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DataCore SANsymphony vs NetApp HCI [EOL] comparison

 

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Executive Summary

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

DataCore SANsymphony
Average Rating
9.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
59
Ranking in other categories
Storage Software (2nd), Software Defined Storage (SDS) (5th), HCI (8th), Storage Performance (1st)
NetApp HCI [EOL]
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
5.6
Number of Reviews
32
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Featured Reviews

SigfridCecillon - PeerSpot reviewer
Owner at Arsium
High availability and user-friendliness enhance infrastructure health and redundancy
I would rate technical support from DataCore SANsymphony a 10. Each time I contact the technical support, it's when I don't have a choice because it's very difficult for me on site, and each time, I have good people online who are able to help me solve the problem. Usually, the problems are not very technically difficult, but sometimes they are, and the support team is still there to help us resolve them. The majority of the problems are linked to licensing, so when the license has expired or the number is not correct, they are proactive and change things live, which is very good.
MB
Chief Information Officer at Lucart S.p.A.
Crashed continuously, complex to deploy, and bad after-sales support - NETAPP FIXED the problems in 2022
Their after-sales support, SLA, and third-parties availability should be improved. NetApp's support is very difficult to engage. We have an SLA of onsite support within 24 hours. but they don't respect the SLA. Its stability was very bad. It has been crashing continuously. In one year, we got three crashes, which is unbelievable for an appliance that is guaranteed for 10 years without any crashes. In 2022, NetApp Italy, driven by the country manager Davide Marini, fixed all our issues and added additional computation power for free. This is a great example of customer care. They could have done it right the first time of course, but admitting the errors and putting in place such a remediation plan has been a very professional behavior.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"It is a well-proven, automated management tool in all dynamic provisioning, auto-tiering, great performance, parallel I/O​, cache speed mechanism, etc."
"The interface is user-friendly."
"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)."
"It is a stable solution."
"The most useful feature of SANsymphony is that it's able to manage any brand of block storage."
"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."
"I'd have to say that the biggest improvement gained by using SANsymphony has to be the performance of the product."
"During the maintenance periods, on any part of the storage or VMware migration, we have had no downtime."
"We're trying to move to a much more API-driven management of all of our products, and NetApp's product is, from all the SDS providers we have seen, the most fully-baked API out there."
"The NetApp Deployment Engine that comes with it makes the actual deployment and usage very easy. That's our primary focus and it's hyper-converged. That's something that we want to use as well."
"Our goal with NetApp HCI is to have no single point of failure."
"Stability is one of the things we absolutely have to have, because if the HCI is down, our assembly lines are down, and that could potentially lead to our customer being down. If our customer is down, that's $10,000 a minute; and any time the assembly line is down, that could potentially lead to overtime. We don't get to charge one and a half times for something we billed just because you happened to build it on overtime. Any technology we bring in, has to be built for what I call "three in the morning." It can't be built for whenever everybody's in the plant, everybody can watch it, and everybody can babysit. It has to be built for three a.m. when you've got a skeletal staff there, and you just have to know that it's just running. As I stand here, right now, I don't have to check my phone, I don't have to check my email. I know it's running. Period"
"The solution is very scalable."
"It's an all-flash solution. NetApp guarantees 3-to-1 or more than 3-to-1. It has guaranteed performance, like 15K IOPS per node."
"It has automated a lot of workloads. It has automated us from ticketing a large number to a very small number."
"The scalability is great, because it can scale independently."
 

Cons

"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 solution is constantly evolving."
"The solution could be better packaged and marketed."
"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."
"DataCore should integrate its own file server into SANsymphony."
"DataCore needs a more efficient and better way to keep track of metrics and counters so that we can do baseline analysis to measure performance."
"I'd like to see the company make the renewal of the software cheaper."
"For customers or technicians who don't speak and understand English, it would be great to have other language support, all the more so given the number of countries in which SanSymphony is used."
"The administration side of it needs to be improved. We expect an easier interface and a single upgrade for updating the infrastructure."
"The fact that it doesn't have all the data points we need and all the historical data that I would like. I find that a lot of the performance analysis is done through support, where they have something that we don't have. It would be nice just to have all that on-prem."
"I would like to see the implementation process improved."
"I would like to have the ability to replicate to multiple sites."
"If you want to have a really dense data center then it's hard to have a big chunk of cabling going through everything."
"To improve the product, they should make it more flexible."
"There have been some drive type of issues where we have to apply a new code level. Storage nodes kick certain drives until they act as though they have failed when really they haven't. You just have to reinsert them, then they go on about their happy way. It's sort of a bug."
"It would be nice to have better access to tutorials and a test environment for simulations."
 

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."
"The solution is cost effective."
"The pricing and licensing are better with DataCore."
"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."
"Pricing has improved but it is still expensive."
"DataCore SANsymphony's pricing is very high and should be much cheaper."
"Make sure you are made aware of the annual subscription cost when purchasing."
"This solution allows the use of off-the-shelf hardware and charges by the TB of storage."
"This solution saved our organization time (35 percent) and money. We have a hefty group of developers, and if you multiply that by 30 to 35 percent, that is quite a bit of money."
"Licenses run on a yearly basis, and there aren't any additional fees other than the standard licensing fee."
"You still have to pay for the licensing for VMware and Red Hat licenses separately. It's not all inclusive at this point."
"This solution reduced our maintenance costs. We were going to have to pay one to two million dollars to put in compute nodes. We are avoiding those costs."
"All the licenses are included when you buy the program."
"Where we lost nearly 75 percent of our infrastructure due to a malicious attack and were able to recover two and a half hours into it due to the integration, it saved us and all of our customers. Because we were able to recover so fast from the attack, the solution paid for itself right there."
"The licensing fees are renewed annually."
"Its pricing is lower than our previous solution."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
14%
Computer Software Company
14%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Government
5%
Marketing Services Firm
14%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business36
Midsize Enterprise12
Large Enterprise22
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise9
Large Enterprise19
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for DataCore SANsymphony SDS?
Before choosing DataCore SANsymphony, I did not evaluate other options.
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 when a backup is in progress).
What needs improvement with DataCore SANsymphony?
DataCore SANsymphony can be improved with high availability as it offers synchronous mirroring between physical and separate sites to ensure business continuity and disaster recovery. I do not have...
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Also Known As

DataCore Virtual SAN
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Overview

 

Sample Customers

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.
American Showa, Children's Mercy, Coca-Cola, Consultel Cloud, Evangelische Landeskirche in Wurttemberg, Imperva, Surface Mount Technology
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, Broadcom, StarWind and others in HCI. Updated: January 2026.
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