We performed a comparison between DataCore SANsymphony and VMware vSAN based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two HCI solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."We have been able to use more on-prem hardware to reduce cost and also use old disks that we do not trust enough for ordinary RAID or usage."
"In the three years that we have been using StarWind, the product has yet to cause us any problems."
"Their support goes above and beyond with the integration of their software."
"The product gave us a cost-effective way to deploy a highly available server environment."
"It enables us to provide more solution options for our clients, with the reassurance that, when implemented, they will be efficient and stable."
"Without the need for any downtime, enterprises can simply grow their storage infrastructure using StarWind Virtual SAN by adding new servers or disks to the current infrastructure."
"In our case, the cost and high availability are the two most important factors which we were looking for in a solution."
"Their support staff is comprised of true experts who can also communicate clearly."
"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)."
"Active-active is the most valuable aspect for us."
"The ability to pool the storage to leverage thin-provisioning is a huge saving in space and costs."
"Continuous data protection (CDP), can be used to "protect" again ransomware by recording all write on disk in a log. You can recover your data with incredible time granularity."
"The features I have found most valuable are the active-active, or so-called grid technology, and the integration into our VMware-vCenter."
"It allows data to be available from two DataCore servers."
"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."
"Oracle OLTP benchmark to test how it improves the performance while using flash drive NVMe."
"Technical support has been very good. They respond pretty fast, especially if we have a critical issue. Their responses have been great."
"The most important feature to me, in my role, is cost. In the renewal cycle for storage, it was about a 40 percent saving compared to going to an all-flash array, which is what we first looked at doing. Secondly, performance: we need clinical data access in five seconds and need to do everything we can to retain that metric. Thirdly, I was really pleasantly surprised during the data migration across to vSAN, that it happened almost instantly whereas, in the past, migrating from array to array was an arduous and fraught process."
"vSAN is one of the easiest implementations of any VMware product. It's almost like click it to enable it, then you're almost done."
"The installation is very easy."
"You get the benefit of local storage, but you have the protection of shared storage."
"The product's initial setup phase was very straightforward."
"Stretched Cluster is one of the big features that we use across multiple data centers."
"There is not a lot of maintenance required."
"A better overall view of the different deployments could be beneficial, although this is difficult due to how flexible the solution is."
"If there are domain controllers inside the cluster, there needs to be some sort of logic allowing them to boot independently so all the rest of the domain clients can gain the authority they need to come online."
"Diagnostics information or alerts on the state of systems could also be implemented to give more visibility."
"Updating the software can be a bit tricky."
"Performance when in storage-separate configuration needs to be improved."
"Though I have learned some of the nuances with the upgrading of firmware/windows/etc., it would be nice to have a more efficient method of doing so."
"We would like the documentation to be more complete. Most items are covered, but if you don't know something, you may need to contact their support."
"I struggled when bit figuring out how to go about doing the evaluation."
"SANsymphony is missing some features that vSAN has. For example, vSAN has a special feature called continuous data protection. It provides the ability to go back in time to a given moment. You can see what was on your disk in the past up to two weeks. That's a great feature because ransomware attacks are increasingly common, and that provides you some kind of protection."
"DataCore needs a more efficient and better way to keep track of metrics and counters so that we can do baseline analysis to measure performance."
"The main problem is there is no DataCore OS."
"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."
"Its interface could be better."
"The cost is becoming prohibitive since they moved to a subscription model."
"The solution could be better packaged and marketed."
"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."
"It is a memory intensive app."
"We are facing some problems with updates with the VMware vSAN. When we upgraded from version 6.5 to 7, we have been faced with many problems. They have been deploying many hotfixes for this version, and they need to continue to improve this version."
"It doesn't seem like it gives the performance that an actual SAN would give for heavy IOPS, read/writes."
"We do see weird things crop up every now and again. It will say that a drive gets kicked off even though it's fine, and we have to re-add it."
"They can improve the manageability of the solution to make it more simple. It is not that complicated, but it will be good if they can make it more simple."
"The upgrading process could be simplified."
"The only negative point relates to the licensing. If you want multiple, different servers, it costs money, but you have all the capacity for vSAN. You do not reach the data, but the processor arrays and the current architecture."
"I see room for improvement with vSAN in particularly in the reporting realm. Now, with vSAN 6.7, they're starting to include vRealize Operations components in the vSphere Client, even if you're not a vRealize Operations customer. So, that's really good. It exposes some really low-level reporting. I would like to see more of that. However, you have to be a vRealize Operations customer to obtain that. I would like to see more include of this included in the vSAN licensing."
DataCore SANsymphony is ranked 7th in HCI with 54 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 3rd in HCI with 226 reviews. DataCore SANsymphony is rated 9.2, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of DataCore SANsymphony writes "Robust with good replication and access protection ". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSAN writes "Very stable, easy to set up, and easy to use". DataCore SANsymphony is most compared with HPE SimpliVity, StorMagic SvSAN, Red Hat Ceph Storage, NetApp ONTAP and VxRail, whereas VMware vSAN is most compared with VxRail, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, HPE SimpliVity, Red Hat Ceph Storage and HPE Nimble Storage. See our DataCore SANsymphony vs. VMware vSAN report.
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