DataCore Software SANsymphony-V10 review

As network storage demands grow, SMBs can easily find that their expansion plans lock them in with one hardware vendor. DataCore’s SANsymphony-V10 offers a smarter solution: by using storage virtualisation, it allows businesses to pick and choose their hardware.

SANsymphony can use any storage device attached to a Windows Server host system, so you can mix local hard disks and SSDs with DAS or SAN devices and manage them all from one central point. A new feature is optional data tiering, which moves hot data to high-performance storage for faster access.

The main console is well designed, with a wizard to help set up the port roles to determine if they’re serving storage and providing mirroring across multiple SANsymphony nodes.

After logging our host server initiators in to the storage node, we registered them with the console, at which point we were able to create disk pools for grouping storage devices together. Virtual disks (VDs) are created in pools and served up to selected hosts. Thin provisioning is applied by default, and you can create snapshot schedules and present them as new VDs if you wish.

Creating mirrored VDs is easy, too: choose the first pool on one storage node, enter details of the second, and leave SANsymphony to get on with it. Continuous data protection can be enabled on selected VDs: this creates a history log, allowing you to roll back to any point during the period for which it was enabled.

SANsymphony-V10 is a versatile alternative to hardware arrays, and is good value, with prices starting at £1,753 exc VAT for a perpetual licence for one server plus 1TB of managed capacity. Annual support costs are around £439, and capacity can be upgraded.