StarWind HyperConverged Appliance Reviews

We mainly use this as failover and to not have the expense for additional or separate storage. 

Our environment is pretty small and with less than 50 users. We only have two servers in the failover cluster that are part of Starwind Storage. 

Prior to Starwind, we always had to schedule maintenance windows and have all of our services down. Compared to before, our downtimes have decreased substantially and maintenance windows have almost been eliminated. Not to mention, I no longer have to come in on weekends.  

Prior to Starwind, we always had to schedule maintenance windows and have all of our services down. Compared to before, our downtimes have decreased substantially and maintenance windows have almost been eliminated. 

It's also been really great that we can schedule maintenance on the servers themselves during on-hours. Since we are able to migrate our VMs from one node to another, this makes it really simple. 

Of course, there is also the fact that if a node goes down, we have one to back it up and continue with our day without management worrying.

The software itself is actually really simple. There isn't much to it at all. 

GUI navigation is simple and intuitive. UI Options are simple and easy to find. 

From one single interface, I am able to connect and or disconnect to any of our servers and see their current status. 

The UI itself lets you add targets, devices, etc. You can view recent events, performance, etc. 

A nice feature that was recently added was the StarWind Command Center. It allows you to manage all of your clusters from a single point. 

There really isn't much to the software itself. It's not something I use on a daily basis and mostly only when needed. I'd have to say I am usually tinkering with the software maybe on a monthly basis, if that. 

The only area that the product could improve would be user training. I've had to learn most of the ins and outs by myself or by asking questions when I have to get tech support involved and that's pretty rare.

I've used the solution for five years.

Support is top quality and their response is exceptional. It's probably one of the best supports I've dealt with. 

Positive

No, we did not use a different solution previously.

It was straightforward and not complex at all to set up. It did take a little bit of time for the setup, however, we never ran into any issues. 

Implementation was done through a vendor.

The cost wasn't a huge issue for us as it was purchased as a bundle. 

Yes, we looked at other options, however, we needed something ASAP and this was the best solution overall.

We were running a Hyper-v failover cluster across five servers and six SAN nodes, however, this was becoming dated and we were looking for new hardware to replace this. 

We looked into a few hyper-converged solutions and Starwind ticked all the boxes and seemed excellent value for money. 

We are a retail company and were running various workloads including domain controllers, file servers, SQL Server, and app servers.

The main workload was MS Dynamics AX 2012 which ran across 13 VMs running various different components. This drastically improved performance.

We condensed an entire rack of servers/switches and SAN storage nodes down to 4U for two Dell R730xd's, we had more storage, and it was much faster all around. It improved all services running on the new cluster and took up less space and less energy.

Our ERP system performance improved for all users. Lengthy overnight batch jobs were suddenly completed much earlier and enabled us to re-shuffle a lot of tasks into a smaller time window.

We are also finding it easier to maintain two host servers rather than the previous five.

The stability of the system has been the most valuable part. I never have to do anything, it just runs and runs and runs.

We haven't had any problems with Starwind, but some of our VMs have had issues and the proactive support from Starwind meant they knew about the issues before I knew and they were on it straight away. 

When we needed to make some upgrades to the server I contacted Starwind to discuss the changes and they were very helpful and easy to contact. The support is probably better than I have used compared to any supplier.

I cannot think of any way to improve it. They recently added a web-based interface that runs on a small footprint VM. This has massively improved the visibility of system metrics and made interacting with the product much easier.

I honestly cannot think of anything else to be improved, as I rarely have to interact with the Starwind product. My main interaction is with the Microsoft Hyper-V failover cluster running on the Starwind kit and the VMs themselves, which never need any attention from me.

I've used the solution for four and a half years.

The solution is very stable and never has any issues.

The solution is easily scalable. We purchase new nodes or expand the existing nodes if you can, which we have done.

Customer service and support is the best I have experienced with any supplier.

Positive

We use HP servers and an HP Lefthand SAN, however, this was too slow to run our SQL workloads.

The solution was very straightforward and we felt fully supported by the Starwind team.

