StarWind HyperConverged Appliance Reviews

We are using the system to run our various virtual machines in a Hyper-V cluster. They run services such as SQL Servers, our Skype for Business phone system, some financial applications, various domain services, and SharePoint servers, among other miscellaneous systems.

We use StarWind’s HyperConverged Appliance in one of our server rooms and plan on upgrading more legacy equipment at another location next year. We have it set up as a Microsoft Hyper-V private cloud.

The old solution we had worked. It was starting to show its age and it consisted of several more pieces of equipment than the StarWind HyperConverged Appliances.

It has saved us time because there are fewer devices to update. We no longer have to worry about updating our hardware SANs, which would actually cause a brief outage, even though the upgrades are advertised as non-disruptive. We just update the StarWind software every once in a while with no downtime.

In terms of overall systems performance, the latency has been reduced. Instead of having to go through two iSCSI connections, the way we had things layered before, everything is direct. We purchased the all-flash HyperConverged Appliance to replace our SANs that had spinning disks. That has definitely reduced the storage latency. We have noticed a substantial performance improvement with our database applications, compared to our previous storage.

StarWind has definitely saved us money. The other solutions we were looking at were priced much higher than this and they didn't necessarily have full redundancy. The other companies provided solutions without enough resources to lose a node and still keep everything up and running. Most of those solutions also required dedicated 10 Gig switching. We are also saving money on the normal support renewal costs since we don’t have separate SAN devices or need dedicated 10 Gig switching.

The biggest thing we were looking for was redundancy, with both the compute and the storage, so that way we could lose a full node and still keep everything up and running, and not have to worry about it.

Another of the most important features we were looking for, since we're short on time, was something that we could deploy quickly and easily. They were offering what they call a "turnkey solution." We could just buy it, they would preconfigure it, we would throw it in our environment and do some very minimal configuration on the phone with them, and we would be up and running. Then we just needed to start moving our virtual machines over, using Hyper-V’s shared-nothing live migration feature.

The solution's hardware footprint is great. We have three 1U servers, a total of 3U, and that's replacing a full rack of equipment.

We haven't had to use the ProActive Premium Support feature much yet. But they contacted me one time because there was network glitch on one server. We hadn't actually started migrating virtual machines over to it yet, but they contacted me within ten minutes of the issue happening, as I was still trying to figure it out. I have not seen the problem since. The ProActive Premium Support was another factor that we evaluated when we made the decision to purchase this solution, to make everything easier with less work for us.

We ordered it at the beginning of the year. It came in around the end of January or early February and we spent the next couple of months slowly moving our virtual machines to the new cluster. So we've been using it for about half a year.

The stability has been great. We haven't had any problems at all.

StarWind’s virtual SAN is limited to synchronizing storage between two or three nodes, which is perfect for us. To scale further, they use a grid architecture, but I don't think that will be necessary for us.

We have about 1,100 users and eight offices. There are two locations where we have servers. We installed this at our headquarters location. Next year, we're going to be upgrading our equipment in another location with more of StarWind’s HyperConverged Appliances.

We're in the process of decreasing our on-premises footprint. Our main initiative is to move everything into Microsoft Azure, but there are several things that need to stay here on-prem. That's what the hyper-converged system is for.

So far, the little that I've worked with tech support, they seem to be pretty great.

We also bought a backup server from them that we're using Veeam software on. While we are learning the Veeam software, it has thrown several alerts. StarWind support is always very quick alerting us of the backup failure so we can remediate the issue.

If we had the option to do this again, we would have purchased the Veeam software through StarWind. If we had purchased the Veeam software through them, they would have helped us set it up, configure it, troubleshoot it, etc. Since we purchased the Veeam licenses elsewhere, we just work directly with Veeam support.

Our previous Hyper-V cluster was a classic architecture cluster with separate iSCSI SANs. It consisted of five Dell EMC servers and four Dell EMC EqualLogic SANs that took some trial and error, along with many support calls to multiple companies, to get running properly. That took quite a while to set up after finding problems with the initial deployment and hidden limitations with the hardware.

