SANsymphony Reviews and Ratings

Rating: 8 out of 10

Score

8 out of 10

Community insights

TrustRadius Insights for SANsymphony are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.

Business Problems Solved

DataCore SanSymphony is a versatile solution that has been widely adopted by users across various industries. One key use case is ensuring redundancy for business continuity and data security. Users have implemented DataCore SanSymphony to protect their critical data by leveraging its Continuous Data Protection and Snapshots functionalities, which provide reliable backup options.

Another major use case of DataCore SanSymphony is its ability to support different types of infrastructure architectures. Users can build hybrid infrastructures by combining legacy, converged, and hyperconverged architectures. This flexibility allows businesses to leverage their existing infrastructure investments while also adopting new technologies as needed.

Customers and prospects often utilize DataCore SanSymphony for demonstrations and training purposes on their production environment. The product's ease of configuration and use, especially when running on Windows, has been praised by users. It offers a user-friendly interface that simplifies the management of storage resources.

DataCore SanSymphony also excels in improving performance and storage utilization. Users have reported increased I/O and the ability to flexibly utilize storage resources across their environment. As one of the best Virtual SANs available, it enables the creation of fast tiers using different disk types, providing optimal performance for varying workloads.

Furthermore, DataCore SanSymphony offers robust offsite replication capabilities, making it an ideal solution for disaster recovery scenarios. Its iSCSI attachment feature is not only utilized for virtual hosts but also for FileServer and backups, enhancing its versatility.

The product's high availability features make it a recommended choice for maintaining a resilient IT system. Users appreciate the flexibility that DataCore SanSymphony provides in terms of hardware purchases, allowing them to choose based on value rather than being locked into a single provider.

Additionally, DataCore SanSymphony has proven successful in multi-site deployments with significant storage capacity. It supports off-the-shelf hardware and charges based on the amount of storage used, promoting cost-effectiveness.

By leveraging storage virtualization, DataCore SanSymphony enables the building of high-performing storage platforms with features like fiber channel, iSCSI, thin provisioning, storage tiering, snapshots, and continuous data protection and recovery. This comprehensive feature set empowers users to create efficient and reliable storage environments tailored to their specific needs.

Reviews

7 Reviews

Gain peace of mind and performance with SANsymphony

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

April 25, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

DataCore SANsymphony is a product that I recommend in pre-sales, that I install and maintain for customers who need to maintain a high level of IT system available for their users. With RTO/RPO/RTA close to zero, it is one of the best data security solutions that I recommend to the majority of my company's client companies.

Pros

Synchronous mirroring
CDP
Autotiering
Support's Team

Cons

Automatic Shared Multi-Port Array

Likelihood to Recommend

An economical solution with only 2 hypervisors with SANsymphony in hyperconverged mode

DEVANLAY Franck

Ingénieur systèmes at Monaco Digital | Avangarde (201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

21 years of experience

View profile

Software-Defined Storage Leader

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

April 4, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

DataCore SanSymphony enables redundancy for business continuity and to secure data. We use it to ensure the first backup with the CDP and Snapshots functionalities. DataCore SanSymphony enables legacy, converged, and hyperconverged architectures with a single product and creates hybrid infrastructures that mix these architectures in order to cover all possible constraints. Because the product is reliable, we perform all demonstrations and training on our production environment for our customers and prospects.

Pros

The mirroring feature synchronous or asynchronous
simplicity of management
Best Customer Support

Cons

No Compression deduplication at this time
Multiple nodes obligation for large infrastructures

Likelihood to Recommend

This product is very well suited to companies that use SANs and wish to secure their data in another room on another physical medium, regardless of whether the SANs or servers come from different suppliers. It will work with all types of data storage and transport layers (FC or iSCSI). This solution is very economical for small infrastructures with all the functionalities of the leading manufacturers on the market.

Julien GUILLAUMOU

CTO (Chief Technical Officer) in Information Technology at INTEGRA SYSTEMS (1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

Reseller

12 years of experience

View profile

Hyper-Converged SANsymphony is a must-see

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

March 6, 2020

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Currently, we use hyper-converged SANsymphony in our corporate location for the whole organization. The business problem it addresses is redundancy for business continuation and for easily carving up data space needs. We do not use a san as our data needs do not require it; however, should we get to that point it will be very easy to incorporate it.

Pros

Speed is remarkable.
Easy to allocate data space needs.
Very easy to administrate.
Customer assistance is fantastic.

Cons

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

This product is very well suited for companies that are running SANs and it does not matter if the SANs are from different vendors. It will work with all types of data storage. The main reason I purchased it was for redundancy as it was more economical than doing something like VMware SAN.

Scott Lambourne

System Administrator in Corporate at Superior Water And Air (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

Fantastic Software. Terrible Support.