This product is well priced with very good value for money and the support team is great so the setup is no problem.

We looked at Dell EMC, Nutanix, Scale, and Nimble.

We needed a high availability solution for our mission-critical infrastructure. We wanted to minimize any potential downtime and make sure we had a redundant system in place. 

We are currently running three nodes that maintain our fleet of virtual machines. We are able to run the entire infrastructure off of two nodes so it makes patching very easy and we don't have to schedule downtime. The failover clustering works flawlessly and we can move virtual machines between all the nodes extremely quickly. 

The machines perform much better than what we were previously using; they are workhorses. We have had zero issues with them over the years we've been using the solution. Support is extremely helpful and the application is easy to set up and configure. 

It has also helped us to schedule less downtime as we're able to run all of our machines off of two nodes while we patch. Being able to live-migrate virtual machines from one box to another goes extremely quickly and is never noticed from the end-user side.

Having high availability is a must in our environment and works flawlessly. Their service is top-notch and if a node goes down they immediately are following up with us to make sure that everything is working smoothly. 

We have a massive amount of storage for future expandability. 

Being a small team the service that we receive from them gives us peace and mind and knowing that if something were to go wrong they would be able to step in and support us in getting the application back up and running as soon as possible.

We don't find ourselves using the StarWind Console it would be nice to have some extra features built into it. 

There doesn't seem to be anything upfront inside of it that would warrant us to monitor it or use its feature set. 

It would be nice to have some kind of GUI interface implemented to give you an overall view of the system's health at a glance - such as displaying critical events, storage space used/available, the health of the disks, etc. Other than that, in our time with the system, we haven't had any complaints or issues in our environment.

We have been using this solution for the last three years.

The nodes have been extremely stable. We have had no issues over the last few years when using them.

The machines work great and with the amount of storage we originally had purchased. We are in no danger of running out anytime soon.

Customer service has been kind and professional and on top of their game. We're notified very quickly if they notice a node going down on their end.

Positive

We were previously using VMware. The cost was extremely high so we wanted to move to something else. 

Initial setup was very straightforward with the engineers providing great support to get it implemented.

We used our in-house team to install and then the vendor's engineers configured the application for us.

The setup cost and pricing were very competitive, even including service. That's why we went with StarWind.

We considered HyperV as an alternative and found StarWind.

We use the solution as a virtual file server and Active Directory domain controller for the corporate office and virtual development and technical support environments for our developers and technical support staff for the timesheet software we develop in-house at our corporate office. 

We have an office space of about 30 employees, a mix of corporate and company employees. We currently have two HCAs in a rack cabinet in our server room, and, with the HCAs, there are no network switches required to support the SAN.

The solution has provided our company with a fully redundant virtual environment at half the cost of a traditional SAN implementation. Previously, we had the traditional SAN environment of 2-3 virtual hosts, 2 SAN switches for iSCSI, and then one storage array/server (all Dell hardware). The problem was the single point of failure (SPoF) at the bottom, which was the one storage server. Due to the cost, we could only afford one storage server, however, this meant we had a completely fully redundant SAN solution at half the cost and rack space footprint.

The redundancy, lower rack space footprint (no switches are needed for the SAN), and ease of management are the most valuable aspects of the product. At the same time, the technical support staff has been one of the most knowledgeable that I have ever seen. I purchased the support package where StarWind Support will support every aspect of the HCA - the virtual hosts/hardware, StarWind Software, and VMware vSphere/ESXi server software. The ease of installation was a plus and it was very easy to understand the concepts of the HCAs and the StarWind software.

For our use case, I seriously can't think of anything missing. For us, it's a set it and forget it kind of use. For us it improves our redundancy issues and the maintenance of the HyperConverged Appliances is next to nothing. 

The only issue we have had was the issue of performance, however, that is only due to the fact that we purchased a mix of SSD and regular spindle drives and restoring databases was slow as it was trying to restore the database using the spindle drives. Next time around, we will purchase all SSD drives which will resolve the issue.

I've been using the solution for two and a half years.

In the 2.5 years we have had our HCAs, I have had not one issue with stability and it primarily just works right out of the box.

