DataCore SANsymphony vs NetApp ONTAP comparison

DataCore and NetApp are both solutions in the Storage Software category. DataCore is ranked #2 with an average rating of 9.4, while NetApp is ranked #1 with an average rating of 8.8. DataCore holds a 29.9% mindshare in SS, compared to NetApp’s 41.8% mindshare. Additionally, 97% of DataCore users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 98% of NetApp users who would recommend it.

DataCore SANsymphony

Read 56 DataCore SANsymphony reviews

296 Views
166 Comparison Views

97% willing to recommend

NetApp ONTAP

Read 90 NetApp ONTAP reviews

837 Views
249 Comparison Views

98% willing to recommend

DataCore SANsymphony

NetApp ONTAP

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between DataCore SANsymphony and NetApp ONTAP based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Storage Software solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed DataCore SANsymphony vs. NetApp ONTAP Report (Updated: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

DataCore SANsymphony vs. NetApp ONTAP

April 2025

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Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

DataCore SANsymphony

Ranking in Storage Software

2nd

Average Rating

9.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Software Defined Storage (SDS) (5th), HCI (7th), Storage Performance (2nd)

NetApp ONTAP

Ranking in Storage Software

1st

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Storage Software category, the mindshare of DataCore SANsymphony is 29.9%, up from 26.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of NetApp ONTAP is 41.8%, down from 42.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Storage Software

Featured Reviews

TempreviewerD

Architecte Principal at Orange

Robust with good replication and access protection

The solution is constantly evolving. Recently, deduplication and compression have been further improved to meet customer needs, and updates are easily implemented without stopping production. The update assistant checks the state of health before using good practices, during checks that the data is still presented for service continuity, and afterward, if the actions carried out are indeed active. Technical support is truly available even without a production incident. This is really essential right now.

Read full review

Christopher Cagayan

IT Server and Storage Engineer at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees

A solution that comes with several valuable features and excellent SAN storage

NetApp ONTAP is scalable. They have two types of scalability, "scale up" and "scale out." With "scale up," you can get up to petabytes of data if you have the money to buy those servers and add them to the system. And "scale out" also, you can buy additional controllers, up to 12 nodes, which is pretty good when you are a big company. I rate the scalability a nine out of ten. NetApp is one of our organization's main storage systems. Every application is scattered on all of our NetApp devices. Applications won't run without it because they need to pull data from NetApp ONTAP.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"The synchronous mirror allows us to operate a fully redundant storage solution that is distributed across two sites."

"DataCore's ability to seamlessly move virtual volume data between storage pools as well as their synchronous mirroring has made maintenance and disaster recovery planning achievable."

"The support is excellent."

"For us, fault tolerance is the most important feature of DataCore."

"DataCore has helped provide flexible, highly available, high-performance storage that otherwise would have been outside our price range."

"The solution's most valuable feature is its versatility, with there being support for all new hardware technologies and platforms, disc mirroring and very effective auto tiering."

"The most useful feature of SANsymphony is that it's able to manage any brand of block storage."

"It's a software storage solution that can scale as we like. There is also has a parallel feature that enhances the performance of the storage solution. We can separate storage and computing, and we can scale these two parts of the platform to meet business needs efficiently."

More DataCore SANsymphony pros

"The initial setup was straightforward. It came in a box ready to go."

"Queries are being completed in less time. For example, we have seen a three times improvement when it comes to running a query. If query used to take an hour, now it takes 10 to 20 minutes."

"It's much easier and faster to deploy our storage with ONTAP than some of the other solutions that we have."

"Technical support is good. NetApp's solution engineers are good at architecting designs which are standard, but also future thinking. I've only opened a few tickets, and they've answered my questions each time. NetApp takes less than four hours to respond."

"Its usability, scalability, and dependability are very good."

"With ONTAP, we have peace of mind with double-parity protector RAID systems. Therefore, we can sleep well at the night, not thinking about crashing a RAID, because it's secure."

