SANsymphony vs. StarWind Virtual SAN

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
SANsymphony
Score 9.1 out of 10
N/A
DataCore SANsymphony software-defined storage aims to deliver flexibility, scalability, and cost-efficiency in a HCI platform. Powered by a block-level storage virtualization technology, SANsymphony is designed to provide flexibility to control how data is stored, protected, and accessed. The vendor states users can ensure business continuity with just 2 nodes, easily scaling out to 64 nodes, and achieve productivity for performance-demanding workloads by improving I/O processing and reducing…N/A
StarWind Virtual SAN
Score 9.3 out of 10
N/A
StarWind Virtual SAN is software-defined storage for efficient storage and backup.N/A
Pricing
SANsymphonyStarWind Virtual SAN
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
SANsymphonyStarWind Virtual SAN
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoYes
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
SANsymphonyStarWind Virtual SAN
Top Pros
Top Cons
Best Alternatives
SANsymphonyStarWind Virtual SAN
Small Businesses
StarWind Virtual SAN
StarWind Virtual SAN
Score 9.3 out of 10

No answers on this topic

Medium-sized Companies
StarWind Virtual SAN
StarWind Virtual SAN
Score 9.3 out of 10
Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure
Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure
Score 9.0 out of 10
Enterprises
IBM Spectrum Scale
IBM Spectrum Scale
Score 9.8 out of 10
IBM Spectrum Scale
IBM Spectrum Scale
Score 9.8 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
SANsymphonyStarWind Virtual SAN
Likelihood to Recommend
9.1
(7 ratings)
9.3
(138 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
10.0
(1 ratings)
8.5
(14 ratings)
Usability
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(10 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(1 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(1 ratings)
Support Rating
10.0
(1 ratings)
9.6
(120 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
8.8
(8 ratings)
Configurability
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(2 ratings)
Ease of integration
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(1 ratings)
Product Scalability
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(1 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(1 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
SANsymphonyStarWind Virtual SAN
Likelihood to Recommend
DataCore Software
Now that you have virtualized your server's CPU and memory resources, you should look to do the same for your storage. Separation of hardware and software has many added benefits not only for CPUs and memory but for storage as well. Without this solution, we would not have been able to afford black-box type SANs at every location. This allowed us to virtualize over 90% of the server environment saving costs and power consumption/cooling and provides all the features costly black-box SANs, including true-HA (which most SAN vendors don't have). Migration from variant SAN storage and using mixed back-end storage solutions is as easier than ever before because the storage being virtualized.
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StarWind
For companies that have 4-5 or more servers, StarWind is a great solution to provide high availability for a low price. It can scale up very nicely for larger implementations to more like 15-20 servers with ease. Although we haven't used it for even larger environments, it's doable. What its not appropriate are really small locations that have 1-2 servers. Unfortunately no one seems to have a good HCC solution in this space.
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Pros
DataCore Software
  • Fast pools should go to your most used data, and not static files.
  • Redundancy is a must for all aspects of our IT jobs. Who wants to explain when there's no data?
  • Works on Windows server 2012/2016 much better. Solid stability.
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StarWind
  • the StarWind Virtual SAN allows us to use Starwind Management Console to confirm health of the sync
  • The High Available nature of the deployment means we can fail over VMs without end users noticing any downtime
  • Their support is proactive alerting when firmware updates are needed (including iDRAC firmware) or when there are any warnings in the event logs, and schedule a time to remediate the issue with you.
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Cons
DataCore Software
  • Our needs are very small when compared to what this product can do. We don't use all of what it is capable of doing. Honestly, I have no cons.
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StarWind
  • Complexity: StarWind Virtual SAN can be complex to set up and manage, especially for organizations with limited IT resources
  • Limited protocol support: StarWind Virtual SAN supports a limited number of protocols, primarily iSCSI and SMB3
  • Limited scalability for storage-only deployments: In storage-only deployments, StarWind Virtual SAN has a limit of 32 nodes per cluster
  • Lack of reporting and analytics: StarWind Virtual SAN has limited reporting and analytics capabilities, which can make it difficult to monitor and troubleshoot performance issues
  • Limited backup and recovery options: While StarWind Virtual SAN provides some basic backup and recovery options, it lacks advanced features such as snapshot management, backup scheduling, and offsite replication
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Likelihood to Renew
DataCore Software
