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DataCore SANsymphony vs StarWind Virtual SAN comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary
 

Categories and Ranking

DataCore SANsymphony
Ranking in Software Defined Storage (SDS)
4th
Ranking in HCI
7th
Average Rating
9.2
Number of Reviews
55
Ranking in other categories
Storage Software (2nd), Storage Performance (1st)
StarWind Virtual SAN
Ranking in Software Defined Storage (SDS)
1st
Ranking in HCI
4th
Average Rating
9.6
Number of Reviews
187
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2024, in the Software Defined Storage (SDS) category, the mindshare of DataCore SANsymphony is 6.8%, up from 5.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of StarWind Virtual SAN is 9.7%, up from 7.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Software Defined Storage (SDS)
 

Featured Reviews

Laurent Pressigout - PeerSpot reviewer
Mar 28, 2024
Intuitive dashboard, great support, and useful rollback capabilities
I'm working on a SanSymphony infrastructure. I use it for my company, and this is also what we install for our clients. All of the clients have to do maintenance operations during business hours, and they have to schedule it never to disturb their users. Thanks to San Symphony, they can do…
FE
Mar 8, 2024
Good monitoring and configuring capabilities but disaster recovery documentation is sparse
My impression has been mostly positive. However, there have been some pitfalls. For example, it runs until it does not - and disaster recovery documentation is sparse and mostly unclear. This consequently follows a long learning curve and can take some time until this can be done efficiently. The feature log-structured file system has been removed. While I have not used it, I know some colleagues who have reported some performance benefits under certain circumstances. Additionally, vSAN does not offer extended SAN features like inline deduplication, compression, or S3-compatible access, which is part of most modern SAN feature sets, also in hyper-converged scenarios.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"For us, fault tolerance is the most important feature of DataCore."
"Our central storage has very high availability. DataCore SANsymphony ensures high business continuity."
"Oracle OLTP benchmark to test how it improves the performance while using flash drive NVMe."
"The most valuable feature for us is that we can adjust the size of the storage very easily, without stopping production."
"The dashboard is very intuitive, and there are many counters to diagnose what happens during a short period (like when a backup is in progress)."
"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)."
"Storage is always available."
"Our system is designed to be scalable and flexible, so it can grow and adapt to meet the changing needs of our clients."
"StarWind vSAN has a lot of great features and is a perfect solution for mirroring internal disks and flash between servers."
"We are able to do maintenance by bringing down one node at a time, rather than having to schedule a complete shutdown."
"You can turn your local disk storage into high-availability iSCSI storage."
"The best part is the easy way it operates with a very clear GUI without any unnecessary items."
"In our case, the cost and high availability are the two most important factors which we were looking for in a solution."
"StarWind has provided us with a top-notch, well-supported, robust vSAN offering when other vendors have moved to hyper-converged solutions that are outside of our average clients' reach from a financial and resource perspective."
"This solution made it possible to deploy a new infrastructure in the shortest amount of time, at a low cost without purchasing expensive hardware storage, and use unused servers."
"We like their high availability. It reduces the downtime for our entire organization's environment."
 

Cons

"We are waiting for container support (on the roadmap), as well as a user-friendly full web-administration capability, and an improved API."
"If it could integrate to a cloud gateway, then we could carry it directly to storage, instead of having middleware in between the storage and the cloud."
"I still see room for improvement with DataCore SANsymphony in the area of alarm and task management."
"One area where the solution could improve is its software platform. Many customers have expressed dissatisfaction with the software running on Microsoft Windows."
"For customers or technicians that don't speak and understand English, it could be great to have other languages support, all the more so given the number of countries in which SanSymphony is used."
"The main problem is there is no DataCore OS."
"It would be ideal if they were providing archive licensing with the ability to create a second pool on existing storage nodes."
"I would like to see SMPA (Shared Multi-Port Array) technology developed with the aim of allowing a configuration identical to other storage arrays."
"The main thing I would like to see improved is the level of documentation."
"We ran into an issue with alerts."
"I'd love to see native export of metrics (via Prometheus or something of that nature) to allow us to get more metrics available on our existing dashboard software."
"They need to improve the speed of the interfaces, thus allowing for better traffic on the network."
"I wish they would improve the documentation for the beginner level as it's not very clear on the web page."
"It took a bit of knowledge and support to put in place but once installed it works fine. Migration (HyperV) from one server to another sometimes takes longer than expected but there is no data loss even if the host crashes."
"It would be great to have more automated tooling around managing the iSCSI connections in Windows"
"There is one issue as far as licensing goes and that is a lack of documentation online for users when transitioning from the free version to the paid version, or vice versa."
 

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 pricing and licensing are better with DataCore."
"The cost is at the same level as other storage solutions and it is easy to understand the licensing."
"DataCore SANsymphony's pricing is very high and should be much cheaper."
"Pricing has improved but it is still expensive."
"The solution is cost effective."
"In my case, the licensing per terabytes is very high and it must be licensed for each extra functionality."
"Make sure you are made aware of the annual subscription cost when purchasing."
"For two nodes, it cost us $10,000, and we spend $2,000 a year on support."
"The scalability limitation for us is its licensing. At some point in the fairly near future, we will probably have to upgrade our license so we can store eight terabytes instead of four. We are currently at four terabytes, but we're starting to knock on the door of that capacity."
"We evaluated other options and this one was the most cost-effective."
"This solution has a great price for the functionality."
"StarWind is a low-cost, full-featured alternative to the traditional SAN environment, and their support will guide you every step of the setup."
"When we did all the analysis for StarWind, it was approximately 20 percent less than any of the other solutions that we looked at."
"The license is reusable. We can always rebuild it and apply the license. Then, boom, we get new servers, apply the license, and we're back up and running."
"The StarWind VSAN business model is very cost-effective."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
25%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Government
6%
Computer Software Company
18%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Government
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for DataCore SANsymphony SDS?
I rate the pricing of this solution as an eight. It is relatively expensive, and the additional costs for hardware and storage can make it a significant investment for customers.
What needs improvement with DataCore SANsymphony SDS?
It's difficult to say if something is missing in this solution. Maybe we'd like to manage the raid on the disk directly in SanSymphony. We essentially use RAID5 for our SAS disk and SSD, and now we...
What do you like most about StarWind Virtual SAN?
It is easy to use and can monitor system synchronization and check Storage status. StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN) combines flash and disks of the cluster and forms a virtual shared storage “pool” acce...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for StarWind Virtual SAN?
Pricing on this product is controlled largely by the number of nodes and the storage volumes involved. One of the cutoff points for license cost is 10TB. If you intend to use storage volumes beyond...
What needs improvement with StarWind Virtual SAN?
In the next release, StarWind should include enhanced integration with cloud services for more seamless hybrid cloud operations. Advanced analytics and reporting tools would improve monitoring and ...
 

Also Known As

DataCore Virtual SAN
StarWind SAN & NAS
 

Learn More

 

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.
Baker Tilly BVI, CMS Internet, Board Harpeth Hall School
Find out what your peers are saying about DataCore SANsymphony vs. StarWind Virtual SAN and other solutions. Updated: August 2024.
801,314 professionals have used our research since 2012.