You can scale the HCAs by adding more CPUs, memory, network ports, and when needed, adding another node.

Customer service/support is outstanding. All the guys that I have spoken with were highly professional, friendly, helpful, and knowledgeable. With the Support level I signed up for, I only have to contact StarWind support for any issues I have with the virtual host hardware, the StarWind software, or the VMware hypervisor.

Positive

We used the Dell Compellent and EqualLogics which are highly expensive, so much so that we could only afford just one storage server in each environment which made them single points of failure, with no redundancy of the storage systems.

The initial setup was easy and straightforward right out of the box with little help needed from StarWind Support. We were able to get it all up and running in two to five hours.

The implementation was handled in-house with just me, one person, with a little guidance from StarWind Support.

There is a cost-saving in regards to the hardware and implementation itself. The time saved in having to manage the software itself also provides an ROI.

The setup cost is minimum (and very easy) and the price is usually half the cost of traditional SAN implementations. Licensing only pertains to the hypervisor and server OS that the StarWind SAN software will reside on.

We looked at Nutanix, Dell Compellent, EqualLogic, VMware ReadyNodes, and Scale Computing.

For us, the StarWind HCAs almost works right out of the box and help me sleep at night knowing that we have a fully redundant SAN implementation.

We had to replace our infrastructure consisting of about eight aging servers. I began looking for a good, redundant system and ran across the HCAs. 

Having never used one before I began researching the different providers as well as looking at going the traditional route. I lucked out by finding StarWinds through a colleague of mine and was greatly impressed. The Dell Enterprise servers not only replaced what we had but also gave me the piece of mind I haven't had in years.

The StarWind system also made managing the units easy and not too time consuming. For a very small IT department, that was key.

The solution has improved our ability to prepare for future needs by easily being able to add servers, storage, backup devices, and more. 

With their highly knowledgeable sales and support team, we are not anxious about upgrading our equipment or suffering long downtimes. We were hosting our ERP environment outside the organization which limited some of the functionality. 

With the HCA appliance we are comfortable with it being in-house and finally get to take advantage of some advanced features we have been missing out on.

The ability to balance servers across the appliance effortlessly and knowing that if we do experience a hardware failure we can keep on trucking is the most valuable aspect.

I cannot say enough about their support team. They are the greatest and extremely knowledgeable. Proactive support is a lifesaver.

The setup was simple and very fast. Servers came pre-configured for our environment and as soon as they were in the rack, Starwind got them up and running.

Monitoring the servers is a breeze and is possible all on one screen. This makes managing the environment super easy - even for a novice.

Updates need improvement. We do not receive critical update notices from Dell. This would be extremely helpful since my primary focus every day is software and DB development and not server updates. A notification when critical updates are available would make management of the systems even easier than it already is. 

The StarWind Command console stopped working for us and we managed the system manually. There is an update that we will be taking advantage of within the next week that I am sure will correct this issue.

I've used the solution for 14 months.

The solution has been very stable with a single exception. We missed a critical update to the firmware of our Samsung SSDs that took us offline. I wish there had been a way to have had a notification of the missing critical update prior to getting to the failure point.

Even with this,  StarWinds support worked with us and the hardware provider to get us back up quickly with no data loss.

The solution is very scalable.

I have nothing bad to say. They are very quick to respond and with the proactive support, they generally know of issues before I do. They are very knowledgeable.

Positive

We just used standalone servers previously.

The setup is straightforward with handholding from support every step of the way.

We used the vendor team. They were very highly experienced.

Our ROI was almost immediate since we stopped using a hosting company for our ERP environment.

It is a very affordable solution and extremely easy to set up.

We also evaluated Nutanix.

If this is your first HCA or your next, you will not go wrong with StarWind.

We were looking to replace a large amount of older physical servers and move to a smaller footprint with a lot more virtualized systems. We also wanted to be able to increase the uptime of our server by being able to failover between nodes. 

We had all our eggs in one basket - a single powerful Hyper-V server running VMs which ran our business systems and customer systems. If that machine had died our business would've died. We implemented HCA and were then able to load balance and have resiliency for all of our systems across the infrastructure estate. 

