Item: SANsymphony
Rating: 7
Author: Tommy Boucher

Overall Satisfaction with DataCore Hyperconverged Virtual SAN

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 and Cons

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

Return on Investment

Very low cost storage
Save on space and power
Low lattency

Alternatives Considered

VMware Virtual SAN

Since it's running on Windows, it's very easy to understand and get ready to work. Simple concept, great UI, very straightforward.

Since it's running on Windows, it will require more updates and patching than a Linux based Virtual SAN.

It requires a Windows license in addition to the DataCore license.

I only tied it on Hyper-V, don't know about VMware, but I bet that it works fine as well.

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.

Comments

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Awesome Virtual SAN