One of our initial requirements was to have the data on two separate pieces of hardware, which the EqualLogic SANs support with their SyncRep feature, but the performance was so terrible with that feature activated that we couldn’t even run one virtual machine on the system. We were forced to find a different option, at minimal cost, to fulfill this requirement. We actually ended up buying StarWind's Virtual SAN solution years ago, and layered that on top of the Dell EqualLogic SANs to provide the redundancy that they were unable to provide, out-of-the-box, at a reasonable rate of performance. StarWind’s Virtual SAN software was able to keep synchronized copies of the data on two separate pieces of hardware and the performance was great.

When we first built our previous cluster, we had looked at a hyper-converged option, but that architecture was still very new and we weren’t quite comfortable with it. Since then, the industry has moved towards hyper-converged and there are many more options available. When it came time to refresh the hardware, we wanted a hyper-converged solution to save on expense and complexity. We looked at several vendors before making a decision. We made sure to look at StarWind’s options because we had been using their vSAN for years. It seems like the perfect solution.

The setup was very quick. After purchasing the hardware, before it was shipped there was a form to fill out to specify IP addresses, server OS version, and some other settings so that StarWind could set up the hardware and have it nearly configured when it arrived at our location. There was an initial quick-start guide that I had to go through after it arrived. It was about ten steps and included cabling the hardware, logging in, setting a password, and joining it to the domain. Then there was about an hour-long call with StarWind Support to do the final configuration of creating the cluster. They configured a couple of things and sent us on our way to start moving virtual machines over.

Altogether, there was about an hour or so of pre-call stuff, and then maybe a little more than an hour on the phone. The software and the operating system came pre-installed. There were just a couple of configuration checks and things that they needed to do to finalize everything.

It was mostly just me involved in the setup. I had some help installing it physically, but it only takes one person to do the install.

StarWind provided the Dell EMC servers. We purchased not only the software but the three Dell EMC servers which have the locally attached storage. They helped us with the initial hardware configuration and adding it to our network.

StarWind gets the hardware shipped to them directly from Dell EMC. They installed Windows Server, their software, and all the drivers. Then they shipped it to us. After it arrived here, we just racked it, cabled it up, turned it on, and finished the minimal configuration with their help. After running through the initial setup, we added it to System Center Virtual Machine Manager and started moving virtual machines to the new hardware.

We haven't done the calculations as far as time and support costs go. That's probably something we'll look to develop after we've had it running for a year, versus what we spent in the past.

Other than the standard licensing fee for StarWind HCA, there are the server costs and the server support. We purchased all of this thorough StarWind on one invoice.

We looked at Dell EMC VxRail, Nutanix, HPE Simplivity, and another option. In terms of the differences between these solutions and StarWind, price was a huge factor, as well as flexibility and the additional hardware requirements.

Most of the other solutions we looked at required 10 Gig switches to interconnect all of them, whereas the StarWind solution interconnects directly between the nodes and doesn't require a 10 Gig switch. That probably saved us $10,000 to $20,000 right there.

Nutanix and VxRail were in the final running. We looked at quotes for those and, from what the vendors were telling us, they seemed to be pretty good appliances. But it came down to our price point. StarWind was able to provide a solution for what we wanted - to provide for redundancy. With the other ones, if we were to lose one node due to a hard drive failure or bad memory stick, we wouldn't have enough RAM on the other devices to run everything. We could have asked for additional RAM to be quoted, but they were already at our budget limit.

The other thing we were trying to do, within our budget, was to get a better backup solution in place. We were using System Center Data Protection Manager and we were running into so many issues that it required daily babysitting. We had evaluated Veeam earlier in the year and it just works without any trouble. While working with StarWind to spec out our new environment, they told us about their backup appliance running on Dell EMC hardware. It seemed like the perfect option and getting everything from one vendor makes support much easier. Getting a better backup solution in place was a huge goal of ours and has since freed up a ton of our time.

The biggest lesson that we've learned from using it is to let somebody else do all the hard work of finding the right configuration and putting together the hardware. It will save you a lot of time and get you up and running a lot quicker. With our previous solution, there was a lot of trial and error and learning. The StarWind solution was basically: plug it in, configure it for a few hours, and start moving virtual machines onto it.

It seems like a great product. It does what it's supposed to do and it does it very quickly. Besides making it free, I don't know what they can do to improve it. My advice would be to go for it. StarWind does actually have a free, full-featured version of their vSAN software that just lacks technical support. My company requires that we maintain technical support on this equipment, so that wasn’t an option. You can download their free vSAN software so you can get a feel for it and see how it works in your environment.

