Overview
What is SANsymphony?
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…
Gain peace of mind and performance with SANsymphony
Software-Defined Storage Leader
Hyper-Converged SANsymphony is a must-see
Fantastic Software. Terrible Support.
You've virtualized CPUs and Memory, why not gain the same/addiational benefits by visualizing SAN storage
SANsymphony 10
Awesome Virtual SAN
Product Demos
DataCore Virtual SAN Software Demo for VMware ESX
Product Details
- About
- Tech Details
What is SANsymphony?
SANsymphony Video
Visit https://datacore-software.wistia.com/medias/8x3v6dkln6 to watch SANsymphony video.
SANsymphony Technical Details
Operating Systems | Unspecified |
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Mobile Application | No |
Comparisons
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Reviews and Ratings
(14)Community Insights
- 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.
Attribute Ratings
Reviews
(1-7 of 7)Gain peace of mind and performance with SANsymphony
- Synchronous mirroring
- CDP
- Autotiering
- Support's Team
- Automatic Shared Multi-Port Array
Software-Defined Storage Leader
- The mirroring feature synchronous or asynchronous
- simplicity of management
- Best Customer Support
- No Compression deduplication at this time
- Multiple nodes obligation for large infrastructures
Hyper-Converged SANsymphony is a must-see
- Speed is remarkable.
- Easy to allocate data space needs.
- Very easy to administrate.
- Customer assistance is fantastic.
- 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.
Fantastic Software. Terrible Support.
- It has really helped with I/O.
- Manages our storage more simply.
- Gives us a way to do replication easily.
- 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.
You've virtualized CPUs and Memory, why not gain the same/addiational benefits by visualizing SAN 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.
- 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)
- 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.
SANsymphony 10
- 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.
- The performance metrics could use some help. I can see what my storage usage and latency is.
Awesome Virtual SAN
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!
- Tier of anything!
- Low cost hardware
- Powerful UI
- Run on well known platform
- Need a lot of RAM/SSD when using tier/dedup.
- Not much RAID options...
- Expansive