Starwind And Datacore Comparison

By Author: Jamie Hanson
Total Articles: 3534
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The market of software iSCSI SAN solutions is growing day by day. But which vendor is more reliable, have reasonable price and good performance? The offer for small and medium business is essential. Let's take a view at short test results of comparing two of the leaders in this branch - StarWind software and Datacore. We will compare each of these product - SANMelody and StarWind Enterprise HA Unlimited.

Installation

Initial step is installation. To install StarWind you need to spend about 3-4 minutes, the installation is intuitive. Datacore, unlike StarWind, takes more time for the installation itself, plus time for reading manual, that is essential in this case.

Functionality

All back up functions are available in both the products but with DATACORE additional MPIO is required.

Security

Security is existing in such features as IPSec, which will protect data transfer while remote control, for example, or CHAP (Challenge Handshake Authentication Protocol) provides shield against playback attack by the peer in the course of the use of an incrementally changing identifier and of a variable ...
... challenge-value.

Performance boost features and User experience

Here we can observe High Speed Caching, MPIO, that will increase performance. Some distinction of the products. Both of them have some features, that competitor lack in. StarWind support such features as.
o SPTI - SCSI Pass through Interface. You will be able to use any data carrier or media as iSCSI intend. It is useful in tape uses.
o Virtual Optical Drive can let you forget about using optical disc drives on the clients region;
o RAM increases the performance.
o VTA (Virtual Tape Array) will assist you to avoid probable network overhead while writing data to tapes or even taking the tapes place;

Datacore:

o MMC is a little improved.
o PerfMon Support - will aid you in monitoring of your network performance;
o EventViewer Support - you can see all Datacores events in Windows Event System.
As you can see Datacore is trying to amalgamate inside the Microsoft OS, but it may cause some troubles with third-party programs.
StarWind has made bet on usability - everything made to make work simplified as much, as it possible.
Usability of both products may not be compared - they are too different. StarWind GUI is easy-to-use, so you don't need any manuals or help to find something, somewhere. The other deal is Datacore. It is similar to installation.
There was one more problem while working with Datacore - to generate target you need unformatted volume without seted letter.

Price policy.

Comparing the prices we can see next.
Purchasing DataCore you can pay more up to 800%, comparing to StarWind. There is a wide variation in the price of Starwind and Datacore.

For more info on StarWind and Datacore SANMelody comparison and san failover,check out starwindsoftware.com