We initially ran with a demo system, a couple of older servers with some high-speed network cards configured using the Starwind software - which was provided as a demonstration even with some technical support for a number of months, so that we could try the system out. 

We had some very niche bespoke software that we provided to the recruitment industry, which in turn used some bespoke indexing and categorizing software that was very picky on how it runs. Starwind amazed us by being able to host this bespoke software on the HCA and failover between nodes with Live Migrate without any issues whatsoever.

Starwind HCA allowed us to provide customers with a much higher service level. We could guarantee 99.999% uptime. Previously, we were not confident enough to offer this. 

We were able to reduce the footprint of our physical servers in the datacentre, by virtualizing most of them and running them as VMs on the HCA. We were therefore able to reduce costs in the datacentre.

We also had peace of mind in that we were able to retire a lot of older hardware and consolidate on to brand new powerful hardware. 

It also looked fantastic in the data center.

Live migration between nodes was quick and simple. The management interface was clean and intuitive. The system ran with no issues whatsoever, it never had any problems.

It was able to run all of our VMs without struggling one bit.

We were able to run Hyper-v and Failover Cluster Manager. Therefore we already knew how to use these, being Microsoft certified engineers. These fit easily on top of Starwind, in fact, the Starwind software is pretty much invisible in the background, running cleanly underneath the Hyper-V and Failover Cluster Manager.

Perhaps the initial configuration and documentation could be a little clearer and simpler to follow. It is a little fiddly and easy to make mistakes. I remember that I had to follow the instructions very carefully during the initial setup.

Also what is slightly disappointing, although understandable, is that the demo/free version of Starwind vSAN reverts to "command line only" and limits access to the GUI when the trial license runs out. Perhaps this license time limit could be extended to allow further evaluation time.

We have used the solution for four years.

The solution's stability is absolutely faultless.

From what I understand, it can be scaled up and out as required - although we never needed to do this. Scale up by adding more RAM, more CPU and more disks. Scale out by adding more HCA nodes. If we had more budget we would've added more RAM to the nodes, or added an additional node when we initially bought the system.

Technical support is absolutely fantastic, always eager to help, and technical support was fast and concise.

Positive

The initial setup is straightforward, although it is a little fiddly and tricky to follow. It's best to implement this when you can't be interrupted.

We handled the implementation in-house.

We saved a lot of money by reducing the data center footprint by half.

This is the best value HCA available. 

We also looked at Nutanix and HPE Simplivity.

If you are looking for an HCA solution and other vendors are proving excessively expensive, I would advise companies then take a look at Starwind instead.

We primarily use the solution to provide a safe and secure home for VMs. We are currently only using the computer power, but I like the ability to add GPUs to the device if it is ever needed. We run a bunch of SQL, web services, and remote app servers. The hardware has always been solid, and the 24-hour monitoring is a great safety net. VMs being able to live migrate near-instantly has made updating the hypervisors much easier. The hardware comes from known vendors, so replacement parts are plentiful if ever needed.

We upgraded from older servers, and the Starwind HCA is much faster and more reliable. All of the old VMs can do the same job they always did but with less waiting. With 24-hour monitoring, we can worry less about hardware and software failures. Every time the system has detected an issue Starwind has emailed us before anything went sideways. Migrating VMs is much easier now that the Starwind team has configured the HCA boxes. All this has been done without the need for a separate storage device.

The ease of use is great.

The solution is comprised of high-end hardware components.

The 24-hour monitoring is great.

The sales process is easy.

It is extremely reliable, has very very few issues, and has next to no downtime.

The deployment was very fast, and VMs were migrated without any downtime.

SSD Storage is very fast, and everything I want to do is very very speedy.

It is very configurable, with lots of different options.

I can't think of anything that is missing. Everything has been top-notch from start to finish. Every interaction we have had has been 100% positive. If you are hard of hearing some of their team has strong accents, but I have never had an issue understanding them, nor has any of my team that had a bad interaction with them. 