"The ability to spin up copies of data in other data centers, on other storage appliances, is the most valuable for us."

"Its typical use case is storing files and getting data, so it does its use case well."

More NetApp ONTAP pros

Cons

"I think an easier way to open a service call, right through the DataCore GUI, would be an improvement, especially when there is an urgent issue."

"I still see room for improvement with DataCore SANsymphony in the area of alarm and task management."

"The cost is becoming prohibitive since they moved to a subscription model."

"Management could be improved. The management console sometimes reacts very slowly."

"Problem detection could be easier. It should help customers identify problems very quickly because it's not easy to analyze on the platform today."

"Its interface could be better."

"I would like for it to improve into a more ergonomic management console and a translation into the French language. It should have some process for a shutdown of a VM properly in case of a problem."

"I would like to see reporting added, such as a monthly connectivity report."

More DataCore SANsymphony cons

"We are always looking for more security enhancements and ways to continue to provide security encryption, whether it's data in rest or security in transit. We would also like to have more enhanced encryption beyond the regular TLS and 256-bit."

"There is a lot a lot of functional integration that we look forward to for improvements. I'm learning where they're going and I'm very interested to see those improvements and how they can help us."

"Some of their products have been really good for us, on certain versions. We've run into a bunch of verts, though. That's NetApp's word for their bugs. Stability has been the main complaint that I've had with the product. Because it's so feature-rich and has so much software related to it, it does come with a decent amount of bugs so we do a lot of upgrades to patch bugs."

"NetApp ONTAP has several limitations that we encounter, primarily related to large enterprise clients. They do not affect small clients that NetApp may have. While these limitations are clearly described, some issues require us to develop workarounds."

"I would like to see more S3 integration with other vendors, objects, or instruments."

"If the customer wants to integrate with another product they need deployment guides."

"With our current use case, we will need something faster. E.g., if you have a huge scale, having SSD-based backup is better."

"The PowerShell scripting capabilities right now are all over the place as far as which rich operating systems are supported. They all support Windows, but the HCI product with the SolidFire integration also supports PowerShell on Mac and Linux. It would be nice if the rest of the NetApp APIs caught up with PowerShell on other operating systems besides Windows. Because we're deploying more non-Windows operating systems, it would be helpful if we would be able to use that utility."

More NetApp ONTAP cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"This product has a good ratio between quality and price. In many cases, it's less expensive to work with DataCore than other storage systems."

"This solution allows the use of off-the-shelf hardware and charges by the TB of storage."

"Make sure you are made aware of the annual subscription cost when purchasing."

"We have licensing costs on a yearly basis. They charge per terabyte, so in terms of cost, it can be very costly. They have three different features, and you have to pay extra for those."

"The cost is at the same level as other storage solutions and it is easy to understand the licensing."

"Pricing has improved but it is still expensive."

"DataCore SANsymphony's pricing is very high and should be much cheaper."

"The pricing and licensing are better with DataCore."

More DataCore SANsymphony pricing and cost advice

"With the duplication and compression, we have been about a one and half to two times savings since we are not running all-flash."

"NetApp is streamlined, reducing costs."

"Because of its manageability, we have fewer people managing it."

"It helps us save money using compression and deduplication."

"The solution has helped us reduce the overall cost of storage by doing an OPEX agreement with NetApp, we are paying based on utilization. Instead of fronting 30 petabytes worth of storage, we are paying for what we're using."

"We save a lot because of the deduplication and compression."

"This solution helped our organization reduce our overall cost of storage. Because idle data which was residing on high cost tiers, once we sifted the ONTAP, we were able to scale and place it where it should be, then offload the data which was unnecessary to different locations."

"At first, it's expensive. Once you start using it, it's not that expensive. When you see all the benefits, it's acceptable. It could always be better, but you get what you pay for."

More NetApp ONTAP pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

19%

Manufacturing Company

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

Manufacturing Company

20%

Computer Software Company

16%

Financial Services Firm

Media Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for DataCore SANsymphony SDS?

