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."I have found the graphical user interface to be the most useful thing about Virtual SAN."
"The most useful aspect is the hyper-converged SD SAN and the ease to expand it by just adding cheap SSD or NVME disks."
"The support has been amazing and quick to reply."
"The support team is available to solve any problem efficiently."
"We went from "no way DB applications would have good performance" to "Wow! We can now actually have a DB running and have some VMs running at the same time.""
"With an uptime of 384 days, StarWind has improved overall server reliability."
"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."
"The most valuable features are high availability and real-time replication between two servers."
"It's a software storage solution that can scale as we like. There is also has a parallel feature that enhances the performance of the storage solution. We can separate storage and computing, and we can scale these two parts of the platform to meet business needs efficiently."
"The documentation repository is really useful and kept updated."
"The solution's most valuable feature is its versatility, with there being support for all new hardware technologies and platforms, disc mirroring and very effective auto tiering."
"The DataCore system has been rock solid since we have been using it - from 2007 on."
"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."
"Storage is always available."
"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."
"It improved from an operations standpoint as we have reduced failures compared to a previous vendor. The hardware that we previously used had a lot of issues with components failing regularly."
"There are so many features, but if I have to choose, I would go for scale-out upgrades and performance. Scale-out upgrades are very valuable. Typically, when customers engage in virtualization, they're committing themselves to run many virtual machines on a fewer number of hosts. They'll have five or six hosts, and they will run all their virtualization on vSphere. They could be having anywhere from 50 to 100 or even more virtual machines. Once all these go into production, getting downtime or getting planned maintenance windows is extremely difficult. It is something that typically businesses will frown upon. With VxRail, you can just go ahead and add a node without disrupting the existing environment, which works very well. That's why scale-out upgrades are a key feature. Its performance is also valuable. It delivers a very high number of IOPS for a hybrid configuration or an all-flash configuration. The processors that are available in the Xeon family are very powerful. They are multi-core with typically 2 gigahertz, 2.4 gigahertz, or higher frequency, so the performance is very much appreciated."
"t's a very good solution with multiple options with VxRail series like based on customer requirements whether they're focused on compute, storage, scalability and high performance, etc. Whether a customer you are going to start your IT Infrastructure footprint with a limited budget, you have freedom of choice and non-disruptive expansion in the future, whether in the main data center or branches. Any idea coming in system admins mind to run this setup continuously and keep service 100% 24/7 is possible in this product line. Hyper-converged appliances allow a datacenter in a box approach, with G, E P, Vand P series."
"VxRail's technical support is very good."
"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 support has been excellent, especially if you compare it to IBM."
"VxRail performs well in the VDI environment."
"A central management console may be nice to see all nodes."
"The StarWind Management Console is available only for Microsoft Windows/Windows Server, and should also be available for Linux and macOS, as it would reduce implementation costs."
"A web management interface would be good, especially for those coming from other solutions that have one."
"A better overall view of the different deployments could be beneficial, although this is difficult due to how flexible the solution is."
"We just need more integration with Veeam."
"I would like to see options for automated notifications of any changes, including, for example, synchronization issues."
"I found that certain browsers are not fully compatible with the administration web access portal."
"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."
"The cloud reporting interface is quite poor compared to other vendors."
"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."
"It would be ideal if they were providing archive licensing with the ability to create a second pool on existing storage nodes."
"The solution could be better packaged and marketed."
"We'd like to manage the raid on the disk directly in SanSymphony."
"NVMeoF should be implemented. This protocol will play a major role in storage infrastructure in the future."
"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."
"Having an enterprise "Storage Dashboard" that can show capacity, usage, performance, and any issues would be very beneficial."
"VxRail could be easier to set up. It's tricky to configure the network properly and match the requirements."
"We do not use the storage part of VxRail, we use Pure Storage to map out the VxRail because the disk performance from Pure Storage was far better than the performance of the disk on the inside of VxRail."
"if we're looking at costs, Nutanix will win because it allows flexibility in the type of hardware you can use."
"Technically speaking, the vCenter and the administration of the integration of the vCenter could be improved."
"Some of the features of the hyperconverged infrastructure could be integrated with external storage. Right now, for example, if I have surveillance going, I need to purchase very cheap storage. So, an integration between the hyperconverged infrastructure and external storage would be good."
"It would be nice if its installation can be simplified, but it is currently not too bad. They can provide deduplication and compression in hybrid configurations. To the best of my knowledge, these features are not there, and it would be nice if these are added. Some of its competitors already have these features, so it will help VxRail to have a better feature set and compete more effectively."
"I would like to see Dell take a crack at simplifying the process of moving from a node to a cluster and assembling everything into the appliance. It would be great if Dell could provide a pathway where a customer could actually install it without the certifications. Of course, I can't say how you would dumb down something so complex."
"I would like to see more solutions for satellite capabilities where we can put it into smaller locations and still have the redundancy that we have with a larger cluster."
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DataCore SANsymphony is ranked 7th in HCI with 14 reviews while VxRail is ranked 2nd in HCI with 62 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, Pure Storage FlashArray, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct and Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), whereas VxRail is most compared with VMware vSAN, HPE SimpliVity, Dell PowerFlex, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) and Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series. See our DataCore SANsymphony vs. VxRail report.
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