Most meetings are done via Zoom, and I'm sure you could switch to a text based conversation if needed as they seem like a very accommodating team. It's not something I would worry about if you are a potential client.

I've been using the solution for about a year.

Support exceeds expectations every time we work together. I have always been able to work with the same engineer, and he knows our network.

We used a SAN with storage spaces. We switched due to buying new hardware and Starwind offering a one-stop-shop.

The solution is cost-effective.

Yes, we looked at HPE and Lenovo.

I'm a value-added reseller for Microsoft. I do some other stuff on these HCAs too, but that's the easiest way to describe it. 

I'm providing a remote workspace for a special, select subgroup of clients who are running a pretty specific product called Infor. I'm pretty experienced with hosting and supporting this particular product, so I decided to also wrap a value-added reselling business around it so that I could give them a full remote workspace, instead of just support for their product.

We're running virtualized workloads for 300 or 400 users at this point. Our goal is to have them log in every day in and run all of their day-to-day work on these virtualized workloads.

The solution has probably saved me 100 hours of implementation work. 

In terms of support, we're probably on the low end of requirements because we don't have a lot of advanced stuff going on. We just have virtualized workloads, so once they're configured they're done. But we've had a couple of longer support cases, and over the course of a month, it has saved me, on average, six to eight hours. That's as a one-man shop. If we grow and we start adding more HCAs, I imagine that that time saved increases pretty linearly. The support is really a convenience. I could always schedule my own time to take care of issues, but if there's a minor storage or networking issue, it's nice to bring someone in. 

The major way it has changed our organization is that we came from a four-node, pure Microsoft setup, where we were using Storage Spaces Direct. StarWind is able to run on two nodes, so the hardware cost is quite a bit lower. They include support, so I don't need to keep someone on call in order to handle storage issues. And the fact that they were able to over-spec us for a reasonable price has meant that, over the past six months, I haven't had to worry about overhead and I haven't had to worry about budgeting any more systems. We have enough headspace to expand another 50 percent or so before I'll ever need to invest in direct processing hardware again. And when I do decide to invest more in hardware, I'm perfectly confident that they would just ship us a ready-to-go unit that can be plugged in with three cables and it's off and running.

I have burned a lot of time in the past configuring stuff like this myself, so the ability to pay a little bit of extra money to have something like this delivered, where all of the failovers are already configured, and all of the converged storage is already configured, and it's really just a blank slate to start building Hyper-V workloads on, is valuable. The fact that it's preconfigured and that there is a high level of support, so that I don't need to hire someone in order to do all this, has been my favorite feature.

Also, the hardware footprint is great. We've got two 2U servers which replaced four 2U servers. Granted, they were about three years old at that point, but we actually increased our processing capacity by about 50 percent while keeping our storage capacity about the same. We've actually been able to downgrade to a half rack from a full rack because we've gotten rid of some of our network equipment and some of our additional storage arrays. And the fact that that's all contained within 4Us of space is a complete 180 from the strategy we had before, which was four processing units and a few storage arrays. It's cut down on the amount of cabling we have to deal with by about 80 percent, so it's been a pretty big deal for the data center on the physical side of things.

The improved performance has scaled pretty well with the cost. I wouldn't say that the cost of performance is significantly lower. The main benefit is the cost of configuration and ongoing support. We're probably not saving a significant amount on hardware costs, but if I'm saving some 50 percent of my troubleshooting and hardware support time, we're probably saving, as a rough ballpark figure, $10,000 a year. If I were to hire even a part-time person to take care of just the hardware stuff that I'm now not having to take care of, it would be well over $10,000 a year to have a hardware architect available.

In addition, StarWind HCA has increased redundancy for us. Early on, just a couple of months into the tenancy, we had a pretty major hardware issue with one of the hosts, to the point where it was rebooting a few times a day. That was actually all Dell EMC's fault and had nothing to do with StarWind. Even with that host going up and down several times a day, there was only a little bit of inconvenience during the lag time when a live migration occurred from one server to the other, and we were up and running that entire time. We didn't incur any direct downtime over the course of a week-and-a-half where, literally, 50 percent of our processing units were going down three or four times a day. As frustrating as that experience was, it really helped strengthen my faith in StarWind solutions.

