DataCore SANsymphony vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between DataCore SANsymphony and StarWind HyperConverged Appliance based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Software Defined Storage (SDS) solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.
To learn more, read our detailed DataCore SANsymphony vs. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance Report (Updated: September 2023).
745,775 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
"Training is also easy as it is just one system to learn.""We are able to execute maintenance on one server while the other is still running.""The instant failover, with vSAN copying data to the second node, allowed for the continuous availability of our applications.""The backup is readily available for use, and the restoration process is easy.""This was a great implementation for a small to mid-size business.""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.""The customer support provided by StarWind is excellent.""The product only requires two VMWare ESXi host servers versus three host servers for VMware's comparable solution."

More StarWind Virtual SAN Pros →

"I am very happy with this product's ability to adapt, increase, and modify existing infrastructures.""I found the solution to be very stable.""The DataCore system has been rock solid since we have been using it - from 2007 on.""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.""It is a very stable solution.""The most useful feature of SANsymphony is that it's able to manage any brand of block storage.""Storage is always available.""The most valuable feature of DataCore SANsymphony SDS is its high availability. This solution also exhibits good performance and has high stability."

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"The solution has easily deployed instances for multiple fast-paced projects.""It did not hurt that the price for the hardware and three years of support cost less than the disparate hardware the cluster used to run on.""The easy way everything can be configured and ready to run in less than a day is great.""The redundancy of two identical nodes that can run alone allows us to have truly "no single point of failure" in our computing and primary storage infrastructure.""I do like that I can manage StarWind with a console running on my local desktop.""The added speed of using standard HDD and SSD meant we could increase what services are stored on the servers without having to have additional servers.""The high-quality hardware options, directly affecting performance, have significantly improved the user experience and are well worth the cost.""The solution has provided our company with a fully redundant virtual environment at half the cost of a traditional SAN implementation."

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Cons
"We ran into an issue with alerts.""StarWind really needs to market its product more.""There should be publicly available tutorials on YouTube or other platforms that help the users to integrate this solution with other platforms, for example.""I would like to see more user-friendly dashboards in future versions.""We just need more integration with Veeam.""A central management console may be nice to see all nodes.""The software could benefit from more tooling to help with initial deployment.""The documentation can be better for the free tier."

More StarWind Virtual SAN Cons →

"The solution could be better packaged and marketed.""It would be ideal if they were providing archive licensing with the ability to create a second pool on existing storage nodes.""We'd like to manage the raid on the disk directly in SanSymphony.""Its interface could be better.""NVMeoF should be implemented. This protocol will play a major role in storage infrastructure in the future.""The graphical interface is not always very stable.""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.""The cloud reporting interface is quite poor compared to other vendors."

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"The web-managed interface (a separate VM) could be better.""If I had to pick something to add to the product, it would be nice if you could have more than one user account on their command center VM.""Not much can be improved, to be honest.""The only area that surprised me had to do with the fact that each host runs a StarWind virtual machine used to maintain the health of the vSAN, which individually uses 24GB of memory per host. You should keep this in mind when determining the resources you will need when selecting hardware and components for your specific setup. If I knew that, I would have chosen to add more memory per host to make up for the use.""The response time is usually several hours after the issue occurred.""Updates need improvement.""It would be nice to have some kind of GUI interface implemented to give you an overall view of the system's health at a glance.""What would have to be done urgently is the adaptation of the hardware to the configuration."

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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 →

  • "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."
  • "DataCore SANsymphony's pricing is very high and should be much cheaper."
  • More DataCore SANsymphony Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:We like their high availability. It reduces the downtime for our entire organization's environment.
    Top Answer:The Premium ProActive service price is a little high, yet worth the price.
    Top Answer:It is hard to find adequate technical documentation on their support website. However, they have a fantastic technical… more »
    Top Answer:DataCore SANsymphony's pricing is very high and should be much cheaper. You buy a license of DataCore SANsymphony, and… 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:StarWind's proactive support is my favorite feature.
    Top Answer:Keep in mind that StarWind VMs for the vSAN will take up 24GB of memory per host. If you do decide to go with StarWind… more »
    Top Answer:I honestly don't have anything to complain about. Nothing is perfect, though, over the past three years, there were two… more »
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    StarWind SAN & NAS
    DataCore SANsymphony SDS, DataCore, SANsymphony-V, Hyperconverged Virtual SAN
    Learn More
    DataCore
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    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.”

    For SMB, ROBO and Enterprises, who look to bring in quick deployment and operation simplicity to virtualization workloads and reduce related expenses, our solution is StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA). It unifies commodity servers, disks and flash, hypervisor of choice, StarWind Virtual SAN, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct or VMware Virtual SAN and associated software into a single manageable layer. The HCA supports scale-up by adding disks and flash, and scale-out by adding extra nodes.

    StarWind HyperConverged Appliance consists of StarWind Virtual SAN, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct or VMware Virtual SAN “Ready Nodes”, targeting those, who are building their virtualization infrastructure from scratch. In case there is an existing set of servers, we offer a “software only version”, which is essentially our years proven StarWind Virtual SAN. Basically, it’s the fuel powering StarWind HCA. 

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    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.
    Sears Home and Franchise Business
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Manufacturing Company10%
    Construction Company9%
    Educational Organization8%
    Computer Software Company7%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company17%
    Manufacturing Company9%
    Government9%
    Financial Services Firm8%
    REVIEWERS
    Non Profit30%
    Computer Software Company12%
    Manufacturing Company6%
    Construction Company6%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company23%
    Comms Service Provider8%
    Financial Services Firm6%
    Healthcare Company6%
    REVIEWERS
    Construction Company12%
    Computer Software Company10%
    Transportation Company8%
    Financial Services Firm7%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company19%
    Financial Services Firm8%
    Manufacturing Company7%
    Educational Organization5%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business63%
    Midsize Enterprise22%
    Large Enterprise14%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business25%
    Midsize Enterprise17%
    Large Enterprise58%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business49%
    Midsize Enterprise14%
    Large Enterprise37%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business42%
    Midsize Enterprise13%
    Large Enterprise45%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business65%
    Midsize Enterprise27%
    Large Enterprise8%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business38%
    Midsize Enterprise16%
    Large Enterprise45%
    Buyer's Guide
    DataCore SANsymphony vs. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance
    September 2023
    Find out what your peers are saying about DataCore SANsymphony vs. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance and other solutions. Updated: September 2023.
    745,775 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    DataCore SANsymphony is ranked 4th in Software Defined Storage (SDS) with 14 reviews while StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is ranked 5th in Software Defined Storage (SDS) with 36 reviews. DataCore SANsymphony is rated 9.2, while StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is rated 9.8. 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 StarWind HyperConverged Appliance writes "Excellent support and documentation with flexible pricing". DataCore SANsymphony is most compared with VMware vSAN, HPE SimpliVity, Red Hat Ceph Storage, StorMagic SvSAN and Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), whereas StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is most compared with Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), StorMagic SvSAN, Dell PowerFlex, VxRail and HPE SimpliVity. See our DataCore SANsymphony vs. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance report.

    See our list of best Software Defined Storage (SDS) vendors and best HCI vendors.

    We monitor all Software Defined Storage (SDS) 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.