DataCore SANsymphony vs HPE SimpliVity comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between DataCore SANsymphony and HPE SimpliVity 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.
To learn more, read our detailed DataCore SANsymphony vs. HPE SimpliVity Report (Updated: May 2023).
708,830 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"It has great free trials that allow end users to test a large variety of their products before deciding to buy the full product.""It enables us to provide more solution options for our clients, with the reassurance that, when implemented, they will be efficient and stable.""Besides being 80% cheaper than the other alternatives, the simplicity makes reconfiguration and support much easier.""It provided the much-needed HA on an extremely low budget.""StarWind Virtual SAN offers high availability and data resilience features to prevent data loss if hardware fails.""The most valuable feature is the reliable storage replication, which enables me to create a robust infrastructure to run our business.""As the client had acquired another company some distance away, they were concerned about having a single SAN in one location or the other. StarWind vSAN allowed us to keep a copy of the data local to each site without asking the client to pay for two SANs in addition to the two new servers they needed.""Support keeps track of alerts of the system and verifies with us if we need help to fix any issues. They have great and quick technical support."

More StarWind Virtual SAN Pros →

"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.""Active-active is the most valuable aspect for us.""The ability to pool the storage to leverage thin-provisioning is a huge saving in space and costs.""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 most useful feature of SANsymphony is that it's able to manage any brand of block storage.""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.""The most valuable feature of DataCore SANsymphony SDS is its high availability. This solution also exhibits good performance and has high stability.""The DataCore system has been rock solid since we have been using it - from 2007 on."

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"It doesn't take long to mount the entire VM somewhere and then copy it. That's one of the things that I like about SimpliVity's deduplication and compression. I can literally stand up a backup in minutes. It is like no time at all. They've got pretty phenomenal deduplication and compression. Within SimpliVity, one of the things that they do is deduplication and compression on ingestion. So, on the front side, everything is deduplicated and compressed, which, of course, adds some overhead to their solution. For instance, in my environment today, I've got roughly 30 terabytes of raw storage, and with their deduplication and compression, I'm over the 300 terabyte threshold with my active servers and all my backups.""I like SimpliVity because it can be adapted for small clients or the biggest ones. It's flexible.""The backup feature is valuable, and replication is also valuable. It is very quick and easy to use.""The solution is scalable.""The configuration capabilities are good.""HPE SimpliVity is a very valuable and effective solution. It's also a scalable solution. As the customer requirements and application requirements increase, it can scale to accommodate them.""We have not had any problem with customer support at SimpliVity.""The HCI concept by itself is the most valuable feature of the solution. It is a full-fledged HCI. It is the main component. I think this is what makes the project valuable."

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Cons
"It would be nice to see a new UI for the windows client, as it is not the easiest to find settings.""They require more media visibility.""The platform needs to improve user management and the web console.""I would like to see more advanced free versions.""The system failovers properly on its own without too much worry.""The only way I can see this product needing improvement is the consultation level of the StarWind sales and engineers.""The interface of the management console of the StarWind Virtual SAN is complex, and it's difficult for the novice user to interact with the management having less knowledge or training in the product.""Currently, the StarWind management console is a bit clunky to navigate and isn't the most user-intuitive interface."

More StarWind Virtual SAN Cons →

"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.""We'd like to manage the raid on the disk directly in SanSymphony.""Datacore is developing a new WebUI with new dashboards. It is a good idea as the classic GUI is lacking dashboards.""The graphical interface is not always very stable.""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.""There is room for improvement in the graphical interface.""Having an enterprise "Storage Dashboard" that can show capacity, usage, performance, and any issues would be very beneficial."

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"Not a lean architecture in terms of anything.""The technical, commercial, and marketing support is not at the level that it should be. They are not structured well. Other vendors provide better support, such as Dell.""The setup was complex, as it has multiple integrations with multiple orients.""They could have better-specialized support for more countries.""It could integrate better with other platforms. It's a proprietary solution of HPE, so you are stuck. Before I was running SimpliVity as an independent solution. it wasn't a card and software, so you could put in whatever server, IBM, Dell, etc.""The solution wasn't able to connect to the cloud, and there's no micro-segmentation. The configuration of this solution is also complex.""Once you select the size of SimpliVity, it could be risky for you to downsize it because you may need maybe to reimplement some things.""We had minor problems with the initial setup but it was with our internal infrastructure."