That situation, where Dell EMC servers were going down, has been my only real difficulty. I do understand that we were using refurbished Dell EMC hardware, so that may have played into the difficulties we were having. But at the end of the day, it ended up being something that the wider audience of Dell EMC was actually aware of as an issue. Neither the StarWind technicians nor the Dell EMC technicians were able to actually identify that problem sooner than a week or so. I found after, doing my own diagnosis and my own technician work, that there was actually a solution out there that many people Dell EMC's forums were aware of. The communication between Dell EMC support and StarWind support, in that particular scenario, left something to be desired, for me. 

I did express those concerns to StarWind and they were very responsive to that. They seem to really appreciate the feedback. I'm hoping that there has been a change that has already been enacted by them as a result.

We installed in March of this year, so we're relatively new. I believe we got refurbished, seventh-generation HCAs.

The stability has been great, with the exception of that one issue I mentioned which seemed to be Dell EMC hardware-specific. That even spoke to StarWind's stability in the sense that we had one host going down regularly without downtime.

We've had zero issues directly caused by StarWind. Everything is contained within the VM guests. Those are just configuration and Windows Server problems. This is definitely the most stable hardware we've had, and I've been involved in this business for eight years, on various stages of hardware. These past six months have been the lowest in terms of overhead so far.

The scalability seems really good. I haven't hit the need for scalability yet, but it seems to scale pretty linearly with the exception of storage. 

The idea is that all the storage is needed between all the hosts. So if we needed to increase our processing capacity, that would scale perfectly linearly. We would spend another X dollars to increase our capacity by 50 percent with an identical server.

I haven't explored storage capacity yet because we're a pretty low-storage-capacity company. But it seems like, with their additional products that aren't HCAs, their storage arrays, that you would be able to increase storage capacity on level with your costs as well. So you're not incurring a lot of overhead for interconnectivity or additional redundancy. At least that's my impression.

At the moment we're probably at 60 or 80 percent capacity across the board in all system resources, including networking. It's a really even 60 or 80 percent. If we can grow the business by another half next year, we'll be at 100 percent capacity. At that point, it would start making a lot of sense to look at adding another host because, if one fails and we have to fail over, we would effectively need to throttle everyone backed by 50 percent.

We don't use the proactive part of support a whole lot but that's really because we're a very simple setup at the moment. They've come to me a couple of times when they noticed some things going wrong, but that's usually when I'm in there reconfiguring things or rebooting servers. When our proactive support expires we'll probably renew because of the fact that they've been really on top of issues, whether or not I've already been aware of them. 

The part where support has really saved a lot of time is not really directly due to the proactive part of it. It has had to do with the fact that when I do need help, if storage is running slower, or if I see that there's some kind of memory-usage issue on the hosts, they're usually back to me in probably half an hour, at the very most, with a solution.

The main thing I've enjoyed from them is the really fast response when I do need help with reconfiguring or the like. I actually just reached out last week to try and make some networking changes. I got a response in about five minutes and I had an actual solution, with an advanced-tech ready to help me, within about 30 minutes. I don't know if that has anything to do with the proactive part of their support but I would imagine — putting myself in their shoes — that having a customer who is part of proactive support probably accelerates their response a little bit.

I've been really impressed with StarWind so far. They've been really helpful.

I haven't had to talk to StarWind at all for about a month. The last thing was a major networking upgrade request and I was really pleased with their response time. From a small-shop perspective, this is probably the best experience I've ever had in terms of the backing hardware for the services we provide. It's been very nice.

The solution this replaced was all home-brewed. It was all running on a Windows Server. We had a backplane connected to a few different storage area network arrays. It worked well but it incurred quite a bit of overhead just to manage it. If you've ever heard of people working with just Microsoft Failover Cluster Manager with backplanes, it was a bear, both to physically connect and to manage.

The concept of an HCA was actually kind of new to me, at the time. We had been under the practice of putting processing and volatile memory on one box and putting all of our storage into other boxes. That introduced some issues with single points of failure: If your switch fails then your storage is done and if your network switch fails then your communication is done.

