We performed a comparison between DataCore SANsymphony and VxRail 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."This software lets us maintain storage redundancy across both of our Hyper-V hosts, so if one goes down the environment fails over to the other and we have minimal to no downtime."
"I have found the graphical user interface to be the most useful thing about Virtual SAN."
"The top-notch support before, during, and after deployments are better than any other vendor I have come across."
"As the client had acquired another company some distance away, they were concerned about having a single SAN in one location or the other. StarWind vSAN allowed us to keep a copy of the data local to each site without asking the client to pay for two SANs in addition to the two new servers they needed."
"StarWind saved us about 80% of our storage costs over our old solution."
"Virtual SAN runs on iSCSI, which is free and easy to configure. It's easy to manage from StarWind's GUI console, and it only required a few extra switch ports."
"The instant failover, with vSAN copying data to the second node, allowed for the continuous availability of our applications."
"vSAN we found was simple to set up, easy to configure and manage and allows us to achieve storage redundancy."
"The documentation repository is really useful and kept updated."
"Storage is always available."
"The most useful feature of SANsymphony is that it's able to manage any brand of block storage."
"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."
"I found the solution to be very stable."
"I am very happy with this product's ability to adapt, increase, and modify existing infrastructures."
"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."
"This is a good solution if you want to deploy an ACI Environment but don't have all the necessary resources."
"like VxRail because it's fully integrated. The other hyperconverged solutions are also well integrated. They are all highly similar to each other in that regard. But we prefer VxRail for its physical integrations or lifecycle management. It also has vCenter, which integrates the hardware lifecycle management."
"The ease of deployment and management of the solution are the most valuable aspects of the product."
"VxRail has improved our organization by providing our admin team with an easy-to-use interface."
"The tool's price is competitive and it is easy to use."
"VxRail's technical support is very good."
"The compute is good and we have not had any issues with the vSAN."
"It's somewhat hard to speak about specific features, but I like VxRail's simplicity and ease of use. It's a decent solution for customers with a small footprint. If you're operating a big data center, it's not easy to position VxRail or HCI solutions, but when you have a small customer managing many different components, it's easier to work only with one solution."
"The gathering of monthly consumption and performance reports for future dissemination to concerned parties is very important. Unfortunately, StarWinds vSAN doesn't offer this functionality."
"Regular updates to the software are required, and subtle design changes would be welcome."
"It would be good to have a little more access to control certain aspects within the UI."
"A better overall view of the different deployments could be beneficial, although this is difficult due to how flexible the solution is."
"I want to suggest that the complexity of the startup and shutdown procedure needs to be reduced."
"There should be publicly available tutorials on YouTube or other platforms that help the users to integrate this solution with other platforms, for example."
"It should be improved in the way it detects the right filesystem image after a complete shutdown of the system or in the case of disaster recovery."
"A great feature would be a wizard and to include a new disk in the SAN. At the moment, including a new disk requires several steps - some that must be done at the OS level and others in each node."
"There is room for improvement in the graphical interface."
"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."
"We'd like to manage the raid on the disk directly in SanSymphony."
"Right now, the version used is run on Microsoft Windows Server. Having a Linux version or even an appliance would be better as it would eliminate the use of additional licensing for another piece of hardware."
"One limitation of this solution is that it's Windows-based, e.g. one requirement to install DataCore SANsymphony SDS is putting it on a Windows server machine. It relies on Windows and that is a limitation because there are some customers who are looking for non Windows systems."
"The cloud reporting interface is quite poor compared to other vendors."
"NVMeoF should be implemented. This protocol will play a major role in storage infrastructure in the future."
"Datacore is developing a new WebUI with new dashboards. It is a good idea as the classic GUI is lacking dashboards."
"When we have a vulnerability or we need to upgrade VxRail, it takes a long time. It takes eight hours each time we upgrade."
"You have to buy a new server if you want to scale up."
"The SCL database sends out a warning and you have to download the adjacent file from the Dell website. You have to upload it and retest it. We cannot always connect our systems to the internet which means we sometimes miss these important updates."
"The configurations of VxRail can be difficult. However, it has improved in the newer version. From version 6 to 7, there has been a lot of changes."
"Sometimes during implementation, you can some scripting errors. And there are some issues when we update the version. There are some issues like the version will not get updated or stable at some time. Dell needs to resolve these problems, we don't waste time fixing them."
"if we're looking at costs, Nutanix will win because it allows flexibility in the type of hardware you can use."
"The full solution is not completely included as a bundle, such as we see with SimpliVity."
"The solution is vendor-locked and Dell is the only supplier of VxRail."
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DataCore SANsymphony is ranked 7th in HCI with 13 reviews while VxRail is ranked 3rd in HCI with 49 reviews. DataCore SANsymphony is rated 9.4, while VxRail is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of DataCore SANsymphony writes "Provides HA virtualized storage independent of storage type or vendor". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VxRail writes "It's built on platforms that have been in the industry for more than 15 years, so it's very stable". DataCore SANsymphony is most compared with VMware vSAN, HPE SimpliVity, StorMagic SvSAN, Pure Storage FlashArray and NetApp ONTAP, whereas VxRail is most compared with VMware vSAN, Dell PowerFlex, HPE SimpliVity, Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series and Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI). See our DataCore SANsymphony vs. VxRail report.
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