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Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "For two nodes, it cost us $10,000, and we spend $2,000 a year on support."
  • "If you are looking at a traditional SAN for a small cluster, give StarWind vSAN because you will save thousands without any compromise."
  • More StarWind Virtual SAN Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "This solution allows the use of off-the-shelf hardware and charges by the TB of storage."
  • "The solution is cost effective."
  • "We have licensing costs on a yearly basis. They charge per terabyte, so in terms of cost, it can be very costly. They have three different features, and you have to pay extra for those."
  • More DataCore SANsymphony Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "Customers always complain that SimpliVity is a little bit higher in price point as compared to other solutions available in the market."
  • "The solution is priced high. However, there are plenty of features as part of the package that other solutions do not have."
  • "There is not a license required for the solution."
  • "The price of the solution is reasonable. We have purchased a five-year license with all the support and upgrades."
  • "If we compare the price of HPE SimpliVity with other vendors that are selling the hyper-converged infrastructure, all of them are not cheap and are priced similarly. However, the price we pay and what we receive makes it a good price."
  • "We did get some quotes from Nutanix, and they were ballparks. So, it is not cheap, and there is nothing free, but those two were comparable."
  • "I think it's a complete package. We buy the license with support for five years. It's a subscription, I will say, but it's included when you buy the SimpliVity solution from HPE. You have a contract with the software warranty and upgrades."
  • "The solution is affordable and quite reasonably priced in terms of the product one gets."
  • More HPE SimpliVity Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:I like StarWind's high availability. The failover is almost immediate, so the end users have no idea the guest VM moved… more »
    Top Answer:We underestimated how many guest VMs we would have running on these hypervisors after three years, and would have bought… more »
    Top Answer:The Command Center, a free guest VM for management and monitoring, leaves something to be desired. It could have more… more »
    Top Answer:It's difficult to say if something is missing in this solution. Maybe we'd like to manage the raid on the disk directly… more »
    Top Answer:HPE SimpliVity is a hyper-converged infrastructure solution that is primarily geared to mid-sized companies. We… more »
    Top Answer:The built-in backup and quick restore are good features.
    Top Answer:Licensing is slightly more expensive in comparison to the competition but I think SimpliVity provides very good value.
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    DataCore SANsymphony SDS, DataCore, SANsymphony-V, Hyperconverged Virtual SAN
    SimpliVity, HPE HCI
    Learn More
    Overview

    StarWind Virtual SAN provides high availability and fault tolerance for virtualized environments without the need for dedicated SAN hardware. It allows for real-time replication between servers, shared storage for Hyper-V clusters, and enables vMotion and High Availability features for VMware vSphere. The solution reduces costs and leverages existing hardware while providing a scalable and reliable infrastructure. Valuable features include ease of use, scalability, top-tier support, hardware agnosticism, and the ability to use off-the-shelf standard servers to increase storage space. StarWind VSAN has helped organizations improve performance, data availability, and data security while reducing downtime and providing cost-saving storage options.

    DataCore SANsymphony is a very powerful software-defined storage (SDS) solution that makes it easy for organizations to take control of their data storage operations. It makes it so that users can choose the way that their data storage infrastructure is built and operates. Businesses that choose DataCore SANsymphony find that potential threats to their data are either removed completely or mitigated.

