DataCore SANsymphony Reviews

We exchanged our standard storage (conventional storage) with a software-defined solution. We wanted to use something that corresponds to the time, something modern and hardware-independent. 

We had many small problems, but with time, we were on the way. Only once did we have a total failure of the storage, and this was a bug in the software. 

The Disaster Recovery (DR) site helped us to recover the data. This was a one and only case and we were disappointed. In the end, we have two DataCore systems, a two-node system, and a three-node system. Over time I must say, we have been satisfied. It has advanced storage knowledge and good administrators.

DataCore SANsymphony is our main storage system. We were using it in combination with VMware vSphere. Each data store is mirrored; many critical data stores have a 3^rd mirror in their Disaster Recovery site. On the 3^rd mirror copy, we are using continuous protection. The data stores are set to get a maximum of 14 days. Some special data stores have additional snapshots to keep the full backups. We tried to use vFilo. However, this solution was not as good as the NetApp ONTAP software-defined version. I do not know what we will use in the future when choosing the next storage solution. Right now, we are split between NetApp and DataCore.

For us, fault tolerance is the most important feature of DataCore. 

Redundancy mechanisms, such as mirroring or parity, help maintain the integrity of stored data even if one or more components fail. This is essential for mission-critical applications and services that require continuous operation. In the event of a hardware failure or other disruptions, fault tolerant systems enable seamless and uninterrupted access to data, minimizing downtime and associated business impacts. This is especially critical in environments where any interruption in data access can result in significant financial or operational losses. Fault tolerance protects against the loss of data due to hardware failures, ensuring that critical information remains intact. The associated business disruptions can outweigh these initial investments.

The main problem is there is no DataCore OS itself; there is nothing better than one complete solution from one solution provider. We had a lot of issues. It was really disappointing to see that DataCore blamed Microsoft for the problems, Microsoft blamed Lenovo hardware, and Lenovo blamed Datacore.

DataCore should have an OS specifically designed and optimized for managing storage workloads. Only the storage system should have access to encryption and authentication mechanisms to safeguard stored data. The future DC system should be integrated with the DC Hardware, this will enhances interoperability and simplifies the deployment and management of all storage products.

I've used the solution for over ten years.

We did use a different solution; at the time, DataCore was more modern than other competitors.

Don’t do it on your own. You need someone with some DCSA experience and five or more years of experience.

We did not evaluate other options. We wanted DataCore.

This is not a solution for administrators without storage experience; however, if all requirements are met, it is very stable, fast, and flexible.

We use it to ensure the availability and reliability of our clients' storage. It's deployed in environments with VMware, tech servers, and other equipment to establish a highly available infrastructure for our clients.

I find its high performance, total cost of ownership, strong availability, and simplicity to be the most valuable features.

The pricing could be improved.

I have been using this solution for 15 years.  Initially, we started with version 4.0, and now we're on version 10, PSP 16.

It is a very stable solution. 

It's scalable and works well in that aspect. We have around 20 customers using this solution. 

The customer service and support are quite fast. However, it is not a ten on ten because the support was unable to help with a functional program of the solution. The functionality was there, we struggled with it, but the support was unable to help us. 

Positive

The setup process is okay. Training is required for deployment, which is standard. It's not overly complicated.

The deployment process involves analysis, configuration, reception of configuration, and testing with the client.

Analyzing the installation is a very important step. It is important to analyze the installation, the infrastructure, the target, and after that configuration.

We require a team of engineers for deployment and maintenance of the solution. We have ten in-house staff members, along with some freelancers. Globally, we have eight professionals dedicated to DataCore services.

The licensing cost is reasonable, a bit on the expensive side but manageable.

Overall, I would rate the solution a nine out of ten.

My advice is to define the solution before deploying it because DataCore is indeed a good solution, but it's not the only one available. There are various other solutions in the market. 

Additionally, DataCore might not be suitable for all projects. Therefore, conducting a comprehensive analysis and careful consideration of the project's needs is crucial. Choosing this solution and deploying it should be approached with utmost importance. For instance, 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. It's important to recognize this aspect.

Usually, our clients want to replace some storage units from NetApp. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't because NetApp still has some features that DataCore SANsymphony would like to have.

DataCore SANsymphony's stability is okay.

DataCore SANsymphony should integrate file servers at a good price into the solution. The licensing is expensive, and you cannot manage a big file server with DataCore SANsymphony without paying a lot of money. NetApp is easier to sell, and we have had projects where NetApp was a lot cheaper than DataCore.

Our customers want their block storage to be fast, redundant, and highly available. You also might have a large fire storage for data that the customer does not need to access urgently. When you want to enclose this in the DataCore architecture, you have to pay the full amount of money as with block storage, which can be very expensive. Sometimes, it is very expensive to use DataCore SANsymphony.

I have been using DataCore SANsymphony for about one year.

I didn't notice any problems with the solution's stability. DataCore SANsymphony's stability is okay.

The first installation of DataCore SANsymphony took a long time. I am not sure if that was due to a lack of experience or software issues, as I was part of the sales team. I am not mounting DataCore SANsymphony. I am just selling the solution to the customers.