Rating: 7 out of 10

Incentivized

April 12, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are using DataCore to increase I/O, to more flexibly utilize storage and to provide a robust offsite replication solution for the whole organization.

Pros

It has really helped with I/O.
Manages our storage more simply.
Gives us a way to do replication easily.

Cons

The only area I see lacking with DataCore is their support. It's not very good at all, and it's frankly, very frustrating and has almost caused me to swear off the product. With that said, the product itself (especially when working) is developed and runs very well and because of that, I will keep using it.

Likelihood to Recommend

In any organization that uses or manages data of any kind or size, this would be useful. It may be cost prohibitive to smaller businesses but it would still be useful.

Andrew Bouwhuis

Network System Administrator in Legal at LANprofessionals (1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

You've virtualized CPUs and Memory, why not gain the same/addiational benefits by visualizing SAN storage

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

April 6, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I have assisted various organizations to implement this product as well am currently using DataCore's SANsympnony product in my home lab and place of employment. We have 20 DataCore storage server across the enterprise, at 9 different locations with over 2 PBs of storage.

This solution allows the use of off-the-shelf hardware and charges by the TB of storage. So we can throw in our own enterprise-class hardware (including SSDs) and not pay any extra based on the type of storage we use. This is the same model used with server virtualization. Keep the hardware separate from software. This is true "storage virtualization" at its finest. The software over the years has matured to be very robust and allows you to build a very high performing storage platform. It has all the features of any high-end SAN such as fiber channel, iSCSI, thin provisioning, storage tiering, snapshots, continuous data protection/recovery synchronous and asynchronous mirroring, performance reporting/graphing, true HA design.

Pros

No more vendor lock-in, overpriced drives or forklift upgrades. With DataCore SANsymphony, you can utilize just about any storage you wish with this product such as another SAN, NAS, JBOD, FusionIO, etc. If Windows can see it as a non-removable drive, you can use it with SANsymphony. Also, you can use this to mirror any of these various types of storage which is awesome for migration. Say you have an HP SAN and you want to migrate off it to your own JBOD type storage or you have 2 sites with 2 different storage SANs that you want to replicate data between. With DataCore, it is possible to mix and match just about any storage platform you want to use.
As software-defined storage, the system is designed to run on top of Windows Server OS (which can be virtual or physical) and can utilize the server's RAM to provide disk cache. This makes our 7.2K HDDs class storage run really fast and allows us to use a bottom tier class of drive and get the performance of a much higher class of drive. Also if we have to add capacity or replace drives we can just order replacement drives off the web saving us quite a bit of money. Of course, we still use "enterprise-class" drives but we don't pay through the nose to buy hardware. If we want to upgrade the Ethernet ports from 1Gb to 10Gb we just do it. Same goes for FC. If we want to upgrade from 4Gb FC to 16Gb, we don't have to do a forklift upgrade. We just buy the HBAs and we're off the to races.
The other great thing is DataCore keeps their product on VMware's approve HCL. So even if you have a SAN (backend storage) that falls off the HCL with VMware, because it's virtualized storage behind DataCore, your covered. If you put the storage behind DataCore you won't have to worry about VMware's HCL any longer. Because of this fundamental practice, DataCore was one of the first storage vendors to support vVOLs.
The ability to pool the storage to leverage thin-provisioning is a huge savings in space and costs.
DataCore Support is OUTSTANDING and they release new updates and features frequently (sometimes almost too frequently)

Cons

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 and just as we finish updating all our sites another update comes out. Due to the many, many various options for what hardware to use, sometimes it is difficult trying to figure out what hardware options are the best for the money. DataCore can help a bit with this but because they only are the software side of the solution they tend to not prefer one hardware vendor over another (they get along with everyone). They do have good documentation that covers known issues with various hardware items.
While they support de-dup, it is recommended that you not de-dup the storage used for operating systems, or high change rated type data. The requires some planning to ensure the storage that is targeted for de-dup only have data that end users would be using (such as MS Office files etc.). Also, their de-dup console is not yet integrated inside their 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 in when you switch between a different storage server groups. It would be nice if they had an interface more like vCenter to where you see all server group 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. So 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 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 could show capacity, usage, performance and any issues would also be very beneficial. Currently, DataCore does not have this.

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

Verified User

Engineer in Professional Services (1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

4 years of experience

SANsymphony 10

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

February 11, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Want to choose your hardware purchases on value and not be locked in by a single provider? Go with SANsymphony. Chose your hardware vendor and if you don't like them, move on; it's that flexible. The big vendors want you to just purchase the solution they offer. Storage changes quickly. You have the flexibility to purchase SSDs from one vendor and spinning disks from another, thanks to SANsymphony.