I'm currently in the process of renewing my support.
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StarWind
StarWind Virtual SAN is a great solution and is now an integral part of our network of servers. The product is superb and the support has been amazing. It's perfect for our organisation and we won't be looking to come away from it any time soon!
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Usability
DataCore Software
No answers on this topic
StarWind
Overall I like the usability of StarWind Virtual SAN because it is a "Set-up and forget" software. Once you correctly have set up the parameters, StarWind Virtual SAN pretty much rolls by itself. The biggest fact that one needs to keep in mind, though, is that the licensing for StarWind Management Console needs to be purchased separately, and while managing StarWind Virtual SAN through the paid Management Console is really easy and is well documented, going the free or - in other words - PowerShell Template route can be taxing if you are not that deep into the topic. You need to be especially careful with it if you switch from paid to free because using the templates incorrectly can cause issues.
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Reliability and Availability
DataCore Software
No answers on this topic
StarWind
Never went out of availability with StarWind.
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Performance
DataCore Software
No answers on this topic
StarWind
It improves the overall performance.
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Support Rating
DataCore Software
In the 3 years I have been running this, I have contacted support around 4 or 5 times and that was for minor questions with exception of one time when I was performing an update on the system. And in that one time, they were very timely in assisting me with correcting the problem. Top notch customer support!
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StarWind
Their support team is dedicated to providing top-notch customer service and is always available to help with any questions or issues that may arise. Their expertise and responsiveness have proven invaluable in ensuring the smooth operation of our virtualized environment. With such excellent support, we feel confident in our ability to utilize this product to its fullest potential, and we highly recommend it to others.
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Implementation Rating
DataCore Software
No answers on this topic
StarWind
Overall the setup was easy, we did require some help from the technical support team but other than that, we followed all of StarWinds prerequisites and everything else just fell nicely into place with hardly any downtime. The downtime was only due to moving VMs from our previous cluster over to the new StarWind storage cluster.
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Alternatives Considered
DataCore Software
DataCore is far easier to manage as well as deal with when it comes to hardware (as DataCore works with any hardware). It also seems way more affordable.
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StarWind
We have found the solution surprisingly simple to use. The management
console allows us to monitor the solution and we have configured email
alerts to alert us about critical issues. These alerts have been proven
to work in an actual failure scenario, for example, when we had a memory
issue with one of our servers that caused the entire server to crash.
The management console also allows us to monitor the solution
performance and provides us with access to system logs.
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Scalability
DataCore Software
No answers on this topic
StarWind
Is is future proof for us.
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Return on Investment
DataCore Software
  • More uptime - Typical SANs have redundant controllers, redundant power supply's and can make the drives redundant by leveraging RAID-0, 5, 6, and 10. The claim to be HA but they are not. That is because if I spay water all over them or catch the SAN on fire, the storage will go down. With DataCore's solution we have identical systems (maybe even at different datacenters connected with long-haul-fiber) including duplicate storage. So one side of the solution can totally be taken offline by water, fire, etc. and the other side will remain up providing true-HA storage. Because of this, we can upgrade the SANs during the day and still keep storage services running (zero-downtime).
  • Lower Costs - Ability to use 3rd party hardware which lowers the costs, not only for the initial investment but as storage capacity grows.
  • All the features one can want - High Availability, Thin Provisioning, Asynchronous and Synchronous mirroring/replication, snap-shotting, continues data protection, deduplication, storage reporting, trending with graphs, centralized console for easier management and many more.
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StarWind
  • It eliminates the need for expensive storage hardware and provides an affordable software-defined storage solution.
  • It allows organizations to use commodity hardware, reducing the dependency on proprietary hardware.
  • It ensures that data and applications are always available, reducing downtime and increasing productivity.
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ScreenShots

StarWind Virtual SAN Screenshots

Screenshot of StarWind Management ConsoleScreenshot of StarWind Management ConsoleScreenshot of StarWind Virtual SANScreenshot of StarWind Virtual SAN