I rate DataCore SANsymphony a seven out of ten for stability.

You can scale DataCore SANsymphony as much as you want if you are willing to pay the price. The solution’s scalability is high and theoretically has no limit.

We won three or four projects last year but also lost some. In some cases, the decision was to go back to maintaining NetApp. Our clients are enterprise businesses.

I rate DataCore SANsymphony a six out of ten for scalability.

I have to contact the sales team and system engineers. I'm quite content with DataCore SANsymphony's system engineers.

Positive

I am not completely satisfied with the initial setup. I rate DataCore SANsymphony a five out of ten for its initial setup.

DataCore SANsymphony’s deployment takes around eight weeks.

DataCore SANsymphony's pricing is very high and should be much cheaper. You buy a license of DataCore SANsymphony, and then you have to add three or four times the price in hardware.

You have several SLAs. You have to buy the hardware equipment because DataCore SANsymphony doesn't run independently but on server hardware.

On a scale of one to ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive, I rate DataCore SANsymphony's pricing a seven or eight out of ten.

We sell DataCore with the package that permits to use the latest version. We wouldn’t install another version.

NetApp is very good compared to DataCore SANsymphony in terms of flexibility and licensing.

I don’t know. I would ask them to compare.

DataCore SANsymphony is a good product, but there's room for improvement.

Overall, I rate DataCore SANsymphony a seven out of ten.

My primary use case for DataCore SANsymphony is SAN rapid storage for virtual machines and the high availability for infrastructure.

The feature I found most valuable was the high availability with mirroring.

There is room for improvement in the graphical interface. 

I have been using the DataCore solution for about 12 years.

My impression is that it is a very stable solution. However, I did have one encounter with this solution's crash as the result of a wrong action taken by a user. The crash resulted in some data being lost. We had to restore some data.

My opinion is that it's a very easy solution and that it's very scalable. I am very happy with this product's ability to adapt, increase, and modify existing infrastructures.

We have about 20 clients who are using this solution.

I would rate DataCore's technical support a nine, on a scale from one to 10, with one being the worst and 10 being the best. Each time I requested help, they would call me back in 20 minutes or less.

Positive

I think that the initial setup is quite simple.

The deployment of DataCore depends on many factors, but for us, it took about one day for each server.

The license is paid twice per year.

This solution is quite fluent and stable and very easy to administer and use. I would recommend it to other people.

We have two VMware servers attached to two DataCore SanSymphony servers. The two SanSymphony servers are in high availability. Each server has two NVMe cards and some SAS disk in RAID5. 

We use the auto-tiering function to manage the two kinds of storage and place the dormant blocks on the SAS disks. 

We also use the Continuous Data Protection function to protect our volumes against crypto lockers, for example. 

The solution allows us to have real Business Continuity Planning on our storage system.

DataCore SanSymphony helps us to have a real performant and secure storage system. We can use the storage technology of our choice because SanSymphony can manage any storage that Windows accept.

The solution helps us to protect the data with the high availability function, which synchronizes in real-time the block between the servers. The continuous data protection function can log all the changes on the storage to allow us to go back in time within the last 72 hours.

We thought about replacing our two VMware servers and the two DataCore servers with the hyper-converged DataCore solution. 

The first valuable aspect is the software-defined storage. We like the fact that we are not dependent on a constructor. We can mix them as we wish. We can also mix the storage class as we want. 

The second thing we like is the cache which is the RAM of the server so we can choose the cache we need and we want. It provides us with a real performance for the writers but also for the readers.

Next, today, Continuous Data protection is mandatory for us. These days, with the multiplication of crypto lockers, we are more confident in the protection of our data.

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 need to create this RAID on the raid card. If we could bypass this card, we could really manage all the storage from the solution, which would be ideal.

The graphical interface needs to be improved. We have noticed some bugs in it.

A vCenter integration just appeared in the last version. However, we have only some functions within it. I am confident that many new things will arrive in the next few months to make it more robust.

I have been using this solution for 14 years.

I found the solution to be very stable.

The scalability is very good; we can add a disk or RAM if we need it.

The support is very good. They are fast and efficient.

Positive

We used EMC SAN. We switch due to the fact that, at the time, there was not high availability on the EMC side and the management of the storage was simpler.

The initial setup is very simple; there is a wizard to help you deploy the solution. 

I implemented the solution myself.

We evaluated EMC's MirrorView and recently Huawei with Dorado Hypermetro.

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 whatever they want, whenever they want.

I really like to dissociate virtual volumes from any virtual machines. It allows you to manage granularly the storage of your virtual machines. I separated VMs and files on different volumes in my case

Before using San Symphony, I had to work late to improve my IT infrastructure. Now, I can do it at any time of day.

We also won on availability. When one of the servers crashes, there is no effect on our production. It rarely happens; however, we would have been out of production with our previous infrastructure.

We do things differently now. We use our backup solution to backup storage rather than to backup machines, and I find it has less impact on the performance of our virtual infrastructure.

