Some DataCore technical facts:

DataCore runs on Windows as an application, whereas LeftHand’s NSMs are integrated and thoroughly tested storage systems. Microsoft has certified LeftHand as a storage solution, but not DataCore; they are only certified as an application running on Windows.

DataCore is also struggling to get certified by VMware and other virtualization software companies. They do little if any integration with the hardware, which means customers have to mange the hardware with the hardware supplier’s management, separately from the DataCore SAN software management, which introduces the complexity of 2 points of management.

Since they don’t do complete integration and testing with the underlying server hardware, there are often unknown incompatibilities or problems with things like disk controller firmware. If you think about it, the customers are actually doing the testing for them, which is really scary.

DataCore also achieves their performance by using the server DRAM as write cache. Imagine the Windows O/S hanging due to a bad driver, memory being corrupted from the DataCore application, etc., etc. These and many other similar circumstances can cause complete data loss.

Due to envy of LeftHand and other scale-out architectures, DataCore started marketing “N+1 Grid Scalability”, which is a misnomer. It is nothing more than mirroring between 2 DataCore servers. From a performance scalability standpoint, multiple DataCore servers can’t read and write to the same volume, which limits the performance of any given volume to a single server’s I/O capability. Data protection and fault tolerance is also entirely dependent on the underlying storage connected to the DataCore server.

If you consider DataCore’s technical shortfalls and company history, this may not be the ideal partner you want to replace LeftHand with.