Pros

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.

Cons

The performance metrics could use some help. I can see what my storage usage and latency is.

Likelihood to Recommend

Best uses- data replication. Synchronize the info to another site! That way, if site A is down, having access to site B will keep things running. This is great for scheduled maintenance and patching. I sleep at night because I don't worry if one side/site is down. My management doesn't mind patching now! They help me with the dev/apps teams, because we know they always patch/update software.

Fernando Villamil

LAN Engineer in Information Technology at Maimonides Medical Center (5001-10,000 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

View profile

Awesome Virtual SAN

Rating: 7 out of 10

Incentivized

January 16, 2018

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

DataCore is one of the best Virtual SANs I tried. The ability to create a tier from almost anything helps with leveraging [our] investment. You can have a very fast tier like SSD, go thru 15k SAS, 10k SAS, 7k SATA, 5K SATA, ... DataCore will make sure your blocks are on the right disks.

This is an easy way to use direct-attached storage into a very powerful SAN. Running on Windows, you don't have to learn much to be able to configure and use it.

iSCSI attached to not only the virtual hosts, but also FileServer and backups. Sometimes, I attach iSCSI disk directly inside a VM that needs more storage or IOPS.

DataCore is so easy!

Pros

Tier of anything!
Low cost hardware
Powerful UI
Run on well known platform

Cons

Need a lot of RAM/SSD when using tier/dedup.
Not much RAID options...
Expansive

Likelihood to Recommend

Years ago, you would have a network stack, lot of very dense Hypervisor servers, and huge racks of storage. With DataCore Hyper-converged, you buy Hypervisor servers with disks (2U for example) and attach the disks to the Virtual SAN. Each virtual host is part of the storage, so when you add a host, you also add storage. DataCore will make it possible to leverage those low latency disks into a very powerful SAN.

Tommy Boucher

IT Director in Information Technology at Coveo (201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

View profile

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You've virtualized CPUs and Memory, why not gain the same/addiational benefits by visualizing SAN storage

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

April 6, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Pros

No more vendor lock-in, overpriced drives or forklift upgrades. With DataCore SANsymphony, you can utilize just about any storage you wish with this product such as another SAN, NAS, JBOD, FusionIO, etc. If Windows can see it as a non-removable drive, you can use it with SANsymphony. Also, you can use this to mirror any of these various types of storage which is awesome for migration. Say you have an HP SAN and you want to migrate off it to your own JBOD type storage or you have 2 sites with 2 different storage SANs that you want to replicate data between. With DataCore, it is possible to mix and match just about any storage platform you want to use.
As software-defined storage, the system is designed to run on top of Windows Server OS (which can be virtual or physical) and can utilize the server's RAM to provide disk cache. This makes our 7.2K HDDs class storage run really fast and allows us to use a bottom tier class of drive and get the performance of a much higher class of drive. Also if we have to add capacity or replace drives we can just order replacement drives off the web saving us quite a bit of money. Of course, we still use "enterprise-class" drives but we don't pay through the nose to buy hardware. If we want to upgrade the Ethernet ports from 1Gb to 10Gb we just do it. Same goes for FC. If we want to upgrade from 4Gb FC to 16Gb, we don't have to do a forklift upgrade. We just buy the HBAs and we're off the to races.
The other great thing is DataCore keeps their product on VMware's approve HCL. So even if you have a SAN (backend storage) that falls off the HCL with VMware, because it's virtualized storage behind DataCore, your covered. If you put the storage behind DataCore you won't have to worry about VMware's HCL any longer. Because of this fundamental practice, DataCore was one of the first storage vendors to support vVOLs.
The ability to pool the storage to leverage thin-provisioning is a huge savings in space and costs.
DataCore Support is OUTSTANDING and they release new updates and features frequently (sometimes almost too frequently)

Cons

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 and just as we finish updating all our sites another update comes out. Due to the many, many various options for what hardware to use, sometimes it is difficult trying to figure out what hardware options are the best for the money. DataCore can help a bit with this but because they only are the software side of the solution they tend to not prefer one hardware vendor over another (they get along with everyone). They do have good documentation that covers known issues with various hardware items.
While they support de-dup, it is recommended that you not de-dup the storage used for operating systems, or high change rated type data. The requires some planning to ensure the storage that is targeted for de-dup only have data that end users would be using (such as MS Office files etc.). Also, their de-dup console is not yet integrated inside their 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 in when you switch between a different storage server groups. It would be nice if they had an interface more like vCenter to where you see all server group 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. So 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 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 could show capacity, usage, performance and any issues would also be very beneficial. Currently, DataCore does not have this.

Likelihood to Recommend

Verified User

Engineer in Professional Services (1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

4 years of experience