StarWind HyperConverged Appliance Reviews

We are currently using StarWind HCA to build out a flexible, distributed storage system. We had a myriad of file, application, and database servers that ranged from physical to virtual. StarWind helped us consolidate and make the necessary physical to virtual server moves (P2V), and the entire process was very pleasant.

This system also allows us to achieve high availability (HA) across the entire IT infrastructure that we are responsible for, which was a major driving decision. This was all completed at an affordable price point for an SMB, which was also a key element for an NPO.

The solution has allowed us to focus on streamlining our IT Infrastructure. We no longer need multiple staff members performing small, mundane tasks. We have ProActive support and alerting that takes care of our day to day infrastructure management. We were able to consolidate a number of servers and truly cut down on our overall storage costs.

The most valuable features are consolidated storage, low cost and overhead compared to previous solutions. As an NPO, we are always concerned with new technology and the associated costs. The solutions from StarWind were not only a major increase in performance, but they were very affordable for us.

The only thing my team has recommended improving on is possibly a StarWind-customized GUI to monitor the overall system health, similar to 5nine Manager.

There is nothing else I would recommend improving because everything from sales, installation to post-install service for the past year has been great.

One year.

Previously we used a mix of physical and virtualized servers. This was antiquated and inadequate for our organization, so we gave StarWind a try.

For organizations such as ours (NPO), the Microsoft Hyper-V route was too affordable to pass on. Some of our team prefers VMware, but Hyper-V has been pretty good for us with StarWind.

We evaluated other options before choosing this solution, including some time we spent working with Scale HC3, and a little with SimpliVity.

We had to replace an aging and complex infrastructure. We did so with the hyper-converged appliances from StarWind.

The cost to support and maintain every part of the aging infrastructure was pretty high. Also, the SANs were being rather complex to maintain and the time to resolution on tickets was pretty long with the vendor.

StarWind offers an hyper-converged solution that is very well priced and offers remote monitoring and support, resolving both the cost and support issues we had with the previous multivendor solution.

The ease of management through one console for the storage of all of our datacenters worldwide: Going from managing multiple SANs with each of their own consoles and software versions to having a single console to handle all of the company's storage simplified things a lot for us.

Another thing worth mentioning that isn't really a feature: The support provided by StarWind is among the best we've ever gotten for any solution. During the implementation of one of our datacenters, our team took an action that made all storage on a cluster unavailable. StarWind got notified of that situation by the cluster. They contacted us, provided us with a fix and also gave us a procedure for the next time we need to perform this type of maintenance.

It's been a few months since the implementation, and so far, the only improvement I'd like to see is the addition of a web console to manage the clusters instead of a client to install.

Less than one year.

We had non-virtualized and old infrastructure that needed to be upgraded. We use HCA for all of our servers.

We successfully migrated to a virtualized environment, storage performance was increased, and now we had a redundant, failure-tolerant infrastructure. With ProSAFE support, we are sure that our infrastructure is safe and we don't need highly specialized personnel to monitor our infrastructure 24/7.

StarWind HCA delivered us a complete solution that works out of the box. We received everything we needed to get it up and running.

StarWind HCA delivered us a complete solution that works out of the box. There was no need to buy additional hardware; everything came in a box. Also, the software was preinstalled.

Better overall monitoring software. Maybe integration with Windows Admin Center was a good direction to go with on monitoring software.

We used to have four Dell EMC PowerEdge hosts running various versions of Microsoft Hyper-V with no redundancy.

We are also running out of storage space and have been dealing with an increasing complexity of Windows Server licensing.

We investigated and received proposals from three vendors (Dell EMC, Scale Computing and StarWind). Ultimately, the main decision point was cost. StarWind is the only vendor that only needs two nodes to set up the cluster. Not only have we saved on the extra node, but we also don't have to license another Windows Server Datacenter edition.

Our StarWind HCA has been in production over 12 months, and we have had no issues or single downtime so far.

It has achieved our goals of centralizing storage management because of the StarWind Virtual SAN, added fault tolerance, and simplified Microsoft server licensing, by using the Datacenter edition.

• StarWind Virtual SAN. We no longer have to manage storage via multiple local server disks.
• Added fault tolerance helps everybody sleep easier at night knowing we can lose an entire node without affecting production.

It could potentially be less reliable due to the Hypervisor, and the cluster relies on Microsoft Windows Server. However, we have not had any issue since putting them in production 12 months ago.

We have not had any issue since putting it in production 12 months ago.

It's good for what we do — an SMC with hybrid cloud.

Tech support has been quick, has a very quick response, and they also provocatively monitor the appliance's status.

No.

Fairly straightforward because StarWind handles most of the setup. We did handle the network setup because we added redundancy at the switch level.

A combination of vendor team and in-house team. Their level of expertise is good.

We reduced manpower on managing servers and storage. It helps us by not having to hire an extra IT person.

It's the only vendor that allow two nodes, all other vendors I researched at that time (late 2017) requires at least three nodes.

Yes, we evaluated Dell EMC VxRail and Scale HC3.

Before implementing the StarWind solution, we had standalone servers with Hyper-V on top. With this IT infrastructure, there was no fast and easy way to restore virtual machines (VMs) from backup if a Hyper-V host failed. The process and time it took to restore the VMs from backup were long and tedious. Moreover, there were no constant availability of applications and the necessary protection of the agency’s data. We required a solution with the help of which it would be possible to build a highly available (HA) and fault-tolerant (FT) IT environment at a price affordable for a ROBO’s budget.

We chose StarWind HyperConverged Appliance because it could be easily integrated into the existing IT infrastructure. Being a 100% software-defined hyperconverged platform, StarWind HCA leveled the possibility of hardware or software issues in the case of the Hyper-V host failing. All the critical VMs have been migrated to StarWind HCA, and if a failure of Hyper-V host occurs, automatic failover of VMs to the other node without any service interruptions is observed. Thanks to synchronous failover clustering, a non-stop application availability and unbeatable data security were ensured. We managed to build a fault-tolerant and highly available IT environment with a reliable and cost-effective solution. We also took advantage of StarWind ProActive Support AI. Support administrators kept continuous track of the system's status and informed about critical issues. So, with StarWind HCA we managed to achieve uninterrupted IT infrastructure work and peace of mind.

• Proactive monitoring and support
• The ability to achieve high availability.  

None so far.  StarWind has met our needs, exceeded our expectation, and increased our system up-time and availability.  

Less than one year.

Our small business was looking for a reliable and cost effective solution to ensure maximum uptime. We went from a single server to a virtualized hyper-converged infrastructure to allow routine maintenance at our convenience and have peace of mind that a failover system was in place.

This solution came preconfigured. All we needed to do was plug it in and move our VMs. The migration was seamless and we have had no issues. This solution has allowed us to take advantage of newer technologies, maintain our servers with ease, and reduce downtime.

We have found the live migration to be the most valuable feature. It allows us to seamlessly maintain our servers, as well as have peace of mind if something goes wrong. There is a failover machine ready to go.

A desired feature or service would be the ability to have a hardware subscription plan that ensures routine hardware updates in conjunction with hyper-converged software.

None at this time.

None at this time.

Customer service has been excellent. Any questions we have had have been answered quickly.

We didn't previously use a hyper-converged solution. We used Veeam to take care of any potential failovers manually. We still utilize Veeam, but we wanted to add a hyper-converged product to free up some time devoted to manual maintenance.

The initial setup was straightforward. All was a breeze.

I installed this system myself.

We have not evaluated it at this time.

Its cost was reasonable.

We did not evaluate any other options.