    DataCore SANsymphony Benefits

    Some of the ways that organizations can benefit by choosing to deploy DataCore SANsymphony include:

    • Low operation costs. DataCore SANsymphony is designed so that users can take full advantage of its many features and capabilities without having to pay large sums of money and allocate similarly large blocks of time. The solution enables organizations to leverage whatever storage hardware they are already using to store their data. DataCore SANsymphony is hardware agnostic and, as a result, users can easily integrate it with the physical infrastructure that is most convenient for them. Furthermore, businesses can manage all of their storage devices from a single management console. This cuts down on the costs associated with the administration of an organization’s storage operations.
    • Flexibility. Users of DataCore SANsymphony can conduct their storage operations with a high level of flexibility. They can gather all of their storage capabilities in one place and deliver them uniformly across all of their devices, regardless of the physical infrastructure. Organizations can deploy their storage operations in multiple ways and use many different types of architecture They can easily and seamlessly move between them as their business needs demand it. Should they desire to, they can stick with whatever system they had been using up until that point.
    • Continuous, uninterrupted operation. DataCore SANsymphony keeps the data that users store with it in a state where it can be accessed at any time. It comes with autonomous safeguards that save a user from experiencing a loss of data when their architecture experiences some sort of system failure. Data is saved beforehand and stored remotely so that it can be retrieved if necessary. It also enables users to recover lost digital architecture so that a business can continue running smoothly even if a disaster wipes out a part of or the entirety of their architecture.

    DataCore SANsymphony Features

    Some of the many features DataCore SANsymphony offers include:

    • Data security. DataCore SANsymphony provides users with a high level of data protection. Users can leverage machine learning and artificial intelligence to scan for and analyze potential threats to their data. They can then receive recommendations that enable them to avoid or at least mitigate potential issues.
    • Auto-tiering. An organization’s data can be automatically assigned a hierarchical storage value. Users do not need to classify and create tiers to hold their data. This solution has a feature that classifies and hierarchically stores data without requiring users to intervene.
    • Automatic load balancing. DataCore SANsymphony is built with the ability to automatically balance workloads. The solution will bypass channels that are slow or that fail to ensure that operations run as smoothly as possible. This will take place without the intervention of system administrators.

    Reviews from Real Users

    DataCore SANsymphony is a solution that stands out even when compared to its top competitors. Two major advantages it offers are its synchronous mirroring capability and the high level of reliability that it provides.

    A Systems and Network Engineer at a computer software company writes, “The synchronous mirroring is great. Storage is always available. This is the main feature of DataCore SANsymphony SDS which allows very high storage availability and better protection against environmental incidents (electrical, flooding, etc.).”

    Fernando V., a LAN Engineer at Maimonides Medical Center, says, “The software just works and is reliable. Downtime due to storage maintenance or upgrades is long gone. We have multiple types of software running to differentiate our applications. This gives us more value due to the fact that we can use the application to segment workloads if needed. The bottom line is that the software runs our applications on whatever storage vendor we choose - and it does so reliably.”

    HPE SimpliVity is an HCI software solution that provides powerful data protection, reducing data loss along with lowering the risk of ransomware attacks on your enterprise.

    HPE SimpliVity Features

    HPE SimpliVity has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

    • Flexible, compact architecture
    • Centralized management
    • AI-driven intelligence
    • Built-in data protection and disaster recovery
    • VM-centric management and mobility
    • Simple to deploy, manage, and scale

    HPE SimpliVity Benefits

    There are several benefits to implementing HPE SimpliVity. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

    • Efficient: HPE SimpliVity helps reduce the number of devices in your data center while also decreasing the total cost of ownership.
    • Cloud benefits with enterprise capabilities: When your enterprise deploys HPE SimpliVity, you gain the agility, elasticity, and affordability offered by cloud computing.
    • Affordable and flexible: The solution provides IT teams with the performance, reliability, and resiliency of on-premises infrastructure. HPE SimpliVity allows them to start virtualizing their enterprise while also keeping sensitive data safe.
    • Reduced risk of data loss: Because HPE SimpliVity is a powerful solution with built-in resiliency, backup, and disaster recovery, it is able to provide advanced data protection that reduces your organization’s risk of data loss and also lowers the risk of ransomware attacks.
    • Speed: HPE SimpliVity gives you the ability to deploy blocks and manage VM environments quickly and easily by using the VMware interface. In addition, the solution allows you to quickly view all data centers and remote offices within a single interface.

