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…
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Scality ARTESCA
Score 8.0 out of 10
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Scality in San Francisco offers scalable file and object storage for media, healthcare, cloud service providers, and others.
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Scality ARTESCA
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SANsymphony
Scality ARTESCA
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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.
When high availability and keeping sensitive information safe are top priority Scality is a great option and has good features that make it ideal for these type of applications. For small companies with limited resources to administer extensive systems Scality would not be a good match. It takes people dedicated to this platform to keep it functioning at its best.
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.
As an organization, it took us a while to understand the shift from a traditional black box SAN to software-defined storage, but now we are much more certain of what this means. The time invested and the resources were not very high, thanks on the one hand to the technical support and on the other to the coherence and good development of the platform.
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!
We reviewed DotHill, EMC, HP, Dell-Compliant, Left-Hand, NetApp and VMware's vSAN offerings and after reviewing costs, performance, and features, DataCore came out on top. We discovered that DataCore's solution allowed us to save about 50%, as compared to other SAN vendors but maintained a rich set of features that we needed for current and future growth.
In reality, it did not become a substitute for AWS, since it allowed us to maintain a much more compact and rigid system by taking advantage of the support and evolutionary trend that Scality has and keeping AWS as a leader.
