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DataCore SANsymphony vs StarWind Storage Appliance comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

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

ROI

Sentiment score
6.8
DataCore SANsymphony enhances security and availability, offering high ROI through hardware reuse and cost-effective storage and uptime savings.
Sentiment score
6.0
StarWind Storage Appliance users saw reduced costs, improved performance, and increased efficiency, with easy scalability and high reliability.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.4
DataCore SANsymphony's support is praised for being rapid, knowledgeable, effective, and highly rated, despite occasional inconsistencies.
Sentiment score
9.0
StarWind Storage Appliance customer service is praised for 24x7 troubleshooting, professionalism, high technical support ratings, and helpful videos.
They always help me quickly and with great knowledge, which is essential for central storage.
The customer support is perfect.
I would rate technical support from DataCore SANsymphony a 10.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
8.5
DataCore SANsymphony is praised for its scalability, hardware independence, and adaptability to both small and large environments.
Sentiment score
7.5
StarWind Storage Appliance is scalable, adaptable, hardware-independent, supports unlimited storage, and is effective in standalone and hyperconverged environments.
There are no limits to scalability, which is essential for central storage.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.3
DataCore SANsymphony is highly stable and reliable, with minimal downtime, requiring proper configuration and minimal maintenance.
Sentiment score
8.9
StarWind Storage Appliance is praised for stability, robust performance, and high user ratings, especially on well-maintained Windows OS.
 

Room For Improvement

DataCore SANsymphony struggles with tech support, pricing, Windows dependence, and needs better integration, interface, and enterprise features.
StarWind Storage Appliance requires improved integration, easier setup, better insights, and feature parity between demo and paid versions.
The area of DataCore SANsymphony that has room for improvement is the support.
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.
there should be improvements in how to get and filter logs
 

Setup Cost

DataCore SANsymphony's pricing is high, but offers favorable price-performance, with careful planning advised to optimize costs.
StarWind Storage Appliance is praised for its affordability, straightforward licensing, and excellent value compared to competitors for SMEs.
They have made some improvements regarding the pricing, but it's still too expensive.
The cost changed from a perpetual license to a subscription model.
 

Valuable Features

DataCore SANsymphony enhances storage management, performance, and reliability with high availability, flexibility, scalability, and hardware-agnostic versatility.
StarWind Storage Appliance is praised for its user-friendly interface, high performance, reliability, excellent support, affordability, and robust data protection.
Customers can extend storage with flexibility, as one is not obligated to purchase hard disks or controllers from the same storage vendor.
DataCore SANsymphony's ability to enhance storage utilization is very good because it's agnostic and it can be deployed on every environment, which is perfect for my clients.
DataCore SANsymphony has positively impacted our organization because it is scalable and has a fundamental concept that aggregates and pools available storage resources, hiding the complexity, which makes it very simple.
 

Categories and Ranking

DataCore SANsymphony
Average Rating
9.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
58
Ranking in other categories
Storage Software (2nd), Software Defined Storage (SDS) (4th), HCI (7th), Storage Performance (2nd)
StarWind Storage Appliance
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.7
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
NAS (14th), All-Flash Storage (30th)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Storage Solutions solutions, they serve different purposes. DataCore SANsymphony is designed for Storage Software and holds a mindshare of 25.0%, down 28.4% compared to last year.
StarWind Storage Appliance, on the other hand, focuses on NAS, holds 1.0% mindshare, up 0.9% since last year.
Storage Software Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
DataCore SANsymphony25.0%
NetApp ONTAP37.7%
Dell PowerPath16.5%
Other20.799999999999997%
Storage Software
NAS Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
StarWind Storage Appliance1.0%
Dell PowerScale (Isilon)16.5%
Dell PowerStore11.3%
Other71.2%
NAS
 

Featured Reviews

SigfridCecillon - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
Kishore CA - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers stable performance even with a single node failure and manages everything with just two nodes.
The only drawback is that it takes a bit of time during initial synchronization, especially after restarting the environment. This is a potential area of improvement. There's a synchronization time, but it takes time. Initially, when we start the first environment deployment, it starts synchronizing between the storage. So, it is taking time. One thing is that even when you restart. Let's assume that the synchronization is completed and the storage is synchronized. Both storages are fully synchronized, and it is in sync mode. Now, if we want to restart both nodes, there is a case for maintenance purposes. You took both nodes for maintenance, and we rebooted it. Then, it should not synchronize again. It should be a checksum. And if there is a checksum match, there should be no synchronization again. So, one thing that should be taken care of. Another thing is that I used freeware- the community version, free license, which we deployed using PowerShare. In that case, it was very difficult to bring back another node when one node was faulty. Let's assume that both the nodes are working fine. And we found one node faulty. And we destroyed all the volumes in that and tried to bring it back. So that was a difficult factor. The final solution is that we were not able to bring back the failed node. So, we reconstructed a new data source for that. That is another drawback. In future releases, I would like to see the integration with VMware or some other things as a plugin model for VMware.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
16%
Manufacturing Company
14%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Government
6%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business36
Midsize Enterprise12
Large Enterprise21
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise2
 

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...
What do you like most about StarWind Storage Appliance?
I would say data protection and easy management are the most valuable features of the product...I rate the technical support a nine out of ten.
What needs improvement with StarWind Storage Appliance?
StarWind Storage Appliance's demo version should be similar to the paid one.
 

Also Known As

DataCore Virtual SAN
No data available
 

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.
Bosch, EC2 IT, Solid Earth Inc., Canon
Find out what your peers are saying about DataCore SANsymphony vs. StarWind Storage Appliance and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
869,566 professionals have used our research since 2012.