I really like the Rollback option, which is like a video of my storage. Administrators benefit from being able to return to a single previous point as precisely as they want.

I also find that the support team is a real quality of the Datacore SanSymphony environment. Opening a case is very simple, and the answers of support are always detailed with precision.

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 product can be improved by making better filters to search event logs. When everybody shows the last event at the top of their board, San Symphony does it at the bottom, and sometimes, we don't see an alert that needs to be checked.

The service is still available every day and at every time of the day, yet only in English. For customers or technicians who don't speak and understand English, it would be great to have other language support, all the more so given the number of countries in which SanSymphony is used.

I've used the solution for three years.

I'm working on a San Symphony 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 whatever they want, whenever they want. 

I really like to dissociate virtual volumes from any virtual machines. It allows you to manage granularly the storage of your virtual machines. I separated VMs and files on different volumes in my case

Before using San Symphony, I had to work late to improve my IT infrastructure. Now, I can do it at any time of day. 

We also won on availability. When one of the servers crashes, there is no effect on our production. It rarely happens, but we would have been out of production with our previous infrastructure.

We do things differently now. We use our backup solution to backup storage rather than to backup machines, and I find it has less impact on the performance of our virtual infrastructure.

I really like the Rollback option, which is like a video of my storage. The benefit is for administrators because they can return at a single previous point, as precisely as they want.

I also find that the support team is a real quality of the Datacore SanSymphony environment. Opening a case is very simple, and the answers of support are always detailed with precision.

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).

The product can be improved by making better filters to search event logs. When everybody shows the last event at the top of their board, San Symphony does it at the bottom, and sometimes, we don't see an alert that needs to be checked.

The service is still available every day and at every time of the day, but only in English. 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.

I've used the solution for six months.

I have never heard one of my customers complain about the stability of San Symphony.

I knew about San Symphony six months ago, and this is the second update that I can see. Developers are working in line with what customers are asking for.

Every time I needed support, they gave me a solution.

Positive

I did not use a different solution previously.

The initial setup is very simple. There are documents to send to Datacore Support, and these were a little bit difficult to fill.

We are the vendor team, so for our use, we did it ourselves

The ROI is difficult to estimate.

I did not evaluate other options; my company already has a partnership with Datacore.

I am an infrastructure engineer for a partner and 95% of the infrastructure that I recommend and/or install and maintain for my clients are based on the triptych: SANsymphony/vSphere/Veeam.

I have often succeeded in convincing clients to add security to their storage by replacing an old single-site infrastructure while providing a Business Continuity Plan solution.

Of all the customers where I installed the DataCore solution, only one decided not to keep it; however, it was for reasons of political strategy following a change of CIO.

The main feedback from my customers concerns the performance of the DataCore SANsymphony - thanks to the embedded Auto-tiering technology which avoids users purchasing an expensive physical storage when the majority of their data is no longer active beyond a few weeks and do not need to be stored.

They have a quality support team, which offers assistance in French when necessary (particularly for Public Service customers who do not speak English fluently). They respond very quickly to engage with any serious problems encountered.

Auto-tiering to obtain performance at a lower cost without the customer having to purchase ultra-fast storage is great. The ease of increasing the volume of storage without interruption of services and without impact on users is helpful. At the same time, they are leaving the choice to adapt storage technology according to a user’s needs. The abstraction of the hardware layer, especially when it is necessary to change the brand and/or model of equipment during infrastructure renewal is good. The possibility of installing the solution in HCI mode for small structures makes it possible to address large accounts as well as small businesses.

I would like to see SMPA (Shared Multi-Port Array) technology developed with the aim of allowing a configuration identical to other storage arrays: instead of having a single storage controller per site, competing arrays all have 2 controllers for redundancy and securing data access (3Par, Unity, MSA, etc.) It would be necessary to automate the operation of two nodes managing the same storage per site and no longer be obliged to manage it by a system of scripts which must be revalidated each time the product is updated.

I've used the solution since 2002.

There will always be problems with a software solution; the responsiveness of the support and developers allows them to be corrected very quickly, and even sometimes individually, in relation to a specific problem for a particular client.

In the majority of cases, the failures that I encountered with my clients had their origin in one of the other components of the infrastructure (hypervisors or switches).

Scalability is one of the many advantages, as the evolution of the solution is simple and does not interrupt services.

Of all the software that I use in my job, it is the one that has the best support. When the problem is not with DataCore, they often help me and sometimes even directly provide the solution to modify the settings on the other components of the infrastructure causing the problem.

Positive

Sometimes some customers use other storage solutions, but whenever possible; I advise them to switch to DataCore

The initial training and accompanying certification made it simple and practical to implement the solution.

I am not able to answer for my clients; however, as long as they do not move to another solution, their ROI should correspond to their expectations.

Most of the time, it is easy to prove that in the long term, this solution is the most advantageous for the client cost-wise; both in terms of equipment renewal and ease of handling.

When I started proposing and installing, I only knew about traditional infrastructures that did not provide security at the data level.

My professional career will end soon; however, as long as the product is available, I will continue to recommend it to more and more new customers and maintain it among those who continue to use it.