DataCore SANsymphony and StarWind Virtual SAN compete in the storage solutions category. DataCore has the upper hand in features with its advanced auto-tiering and synchronous mirroring, while StarWind leads in deployment simplicity.
Features: DataCore SANsymphony offers high availability, flexible hardware utilization, and auto-tiering to efficiently manage different storage tiers. It enables synchronous mirroring for robust redundancy and data protection. StarWind Virtual SAN provides active-active high availability, easy installation, and flexibility in deployment, making it cost-effective for various hardware configurations. It offers fast setup and strong integration capabilities, ensuring minimal downtime and reliable performance.
Room for Improvement: DataCore SANsymphony needs better integrated reporting tools, enhancements in enterprise support, and improved manageability. StarWind Virtual SAN could enhance its documentation, performance reporting, and management interface. It would benefit from more comprehensive monitoring capabilities to aid deployment and management processes efficiently.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: DataCore SANsymphony is praised for exceptional technical support and rapid response times, which make deployment smoother despite its complex setup. StarWind Virtual SAN is valued for its straightforward deployment and minimal setup complexity, paired with a capable support team known for high responsiveness and expertise.
Pricing and ROI: DataCore SANsymphony provides a strong ROI with flexibility in hardware upgrades without altering licensing, though the subscription can become costly over time. StarWind Virtual SAN is recognized for cost-effectiveness, especially for SMBs, with simple pricing and excellent value, allowing affordable scaling as storage needs expand.
It does not require much management once you set up correctly, so it saves time, allowing an admin to focus on other work.
We don't sell a lot of redundant servers, so it's not a massive ROI, but the ability to rely on their technical support and the software's ease of setup allows us to reduce labor costs and go to market competitively.
The cost benefits, as far as we consider, are much better with a StarWind VSAN solution, and the training requirements with the ease of administration simplify and reduce our administrator and professional services costs.
Regarding cost savings, for my client, it was about 20K USD for his specific use and as for extending capacity, StarWind made that process easy.
I would rate them an eight out of ten.
The support is done through email and is not that great, making it a very problematic area I've been dealing with for over four years.
They always help me quickly and with great knowledge, which is essential for central storage.
Even in the instances where my technical team does not have the ability to manage or troubleshoot or resolve an issue, StarWind's technical team supports and resolves on our behalf very quickly.
They have some awesome guides online that show you exactly how to configure the product, how to do the initial setup, and you can speak with them directly who will be able to connect, verify your setup, run its parameters, and see exactly what's working and what is not, and adjust it, and they really help you with that.
When we set it up, they validate our settings and configurations to ensure we don't miss anything.
Pure Storage FlashBlade is scalable.
There are no limits to scalability, which is essential for central storage.
I believe that scalability should be further improved, especially considering the possibility that environments may grow exponentially.
I have never needed to scale up or add additional nodes with StarWind Virtual SAN, but we have had to expand, and customer support has been excellent.
StarWind Virtual SAN's scalability is good, and I have had an easy experience adding more space to the system.
In case there is any issue with any blade, the data is moved to another.
In my experience, StarWind Virtual SAN is very stable, and I have never had a single instability issue.
It has been working for five years and the customer is still happy with it.
In my experience, StarWind Virtual SAN is stable as I haven't encountered any downtime or issues.
Technical support definitely needs significant improvement.
Its configuration should be easier.
there should be improvements in how to get and filter logs
A more intuitive interface or an improved dashboard for monitoring the cluster would also be helpful, as it would facilitate performance tracking and help identify potential issues before they affect services.
There have been cases where not understanding exactly what's failing on the Virtual SAN has been an issue.
Limited feedback in the management GUI is the main area where I would like to see StarWind Virtual SAN get better.
The pricing of Pure Storage FlashBlade is expensive compared to other products I used from other companies in the past, but one benefit is that they have built-in ransomware protection.
The cost changed from a perpetual license to a subscription model.
The costs are acceptable and very competitive compared to other hardware-only HCI solutions.
I talked to the sales team, they gave me a quote with a perpetual license with the support and everything went through smoothly.
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing was that it was easy to implement, license, and the cost was very good.
We can plug in many blades, and we can have data up to one terabyte.
The best features of Pure Storage FlashBlade include better throughput and better performance.
Customers can extend storage with flexibility, as one is not obligated to purchase hard disks or controllers from the same storage vendor.
Thanks to its seamless integration with Proxmox, the implementation of high availability servers has drastically reduced downtime, which is crucial for our security-focused company.
StarWind Virtual SAN helps us keep customer satisfaction and provides the solutions we need without having to hire many IT specialists.
StarWind's storage virtualization and failover capabilities have made a difference for my clusters through uptime improvements, with zero downtime specific to server host maintenance or even maintenance of the StarWind software itself.
FlashBlade is the industry’s most advanced scale-out storage for unstructured data, powered by a modern, massively parallel architecture to consolidate complex data silos (like backup appliances and data lakes) and accelerate tomorrow’s discoveries and insights.
Experience peace of mind with DataCore SANsymphony, the ultimate software-defined storage solution alleviating storage management challenges. Say goodbye to the complexities of managing different storage tiers and disruptions with SANsymphony's block-level storage virtualization technology, empowering you to automate capacity provisioning and data placement across diverse storage environments including SAN, DAS, HCI, and JBOD. Break down silos, control data placement, meet business continuity objectives, boost performance, and seamlessly expand or refresh hardware with SANsymphony. Benefit from features like asynchronous replication for disaster recovery, minimizing data loss, accelerating application responsiveness, and integrating new technology non-disruptively. Trusted by industry leaders like NASA, Thorntons, Inc., and TUI Cruises, DataCore SANsymphony guarantees unparalleled flexibility, scalability, and reliability, ensuring uninterrupted data access and application availability while reducing storage costs and inefficiencies.
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.
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.