAN was pretty easy, and the configuration was done in no time."
"The top-notch support before, during, and after deployments are better than any other vendor I have come across."
"I found the solution to be very stable."
"Active-active is the most valuable aspect for us."
"CDP is an important feature for avoiding data loss in the event of ransomware attacks. You need more storage capacity, however, you get the possibility to return at any time and use the data saved up to that point. The recovery is much faster than with a classic restore."
"The DataCore system has been rock solid since we have been using it - from 2007 on."
"The most valuable feature of DataCore SANsymphony SDS is its high availability. This solution also exhibits good performance and has high stability."
"It is a stable solution."
"The most useful feature of SANsymphony is that it's able to manage any brand of block storage."
"It is a very stable solution."
"No concerns or issues with stability."
"One of the solution's strong points is the deduplication capabilities of SimpliVity."
"It's a very complete product with residencies to protect data and secure it end-to-end. It includes storage, computing, and networking, offering a fully ten-key solution."
"It provides unmatched performance, productivity and reliability."
"Hyper Converge is easier to manage and performs better than traditional infrastructure."
"HPE Hyper Converged is stable."
"There are multiple advantages. Typically, being an all-flash storage, which is available through either SimpliVity or dHCI, the performance is much better because the IOPS goes high, so it's more powerful in terms of performance. Secondly, if I'm talking of SimpliVity Hyper Convergence solution from HPE, unlike the competition, even if three hard drives fail, you are still running the solution."
"It is easy to manage; the administration is simpler. It saves a lot of rack space in the data center because you can consolidate 20 servers into three to five nodes. The client will be able to benefit from power savings and cost savings as well."
"It could have a dashboard so that you can check all servers' SAN health and performance."
"The main issue we ran into was the documentation. We attempted to set up the product in our test environment by ourselves and ran into several areas of the documentation that were unclear to us."
"I struggled when bit figuring out how to go about doing the evaluation."
"A central management console may be nice to see all nodes."
"Regular updates to the software are required, and subtle design changes would be welcome."
"While we had no problems setting the system up, and service technicians from StarWind could assist us very well, they could provide some form of in-depth documentation."
"I want to suggest that the complexity of the startup and shutdown procedure needs to be reduced."
"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."
"Right now, the version used is run on Microsoft Windows Server. Having a Linux version or even an appliance would be better as it would eliminate the use of additional licensing for another piece of hardware."
"There is room for improvement in the graphical interface."
"The solution could be better packaged and marketed."
"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."
"It would be ideal if they were providing archive licensing with the ability to create a second pool on existing storage nodes."
"If you're dealing with big databases or transactional databases, it might not be the best-suited solution. The design of DataCore's solution isn't oriented towards this type of data."
"DataCore SANsymphony should integrate file servers at a good price into the solution."
"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."
"Installation and setup could be easier."
"Scalability is an issue because it becomes very expensive. When you need to upgrade memory, you have to upgrade memory across the nodes. Suppose a customer has gone with a three-node HCI solution, then to increase the memory, you have to do it across the three nodes."
"The improvements could be customization and backup efficiency."
"This solution is very costly."
"If the solution could further compress the data, it would use less storage."
"In the Hyper Converged environment, some of the brands only support the OS VMware and not Hyper-V from Microsoft or even Red Hat or KVM."
"Though with HPE Hyper Converged, you get everything, the documentation part is very much required, especially if you opt for the solution's subscription-based licensing model."
"One of the things that can be improved is that today, is supporting VMware, maybe as a hypervisor. But it would be good to have an open kind of platform for other hypervisors, maybe. Like Nutanix is doing, it's very open."
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DataCore SANsymphony is ranked 8th in HCI with 14 reviews while HPE Hyper Converged is ranked 12th in HCI with 12 reviews. DataCore SANsymphony is rated 9.2, while HPE Hyper Converged is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of DataCore SANsymphony writes "Easily scalable with great technical support and very good snapshot capabilities". On the other hand, the top reviewer of HPE Hyper Converged writes " Ensures end-to-end data security with redundancy measures and provides visibility into the system but node expansion challenges". DataCore SANsymphony is most compared with VMware vSAN, HPE SimpliVity, Pure Storage FlashArray, Red Hat Ceph Storage and VxRail, whereas HPE Hyper Converged is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, HPE SimpliVity, HPE Nimble Storage dHCI and Dell vSAN Ready Nodes. See our DataCore SANsymphony vs. HPE Hyper Converged report.
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