They have a product called StarWind Command Center which offers a lot more visibility into everything that's going on but we haven't explored that. The vSAN software gives us basic performance statistics for CPU, storage IOP usage, and bandwidth usage. It seems to have everything that we need.

Generally, it requires zero maintenance. As long as we don't get any email alerts saying something is going wrong, we don't really touch it. As with anything, you have the normal Windows Server updates which require a server reboot, and occasional updates to the StarWind Virtual SAN software, which only requires a service restart and no storage downtime.

The solution hasn't helped increase redundancy or failover capabilities because we had layered the StarWind Virtual SAN on top of our old environment. It will help next year when we place our Hyper-V cluster in a different location which doesn't have that layer of redundancy.

Based on our experience, StarWind HCA has been a ten out of ten.

We are a small school with 700 users. We replaced an eight-year-old HP system (two HP DL360 G7s and an HP StorageWorks X1600) with a two-node HCA cluster.

Our two goals were to improve performance and add high availability. Even before implementation, the StarWind team analyzed our current workload to determine which HCA would be appropriate for us. This allowed us to make a decision based on data rather than guesswork.

Performance has been excellent, and we have really noticed a big improvement from our old system. Our other goal, improving fault tolerance, was immediately realized with the installation of the second HCA node. We have been running flawlessly since day one with zero downtime. The second node also allows us to perform maintenance without having to take servers offline.

The management interface is really easy to use. Updates are much less painful, and the proactive support is fantastic. New command center is a nice addition.

We are happy with the product, and my only suggestion would be a better process for an unplanned power outage.

Four years

We have been pleased so far. Zero downtime. 

It meets the needs of smaller organizations. I think they are upfront that the HCA solution is not tailored towards large organizations.

They have proactive support which prior to using StarWind, was a new concept for us. It's incredible. We spend less time troubleshooting and more time on other important tasks. 

Positive

We used an HP StorageWorks X1600 for our shared storage with two HP DL360 G7s as our hosts. We switched due to performance issues (slow backups) and to increase fault tolerance since we only had one shared storage device.

So simple. The StarWind team does most of the initial configuration, and we finished on site. We were up and running in two days.  

75% vendor team and 25% in-house. Expertise was top notch which is to be expected since it's their product.

N/A.

Do your research. You will find that nothing compares to the value you get with the HCA appliance. If you have a limited budget, the decision is an easy one.

Yes. We evaluated Nutanix, HPE, Dell, NetApp, Scale.

We have been running Starwind for four years now and it's still rock solid and one of the best decisions we've made. 

On-premises

We use it for virtualization related to development. We have two entities in our company. One is corporate, a subcontractor for NASA. And the other one is an electronic timesheet system. For the corporate side, it's mainly a file server. And we use StarWind HCA for development of the electronic timesheet system. It provides us VMs and tools.

We can do updates without any problems. We can move all my VMs to one host and do updates on the other host. We can bring it down, move everything over to the other host, and then update the other host and bring it down.

In terms of redundancy, with my last solution, if we had two VMware hosts and one host went down, everything would transfer over to the other host. StarWind HCA is the same concept except that we don't have the single point of failure of the storage array anymore. It's all in the hosts. We don't have to worry about the storage going down. It used to be that if the storage array went down, we were dead in the water with both hosts.

Our only real choice, other than StarWind, was to buy a Dell EMC Compellent which would have been double the cost and would still be just one Compellent. So if we wanted redundancy, we would have had to put together a solution that would triple or quadruple the cost. StarWind saved us a considerable amount of money.

The most valuable features of the solution are the redundancy and its cost. I used to have a SAN, a Dell EMC EqualLogic. Unfortunately, it was what they call an "inverted pyramid of doom." It was two or three hosts, two switches, and one storage array at the very bottom. But the SAN, the storage array at the very bottom, is a single point of failure, and many people, including me in the past, don't take that into consideration.

The SAN was working for us, but I thought about the fact that it is a single point of failure. Anything could, possibly, take it out, even though it might have redundant hardware inside it: controllers, power, hard drives. The entire unit itself is a single point of failure. If updates were required to an EqualLogic, we would have to take down everything, just to be on the safe side. We'd have to shut down all the VMs. And those updates could always mess up the entire unit and, then, it's a single point of failure and all your infrastructure and VMs are down.