The cost changed from a perpetual license to a subscription model, and it seems reasonable. I am technical personnel and not deeply involved in sales, but the pricing appears fine.

See all answers

What do you like most about DataCore SANsymphony?

The dashboard is very intuitive, and there are a lot of counters to diagnose what happens during a short period (like when a backup is in progress).

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What needs improvement with DataCore SANsymphony?

In my opinion, there should be improvements in how to get and filter logs. However, this is not a frequent need because they have great support that offers quick and knowledgeable assistance. Other...

See all answers

How does Azure NetApp Files compare to NetApp ONTAP?

Azure NetApp Files is a Microsoft Azure file storage service built on NetApp technology. The platform combines the file capabilities of Azure and NetApp to move critical file-based applications to ...

See all answers

What do you like most about NetApp ONTAP?

We do not face any glitches or downtime.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for NetApp ONTAP?

The price could be a little bit cheaper, but you get what you pay for. I would rate it an eight out of ten for pricing because it reflects the quality of the service offered.

See all answers

Comparisons

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs DataCore SANsymphony

Compared 12% of the time

VMware vSAN vs DataCore SANsymphony

Compared 11% of the time

StarWind Virtual SAN vs DataCore SANsymphony

Compared 10% of the time

HPE SimpliVity vs DataCore SANsymphony

Compared 10% of the time

Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct vs DataCore SANsymphony

Compared 8% of the time

More DataCore SANsymphony Competitors

Dell PowerPath vs NetApp ONTAP

Compared 28% of the time

Azure NetApp Files vs NetApp ONTAP

Compared 17% of the time

Cloudian HyperStore vs NetApp ONTAP

Compared 11% of the time

More NetApp ONTAP Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

DataCore SANsymphony

May 2025

Download DataCore SANsymphony product report

Buyer's Guide

NetApp ONTAP

May 2025

Download NetApp ONTAP product report

Also Known As

DataCore Virtual SAN

No data available

Overview

Experience peace of mind with DataCore SANsymphony, the ultimate software-defined storage solution alleviating storage management challenges. Say goodbye to the complexities of managing different storage tiers and disruptions with SANsymphony's block-level storage virtualization technology, empowering you to automate capacity provisioning and data placement across diverse storage environments including SAN, DAS, HCI, and JBOD. Break down silos, control data placement, meet business continuity objectives, boost performance, and seamlessly expand or refresh hardware with SANsymphony. Benefit from features like asynchronous replication for disaster recovery, minimizing data loss, accelerating application responsiveness, and integrating new technology non-disruptively. Trusted by industry leaders like NASA, Thorntons, Inc., and TUI Cruises, DataCore SANsymphony guarantees unparalleled flexibility, scalability, and reliability, ensuring uninterrupted data access and application availability while reducing storage costs and inefficiencies.

DataCore

NetApp is the data authority for hybrid cloud. We provide a full range of hybrid cloud data services that simplify management of applications and data across cloud and on-premises environments to accelerate digital transformation. Together with our partners, we empower global organizations to unleash the full potential of their data to expand customer touchpoints, foster greater innovation and optimize their operations.

NetApp

Sample Customers

Volkswagen , Maimonides Medical Center, NASA, Thorntons, Inc., TUI, ISCO Industries, Pee Dee Electric Cooperative, United Financial Credit Union, Derby Supply Chain Solutions, Mission Community Hospital, Bellarmine College Preparatory, Colby-Sawyer College, Mount Sinai Health System, The Royal Institute of International Affairs, Quorn Foods, Bitburger, University of Birmingham, Stadtverwaltung Heidelberg, NetEnt to name a few.

1&1 IONOS, Acıbadem Healthcare Group, Adder Technologies, Aero Vodochody Aerospace

Buyer's Guide

DataCore SANsymphony vs. NetApp ONTAP

April 2025

Free Report: DataCore SANsymphony vs. NetApp ONTAP

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