DataCore SANsymphony Reviews

We work with the enterprise edition, SANsymphony V SDS.

The solution is geared towards small and medium-sized businesses, with two or three node clusters supporting business continuity and nonstop operations of virtual machines or servers. This makes the solution very stable, cost effective and simple to administer and maintain. 

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. This translates into very advanced storage features, accompanied by a cost effective application or license.

The so-called hyperconverged infrastructure edition, sometimes knows as vSan, should be addressed. It is one component of the solution. Yet, DataCore is less competitive than certain other manufacturers, such as EMC, Cisco, and VMware vSan. It is competitive when it comes to a general purpose software defined storage solution. As such, a hyperconverged infrastructure solution could be improved.   

The solution could be better packaged and marketed. 

When it comes to a simple 2 node cluster business continuity solution for SMB companies, the downtime can be expensive.

We have been working with DataCore SANsymphony SDS for eight or nine years, although we are talking about a relatively new edition which was published several years ago, possessing similar technology. 

We have worked with the solution over the course of the past 12 months. 

DataCore SANsymphony SDSOne should not hurry with Microsoft patching and should try to use newer, stable versions of DataCore and Microsoft Windows server.

These are the perquisites. When fulfilled, DataCore works really well and is stable.

The stability is high and extremely good. Once set up properly, the stability really works. 

The scalability is excellent. 

We provide support. As such, we usually help to resolve issues arising with vendor DataCore.

DataCore's technical support is very good and I rate it as a nine out of ten. 

The installation is nice and straightforward. 

The length of deployment varies with the complexity of the customer's environment and can last from three to five days, including the planning and optimization.

Generally speaking, we do installation.

There are usually two people involved in the deployment and the main channels of the solution, one of whom is experienced with the Microsoft infrastructure and server, the set up and the configuration. The other person has experience in networking and the configuration of the network, interconnecting the nodes. So, there are not a lot of people involved. 

The solution is cost effective. 

When it comes to a simple 2 node cluster business continuity solution for SMB companies, the downtime can be expensive.

The solution has very advanced storage features, accompanied by a cost effective application or license.

We are a reseller.

There is DataCore and we are Datatek. We are just talking about similar names, Datatek being a DataCore reseller.

I rate DataCore SANsymphony SDS as a nine out of ten. 

The most useful feature of SANsymphony is that it's able to manage any brand of block storage.

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's a very expensive solution, and the licensing costs should be lower.

I've been dealing with this solution for seven to eight months.

It's very stable, but you must know what you are doing because you need to have sufficient memory processing in order for SANsymphony to work properly. Once you have that down, it's actually quite easy to manage.

Scalability is easier because everything comes in pairs. Everything you need to do, you have to do in pairs. For DataCore SANsymphony, you don't need a witness node. You can actually run in pairs, and you can upgrade in pairs. You can find support for up to 64 nodes, if I'm not mistaken. It depends on how you want to design your architecture.

Based on my experience, their technical support is very good.

The initial setup is very straightforward.

One person can easily manage the entire software. There is a learning curve, and you need to understand the features, how it works, how to create your storage pool, and how to tier your storage pool. Once you understand those things, everything is actually quite easy and streamlined. You just need to know the basic architecture.

We have licensing costs on a yearly basis. They charge per terabyte, so in terms of cost, it can be very costly.

They have three different features, and you have to pay extra for those.

If you have multiple block storage, as in a silo, then you can use SANsymphony to manage the storage from one management portal. You can also tier the data from storage, say, for example, from HP storage to Dell storage, transparently. You can also do storage migration without any downtime.

Compared to VMware vSAN on Nutanix or VxRail, you need a minimum of three nodes, two nodes and one witness. However, for DataCore SANsymphony you don't need a witness node.

DataCore SANsymphony is very good and very solid. In fact, it's almost 20 years old, but the pricing can be an issue.

The most valuable feature of DataCore SANsymphony SDS is its high availability.

I also like that this solution has high stability and good performance.

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 we have some customers who are looking for non Windows systems.

What we'd like to see in the future is for this software to support more operating systems.

We've been working with DataCore SANsymphony SDS for 10 years.

Based on customer opinion, DataCore SANsymphony SDS has very high stability. It's a good and stable solution.

The scalability of DataCore SANsymphony SDS is okay. I never had an issue with the scalability of this software, but it could be because we're working with medium-sized customers, not large-sized customers. I'm not sure if scalability would be a concern when dealing with large-sized customers.

Technical support for this software is good. We ran into a few issues and their technical support team were on time helping us, including our customers. I would rate the support for DataCore SANsymphony SDS five out of five.

We are not using software-defined storage, but we are partners with some vendors. We are distributors and resellers of software-defined storage solutions. We're working with DataCore SANsymphony SDS.

As DataCore SANsymphony SDS is a good software, it doesn't need to improve much.

Someone else set the software up, and I wasn't involved in the process of setting it up.

The advice I would give to a company that's thinking of implementing this solution is for them to have a good understanding of the documentation, and for them to be trained before installing the software in their production environment.

I'm giving DataCore SANsymphony SDS eight points out of ten. If they are able to support more OS (operating systems), I would give them a perfect score.

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.

SANsymphony is a hardware-independent solution that provides storage virtualization. We implemented SANsymphony because of its mirrors feature. So it allows you to store the data on two sides synchronously on a single storage server. However, that single storage server consists of two independent hardware boxes in two data centers, but it behaves like one storage server because it's mirrored. No other vendor was offering that kind of transparent behavior when we implemented it.

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.

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.

I've been using different DataCore solutions for about 15 years.

SANsymphony's scalability is huge. 

I rate SANSymphony eight out of 10. I believe it's a great product with many excellent features.