In terms of cost, a storage array is more expensive. It was time to renew our storage array. It was end-of-support, end-of-life, and the EqualLogic line is supposedly being phased out. The next in line is Dell EMC Compellent and we would have had to upgrade to that. It is highly expensive. For half the cost of Compellent, I got two hosts, more storage, and redundancy.

StarWind HCA also has a much better footprint because with a full-blown SAN you have one storage array, or in some cases two, as well as two switches and two or three hosts. Those two hosts are usually 2U each, and the storage array is 2U, and the switches are usually 1U each. We were able to shrink it all down to two hosts that contain all the storage, the switches or the all the storage networking, and the host or the compute/CPU power. In total, the HCA is just two hosts and they're both 2U. So our footprint was reduced to just 4U.

One area for improvement of the solution is that I had to get the HCAs with Windows Server installed to install the StarWind SAN software on, which I really didn't want because of the extra maintenance or overhead, as well as viruses, etc. It's going to take time for them to get their Linux implementation to that point. They already have Linux but it's not as mature and they don't really support it on HCAs. They have it for individuals who want to use it on their servers, but not on HCAs.

With Windows, there's always that fear that, if you add any software to it, if you need to configure monitoring software or the like, DLL conflicts and blue screens can result. Similarly, if you use Windows Update, you can get blue screens. Or, there have been times where an antivirus company has made a mistake regarding its virus definitions and it took down the server. The antivirus blocked or deleted a legitimate OS file that it thought was a virus. So I don't run antivirus on the Windows Servers VMs that run the StarWind SAN software. At the same time, I've had to configure Windows Firewall to block everything and only allow any kind of traffic going to the server. The only thing I allow is just Remote Desktop so I can manage it. But even Remote Desktop, in the recent months, has had exploits. I keep on having to do Windows Updates.

I prefer Linux because it's not as targeted. Don't get me wrong; it is targeted for viruses and all, but not like Windows Server.

We've been using it for a few months.

The solution has been stable so far..

We are using the solution's ProActive Premium Support but it hasn't really reduced our monitoring efforts since we've only been using it for two or three months. We haven't had any issues come up where we've had to use it. I still do all the monitoring of my VMs and the hardware, the HCAs. However, in regard to the support itself, I do like that it's all-in-one. If I need support I call one vendor and they take care of everything. They call Dell EMC, they call VMware and, of course, they take care of the StarWind software. So it is nice.

Plus, each person I've talked to — and I've talked to multiple people there — has been very knowledgeable. I didn't get the sense that any of them were new or learning or that they didn't know what they were talking about. All of them are very knowledgeable and friendly.

I wouldn't say the initial setup was completely straightforward but it's not too complex. I did have a lot of calls with support to help me get it up and running, but I did the majority of the cabling and some of the configuration of the VMs. They took care of many other things that I would not have known to do, but it wasn't too bad.

The deployment took about a month. I had other things I had to do; I'm always doing a lot of things. It probably took longer than it could have taken.

The implementation strategy was that I have all iSCSI. Our previous SAN had iSCSI with RJ45 switches. With the help of StarWind and Dell EMC, I was able to tie in and connect the HCAs to my SAN and see the data stores on the SAN from the HCAs. When the time came, I was able to migrate everything. I placed all the VMware hosts into one vCenter but two different clusters. I was able to simply vMotion them. Once I got the HCAs up and running, configured and set up, I was able to vMotion all the VMs from my old storage array to these HCAs.

Overall, I did like the hardware installation and the cabling and they helped me configure the StarWind software. It was about half and half.

They were top-notch and professional. They know their stuff. I was always able to get them online when needed. Their support was very good.

Regarding licensing fees, the caveat is that with the Windows-based OS, we have to pay for that licensing for both hosts. That's is another reason I wanted Linux. As for VMware, we already had VMware licenses, so we just took those from our old hosts and applied them to these hosts.

There is also a cost for the ProActive Premium Support and, on top of that, is support for the Dell EMC hardware itself. We got four-hour, mission-critical, which is what we have on everything else.

Because of the absolute redundancy of the two HCA hosts, which they say can tolerate a failure of one host plus one drive, you might be able to save a little bit of money by bumping down the support of the servers and not need four-hour, mission-critical support. You could bump it down and wait for parts to arrive the next day instead of four hours.

