Systems and Network Engineer at a computer software company with 1-10 employees
User
Top 20
2022-11-05T14:20:00Z
Nov 5, 2022
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.
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.
The graphical interface is not always very stable. In a dense infrastructure with many volumes and disks, slowness and GUI crashes can be observed. The current graphical interface is ported to a web interface and not all features are available yet. The compression and deduplication features are not functional for a production environment. This feature is probably the only one missing compared to other SAN manufacturers. It is under development, however, it is not yet reliable enough for use in a critical environment.
It would be ideal if they were providing archive licensing with the ability to create a second pool on existing storage nodes. Maybe they could do it with limited max IO and/or without auto-tiering capabilities for the archive pool - to avoid interference with the performance pool.
One area the company can improve upon is the use of other software. 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. While the Windows server has gotten more reliable, I would like it more if it would not be dependent on Microsoft Windows Servers. Improving the GUI would be another feature where they could add to the software. They should make it more intuitive by simplifying the layout.
Sales Manager at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
Real User
Top 20
2022-02-22T08:45:00Z
Feb 22, 2022
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.
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.
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 would like to see a real "sexy" storage dashboard with capacity, usage, performance, and error tracking. The cloud reporting interface is quite poor compared to other vendors. We are far from an HPE Infosight, for example. Using a classic storage array constructor allows clients to have a single point of contact in case of an issue. With DataCore, we have to deal with them for the software part and with the hardware vendor for the hardware part. Sometimes, in a complex environment, we have to deal with storage array vendors, servers vendors, and software vendors and that can be exhausting.
For an upcoming release, I would like to see a function that can manage the storage of multiple Datacore servers in a kind of "erasure coding". This would simplify scaling and make SSY more competitive with other providers. NVMeoF should be implemented. This protocol will play a major role in storage infrastructure in the future. Network protocols are becoming increasingly important. For future projects, protocols such as RoCE should be implemented. Especially in LAN infrastructures from 25G, a simpler and high-performance SAN infrastructure could be built here. The costs should be lower compared to Fibre Channel. Improving support will be very difficult as it is already one of the best in the IT world.
Datacore is developing a new WebUI with new dashboards. It is a good idea as the classic GUI is lacking dashboards. We need a better view to analyze the auto-tiering feature (like in DIS) to easier decide what type of storage we need to add. The current view in the GUI is too simple and we cannot see clearly cold data or hot data. You can report all you want. There are a lot of counters usable in the console. However, there are too many. They need to create some pre-defined graphs or reports.
There's very little that I can find in their software that I would say needs to be improved. Sometimes the updates are too frequent, where just as we finish updating all of our sites, another update comes out. The de-dup console is not yet integrated inside the main SANsymphony console. They are working on it but it's not there yet. While their console allows you to connect to each of the nodes without closing the interface, you have to log out and back in when you switch between different storage server groups. It would be nice if they had an interface more like vCenter, where you see all of the server groups in a list and can just click on each group. It would be nice to be able to see multiple groups at the same time. Having more of an Enterprise approach (v/s a local storage cluster) view would provide better management of the environment. For example, their current reports can only be run for each storage server group. There is currently not a way to run the same reports or look at performance across the enterprise (only the local site). Having an enterprise "Storage Dashboard" that can show capacity, usage, performance, and any issues would be very beneficial. Currently, DataCore does not have this. They recently added a web-based dashboard called DataCore Insight Services (DIS) to their product. However, you will need to be on their subscription-based model v/s their traditional yearly maintenance-based model. Also, the current DIS product does not span multiple storage groups and is in its infancy and is still very rudimentary in nature. However, knowing DataCore's track record for fast, innovative development, I know it won't be long before they get it right.
We use this solution for providing software-defined storage that is virtualized, in a true HA configuration. It provides SAN storage services to VMware vCenter hosts and VMware Horizon hosts, as well as some physical Windows and Linux servers. This platform allows us to leverage any storage that Windows can leverage, including other vendor SAN devices. This allows us to keep existing storage, mirror SANs from 2 different vendors and even allow very easy migration from one vendor to another. Most of our locations just use RAID attached storage (as it is the least expensive) with enterprise-class drives (both HDD and SSD).