I had started researching Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, which I believe was a new feature in 2016. StarWind must have a lot of search engine optimization related to Storage Spaces Direct, because they ended up coming up, really early, as an alternative. They're very active on Spiceworks and they were constantly in threads about Storage Spaces and putting their product out there. I ended up researching them and the total cost of ownership, hardware-wise, was possibly a little bit higher than bringing up your own, but the fact that support and configuration were included in that price, made it a slam-dunk for us.

The implementation was fairly simple.

I had a really big, heavy pair of Dell EMC server boxes delivered to my workplace. I had to schedule some time to go physically into the data center, which is hosted two miles away from my office. The entire installation procedure was really a matter of unbox, throw the rails in, throw the servers on the rails. Each server then needed two power cords and two SFP connections between the servers themselves. And, bare minimum, they need one management connection to whatever your local Cat 5 switch is. That was it. That was really all that that needed to be configured, hardware-wise. 

Once those were up and running, we spent maybe 45 minutes just getting the initial Hyper-V configuration done, and I was off and running. I was able to create and migrate VMs at will. No downtime, no reconfiguration, and literally nothing else.

All together it took about two hours for completely setting up the hardware and getting Hyper-V ready to create guests.

We didn't have an implementation plan. Physically, we had room in our racks and spaces for the power supplies and the cables. The only planning was that I gave StarWind a half-day's heads-up that I was going to get everything installed. They were on the phone and on a remote support session at pretty much the minute that I was ready to do the software side of things.

I enlisted some help to get things physically installed. Once that was done, it was just me and one StarWind engineer. We had to be on the phone for about an hour in total over that entire process. It was just me and that one person. They seem to have their process petty down pat. He was flying through the configuration and I was just sitting in the back seat watching.

We haven't seen ROI yet because we're a pretty low-sales company. We're just sticking with who we have at the moment because we need some more people who are experienced with this Infor product in order to grow the business much. I would expect that we will break even with our hardware investment within the first quarter of the coming year.

That's not bad at all because that will end up being almost right at the one-year mark. Even if we had to throw those servers in the trash at that point we would be at zero loss.

In terms of the hardware pricing, we ended up going with refurbished machines because we're not in quite as critical a situation as other service providers may be. The pricing is pretty comparable between StarWind and other solutions, if you're just talking about hardware and a general support plan. The value starts to come back in a very real way with StarWind when you talk about the reliability of both the hardware and the support structure itself.

Our entire package was around $35,000 for everything, including three years of support.

We evaluated other options and, overall, the thing that made us go with StarWind was really the community involvement, mostly on Spiceworks. They're on Reddit too. Seeing how active they were in proactive troubleshooting and in answering sales questions for whoever was asking was a big deal. The fact they had extra manpower to handle that kind of stuff speaks really well to how efficient their support structure is.

Look long and hard at your current hardware. There is a significant utility in sticking with a single vendor for stuff like this. If you are at that point where you need to refresh pretty much your entire environment, or a significant portion of it, I would say you should seriously look at StarWind because they would potentially be able to take care of just about everything, hardware-wise, as long as you're a small enough shop and you're ready to really commit.

Up until implementation, in March of this year, we were very reliant on ourselves and sub-contractors to support the hardware configuration and make sure everything was up and running. We had to be super-proactive about being on top of Microsoft issues because anything that is 100 percent reliant on Microsoft can go completely haywire if the wrong Windows Update runs. So the biggest change, and the biggest thing that we learned, is that it's nice to be able to rely on an external company, as long as they know what they're doing. We've been able to call StarWind for anything to do with the framework we're built on or anything to do with the substrate that Hyper-V is running on, no matter what happens, and know they're going to take care of it.

I'm the only one dealing with administration or maintenance of the HCA and it will probably stay that way, just for security concerns. It's a lot easier to stay compliant if I'm the only person that can do any of that. We do subcontract to other people for support of our customer VMs, but that's a whole different game. That's all built on the StarWind framework.

StarWind is an easy 10 out of 10.