    Reviews from Real Users

    Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by HPE SimpliVity users.

    Jeff S., Information Technology Manager at Troyer Foods, Inc. says the solution has “Phenomenal deduplication and compression, good support, and works on its own. SimpliVity is integrated with the hypervisor, and you have a single pane of glass. It is really hands-off. Once you set your backup schedules, you're done.

    A Senior Datacenter Consultant at a computer software company mentions, “The most valuable feature is the ease of use and the storage virtualization layer, together with the built-in backups. That's what makes SimpliVity really useful, and how you can replicate data between different sites without paying an extra license for that feature. All the features are built into the product.”

    PeerSpot user Doug C., IT Engineer at a government, comments, “Backups and restores occur very quickly. All SimpliVity management is done through vCenter, providing a single-pane of glass for all management and configuration functions. The advanced deduplication and compression greatly reduce the storage requirements, reducing the amount of expensive flash storage required.The 10G interfaces between the SimpliVity nodes greatly speeds up VM migrations between nodes. SimpliVity enables "stretched-cluster" operation with mirrored storage between the nodes, enabling automated failover. If a node or site goes down for any reason, the VMs on that node are automatically restarted on the other node.”

    German I., Solutions Architect Data Center Servers and Storage at Tecnologia informatica, explains, “The integration possibilities regarding the administration console are one of the best configurations and one of the best features that differentiates this product from others in the market. Also, you can add extra coverage protection that includes everything inside of the hard drives — similar products don't do this. You can use it directly from the hypervisor, which is great.”

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    Learn more about DataCore SANsymphony
    Learn more about HPE SimpliVity
    Sample Customers
    Baker Tilly BVI, CMS Internet, Board Harpeth Hall School
    Volkswagen, Maimonides Medical Center, The Biodesign Institute, 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.
    Red Bull Racing, Mandarin Oriental, Brigham Young University, UCLA, Merlin Entertainments, Sasa Cosmetics, Travelport, St. John’s Riverside Hospital, Princess House
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Manufacturing Company11%
    Educational Organization9%
    Construction Company9%
    Computer Software Company8%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company19%
    Government9%
    Manufacturing Company8%
    Financial Services Firm7%
    REVIEWERS
    Non Profit32%
    Computer Software Company13%
    Manufacturing Company6%
    Government6%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company25%
    Comms Service Provider11%
    Government7%
    Healthcare Company6%
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm13%
    Manufacturing Company8%
    Computer Software Company8%
    Retailer7%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization27%
    Computer Software Company14%
    Comms Service Provider9%
    Government7%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business63%
    Midsize Enterprise22%
    Large Enterprise15%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business25%
    Midsize Enterprise17%
    Large Enterprise58%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business52%
    Midsize Enterprise9%
    Large Enterprise39%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business38%
    Midsize Enterprise15%
    Large Enterprise47%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business33%
    Midsize Enterprise27%
    Large Enterprise40%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business20%
    Midsize Enterprise40%
    Large Enterprise40%
    Buyer's Guide
    DataCore SANsymphony vs. HPE SimpliVity
    May 2023
    Find out what your peers are saying about DataCore SANsymphony vs. HPE SimpliVity and other solutions. Updated: May 2023.
    708,830 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    DataCore SANsymphony is ranked 7th in HCI with 13 reviews while HPE SimpliVity is ranked 6th in HCI with 41 reviews. DataCore SANsymphony is rated 9.4, while HPE SimpliVity is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of DataCore SANsymphony writes "Provides HA virtualized storage independent of storage type or vendor". On the other hand, the top reviewer of HPE SimpliVity writes "Phenomenal deduplication and compression, good support, and works on its own". DataCore SANsymphony is most compared with VMware vSAN, StorMagic SvSAN, Pure Storage FlashArray, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct and Red Hat Ceph Storage, whereas HPE SimpliVity is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), HPE Nimble Storage dHCI and Sangfor HCI. See our DataCore SANsymphony vs. HPE SimpliVity report.

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    We monitor all HCI reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.