DataCore SANsymphony alternatives and competitors

We are an SMB that hosts our ERP on-site. Our infrastructure is shared with a group of inter-related companies, so uptime is critical since several entities rely on our core services. StarWind HCA is the core of our network and hosts all of our critical VMs. We needed a cost-effective HA solution that was easy to manage, as we have a very small IT department that is concentrated mostly on business process improvements. The last thing we need is complex systems to manage taking our focus away from that.

We went from a vSphere compute cluster with an external SAN made by a company that is in perpetual financial trouble and have shifted business focus several times. Not only was our traditional SAN expensive, but we also had no confidence in the vendor. StarWind HCA is commodity hardware, so we eliminated the proprietary hardware issue. 

We also substantially reduced network complexity by eliminating that standalone SAN. That reduced complexity has allowed us to concentrate on improving other areas of our network.

Proactive support has been great, you will receive an email from StarWind soon after their telemetry service sees anything out of the ordinary with either the StarWind services or any critical issue related to your cluster of VMs. The appliance support goes beyond my expectations by helping with some Hyper-V issues that may not be directly related to the StarWind services.

The most valuable feature is its simplicity. It really isn't any more difficult to manage than a standard Hyper-V cluster.

Communication could have been improved during the implementation process. I've also been looking forward to further development of their management console which has been slow to materialize. StarWind is promising full cluster management and backup integration in a single-pain-of-glass console.

Possible new features could be CSV-level snapshot capability, Veeam integration, and maybe a more straightforward setup. Granted, you don't have to worry about setups with the HCA, but if you want to implement StarWind vSAN in a lab to test it is a tedious setup process.

We've been running our StarWind HCA for about two years.

Technical support has been willing to help and train even on simple questions.

We previously had a vSphere cluster with a standalone SAN. We wanted a less complex solution.

The initial setup is really easy. StarWind handles it.

In-house with StarWind help.

The HCA price is all-inclusive (setup, hardware, support, warranty), except for your standard Microsoft Server licensing.

We evaluated Cisco and DataCore.

HCI is often pitched against VMware licenses, which are expensive. However, Sangfor HCI is more cost-effective and offers more features than VMware. This makes it a strong competitor in the Pakistani market.

The manageability feature is the most important aspect of the solution. Customers have told me that this is the key selling point for them. The manageability and the ability to use it across all platforms using vSAN is what makes the solution so popular.

One question that has come up frequently in the last week is whether or not the renewal cost for Sangfor's HCI solution is too high. Customers are hesitant to renew their contracts because of this cost, but everything else about the solution is good. The features are fine and even better than VMware's. However, the renewal cost is a bit higher.

I have been using the solution for seven months.

I give the stability of the solution a seven out of ten.

The solution is highly scalable.

The response time for technical support is very good in Pakistan. We do not have any issues with their support.

The initial setup of the solution is straightforward.

I give the pricing a five out of ten.

The solution has a good initial cost but a high renewal cost.

We have compared the solution with VMware, and there are no features that are significantly better in VMware. There are some features that are a bit lower. I'm not sure what they are right now. Overall, the Sangfor HCI package is good when compared to VMware. The main difference is the pricing. VMware has a high initial cost and a complex licensing model. Sangfor, on the other hand, has all of the features in just one license. This is a big difference.

I give the solution an eight out of ten.

Most medium-sized companies are using on-premises storage solutions. They might have a limited budget, so they don't need some of the more expensive replication or backup solutions. They just keep their data on-site, using software from Veritas or another provider. I will use a simple backup solution, rather than using a cloud-based storage environment. Sangfor HCI is only necessary for large enterprises.

Sangfor HCI is a one-license package that is packed with features. When looking to replace our existing VMware environment with another good product, I believe Sangfor HCI is the best solution.

There are 2 server clusters with a software-defined SAN. They are Hyper-V Windows 2016 clusters and have been working fine for several years. We are using both NVME and SSD disks with both are working fine with good levels of performance. We provide a SaaS solution hosted in external datacenters in one cluster and the other hosts our internal servers. Starwind replaced a Dell SAN that had failed. The SaaS solution runs on an Oracle database which has had excellent price-performance using Linux in Hyper-V VM.  

The product allows extreme flexibility for SAN and hyperconverged infrastructure. Using Hyper-V combined with Linux VMs has allowed us to scale our solutions with additional clients and client volumes. We have customers using our platform with over 1.3 million accounts. The databases have scaled seamlessly. We now have over 16 TB of disks in our hyperconverged SD-WAN and Starwind has managed them flawlessly. The ability to grow SAN size by just buying more cheap SSDs or NVME disks has been very useful.

The most useful aspect is the hyper-converged SD SAN and the ease to expand it by just adding cheap SSD or NVME disks. 

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. We have no more recommendations for the product beyond that.

We have been using the product for over 3 years.

We have had no stability problems whatsoever.

The solution is very scalable. Right now, we have over 16TB of disks. 

Technical support is always available and helpful

Previously, we used a Dell EMC SAN which was failing. 

The initial setup was supported by Starwind. 

We did look at DataCore.