DataCore SANsymphony vs Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) comparison

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.”

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is a top-ranking HCI software, cloud management tool, and Software Defined Storage (SDS) tool that is marketed as the foundation for users' hybrid clouds. It offers a powerful and secure hyperconverged infrastructure to deliver all data and applications at any scale and on any cloud. The solution offers a complete software stack that allows users to unify their hybrid cloud infrastructure. 

NCI’s services include computer, storage and network, hypervisors and containers, and deployment in public or in private clouds. The product also comes with built-in resilience, disaster recovery capabilities, self-healing, and high-security capacities. It provides further deployment flexibility through several software and hardware options and platforms. NCI includes a full set of enterprise capabilities. It can also be deployed on a wide range of servers from popular manufacturers.

The capabilities of the product are categorized into three main groups:

• AOS storage
• Flexible and open compute
• Automated and secure networking

Outside of these categories, NCI also offers other capabilities:

• Integrated disaster recovery
• Full-stack lifecycle management
• VMware with Nutanix
• Intelligent operations

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) Features

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) offers its customers various features and tools in each of the previously mentioned categories. The available features for users currently include:

• High-performance: This set of features utilizes hardware advances such as NVMe and RDMA to accelerate users' most demanding applications with consistent performance. The tools in this feature category work alongside data locality to ensure successful results.
  
  
• Foolproof resiliency: These Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure features protect data and keep it available by facilitating advanced distributed consistency algorithms. Users can utilize these features to protect their data from issues like bit rot, hardware failures, and even entire site failure.
  
  
• Flexibility: This set of features allows storage to be sized for the needs of each organization and expanded promptly and easily so that the organization and its data can grow. The features offer flexibility to users in terms of applying storage policies logically on a pre-workload basis, instead of being tied to hardware.
  
  
• Hypervisor choice: Users can choose from the leading hypervisors - Microsoft Hyper-V or VMware ESXi. They can also leverage the built-in hypervisor AHV that Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) provides.
  
  
• Integrated virtualization: These features offer simplified automation and AHV streamlined operations. The services in this category are optimized for high performance and reliability.
  
  
• Kubernetes: Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) offers features to build and deploy cloud-native applications on intelligent distributed infrastructure. Apps can be integrated with cloud-compatible storage and both building and deployment can be achieved within the same platform.
  
  
• Microsegmentation: Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) offers features to prevent malware spread and reduce attack surfaces by leveraging machine learning (ML).
  
  
• Virtual networking: This set of features allows users to easily implement multi-tenancy in their environment or stretch networks across clouds.
  
  
• Centralized network management: Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) provides organizations with a way to manage networking configurations centrally. Users can utilize it across their human-computer interaction (HCI) environment with simple virtual switch management.

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) Benefits

The product offers various benefits to users who utilize its capacities. Some of these include:

• NCI reduces technology sprawl and frees up technical resources to allow organizations to focus on other activities, potentially reducing costs for the business.
  
  
• The product allows customers to deploy, scale, and bridge to the public cloud to be able to react in evolving business environments.
  
  
• Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure improves data availability while simultaneously protecting it against several kinds of failures and attacks.
  
  
• The solution offers high-performance, resilient distributed storage for all workloads.
  
  
• Working alongside Nutanix Cloud Platform, NCI offers simple management of data from one console.
  
  
• Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure works by the zero trust philosophy, protecting users' apps and data through specially designed security protocols.

Reviews from Real Users

According to Gerhard J., an IT manager at Q4 Fuel, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) provides serious reliability and stability across the entire system makes for ROI.

A solutions architect at a computer software company describes NCI as a stable, straightforward to set up, and scalable solution.