Presales Engineer at a computer software company with 5,001-10,000 employees
Mar 13, 2021
I work with many customers that ask us to put their solution near the production because they can't stop the production. It's easier to protect the network this way.
Presales Engineer at a computer software company with 5,001-10,000 employees
Mar 13, 2021
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.
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There is room for improvement in the graphical interface.
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.
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.
The graphical interface is not always very stable. In a dense infrastructure with many volumes and disks, slowness and GUI crashes can be observed. The current graphical interface is ported to a web interface and not all features are available yet. The compression and deduplication features are not functional for a production environment. This feature is probably the only one missing compared to other SAN manufacturers. It is under development, however, it is not yet reliable enough for use in a critical environment.
It would be ideal if they were providing archive licensing with the ability to create a second pool on existing storage nodes. Maybe they could do it with limited max IO and/or without auto-tiering capabilities for the archive pool - to avoid interference with the performance pool.
One area the company can improve upon is the use of other software. 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. While the Windows server has gotten more reliable, I would like it more if it would not be dependent on Microsoft Windows Servers. Improving the GUI would be another feature where they could add to the software. They should make it more intuitive by simplifying the layout.
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.
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.
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 would like to see a real "sexy" storage dashboard with capacity, usage, performance, and error tracking. The cloud reporting interface is quite poor compared to other vendors. We are far from an HPE Infosight, for example. Using a classic storage array constructor allows clients to have a single point of contact in case of an issue. With DataCore, we have to deal with them for the software part and with the hardware vendor for the hardware part. Sometimes, in a complex environment, we have to deal with storage array vendors, servers vendors, and software vendors and that can be exhausting.
For an upcoming release, I would like to see a function that can manage the storage of multiple Datacore servers in a kind of "erasure coding". This would simplify scaling and make SSY more competitive with other providers. NVMeoF should be implemented. This protocol will play a major role in storage infrastructure in the future. Network protocols are becoming increasingly important. For future projects, protocols such as RoCE should be implemented. Especially in LAN infrastructures from 25G, a simpler and high-performance SAN infrastructure could be built here. The costs should be lower compared to Fibre Channel. Improving support will be very difficult as it is already one of the best in the IT world.
Datacore is developing a new WebUI with new dashboards. It is a good idea as the classic GUI is lacking dashboards. We need a better view to analyze the auto-tiering feature (like in DIS) to easier decide what type of storage we need to add. The current view in the GUI is too simple and we cannot see clearly cold data or hot data. You can report all you want. There are a lot of counters usable in the console. However, there are too many. They need to create some pre-defined graphs or reports.
Problem detection could be easier. It should help customers identify problems very quickly because it's not easy to analyze on the platform today.
There's very little that I can find in their software that I would say needs to be improved. Sometimes the updates are too frequent, where just as we finish updating all of our sites, another update comes out. The de-dup console is not yet integrated inside the main SANsymphony console. They are working on it but it's not there yet. While their console allows you to connect to each of the nodes without closing the interface, you have to log out and back in when you switch between different storage server groups. It would be nice if they had an interface more like vCenter, where you see all of the server groups in a list and can just click on each group. It would be nice to be able to see multiple groups at the same time. Having more of an Enterprise approach (v/s a local storage cluster) view would provide better management of the environment. For example, their current reports can only be run for each storage server group. There is currently not a way to run the same reports or look at performance across the enterprise (only the local site). Having an enterprise "Storage Dashboard" that can show capacity, usage, performance, and any issues would be very beneficial. Currently, DataCore does not have this. They recently added a web-based dashboard called DataCore Insight Services (DIS) to their product. However, you will need to be on their subscription-based model v/s their traditional yearly maintenance-based model. Also, the current DIS product does not span multiple storage groups and is in its infancy and is still very rudimentary in nature. However, knowing DataCore's track record for fast, innovative development, I know it won't be long before they get it right.