I looked at Dell EMC storage. The only option was Compellent, which was highly expensive. I looked at Nutanix which was still highly expensive.

I also looked at StorPool; I liked the idea behind it, but I didn't like their implementation. It's roughly the same concept but requires more hardware. They take a bunch of servers that are not purely storage servers but which have the compute and memory. It's a rack mount server with all the storage inside and they aggregate the storage.

StarWind was all-in-one and consolidated on two servers. StorPool would have been three servers just for the storage. I would have had to buy two more new hosts to be the compute.

I love StarWind HCA because of the cost and the redundancy. I love the service, the support. Across the board, it was the best choice. I love the HCA because it's all-in-one and everything is pre-configured. I could have bought my own servers but it would have taken longer to bring up the environment. It would have been less expensive, but StarWind's hardware and software support and the compatibility of all the hardware components add a little bit more to the reliability of the system. That's why I went with the HCA instead of doing it myself. I certainly could have done it myself if I had more time. But, as a small business with one or two people managing all the IT, it was the best choice.

We have two environments, one at the office and one at the data center. This implementation was a trial of sorts, but looking to the future I'm going to implement this for our data center, where we have a standard SAN like we did before this HCA implementation.

The solution has not improved our system performance. There were some things that we couldn't foresee or we didn't test, like restoring databases. It's a little bit slower there. That's more a failure on our part, not having tested it out, rather than StarWind's failure.

We have a hybrid HCA as far as our drives go. Some are flash drives and others are just regular spindle drives. The solution is supposed to move things into the SSDs and then give the appropriate power, from what I remember them telling me. But in one particular case, one of the developers, who is also a database admin, was restoring a file and he said it took way longer than usual. That was one thing we couldn't assess during our assessment of what kind of drives we needed. In this case, we probably would have done better having all flash drives. It might have been overkill — it depends on what you need. But we should have made it all flash drives and we probably wouldn't have had any problems. Again, that's not anything on StarWind's part.

Everything else, performance-wise for all the other VMs that we have that are not as intensive as a database, it works just fine. We have no complaints about the performance in terms of using it as a file server or for web-based development utilities.

We're a small company. We have two entities that these HCAs provide service to. We have about 30 to 40 employees. Of them, 10 or more are on the corporate/sub-contracting side. The rest work on our electronic timesheet system, whether they're in development or technical support. In terms of deployment and maintenance of StarWind, it is just me.

StarWind gives you choices of servers, as far as the HCA goes. It was either all-new certified Dell EMC equipment or equipment from another company that they can place these servers on. With our being an all-Dell EMC shop, and my being familiar with Dell, I opted for all-Dell EMC hardware.

Being a small business, we don't have another product alongside it. It is the product. So it gets 100 percent usage. I don't see us expanding our usage in the future. The power and the storage should last us for, hopefully, the next seven years, which is roughly the Dell EMC support contract life expectancy. We use our servers for seven years and, at the end of the support, we refresh and buy brand-new servers.

Nothing stands out, in terms of problems or issues. They helped me and got everything resolved that I had problems with. I would give it a 10 out of 10.

On-premises

I've found its flexibility and performance to be the most valuable.

This product is not one hundred percent enterprise-ready, so it is more suitable for SMB.

The price could always be reduced.

I've been using the solution for about four years.

We never have any problems with stability.

In terms of adding processes or new user licenses, we've never had to do that, but from the documentation and speaking with support, it is relatively easy.

I only had to call technical support once, and they were very responsive and quick. Overall, I've been satisfied with them.

The initial setup is straightforward once you know what you're doing. It's a solution that people should be able to install it on their own.

When I researched they came the most cost-effective. If you're in a small to medium business, I certainly advise any users to evaluate it. At the moment I haven't any reason or cause for improvement because it does what it does as it says on the tin, and it just works.

I can see for a large enterprise that it could cause problems because it's not one hundred percent enterprise-ready, but for small and medium companies, when you have a smaller system, it does what it says.

I think the more you add to it the more complicated it gets and then it'll make it more difficult for a small company to manage it. It does exactly what I need it to do, so I don't need any more features or anything more. I'm used to the user interface so it doesn't have any tricks or any hidden things that I can't find so for me it's ideal.

I would give the solution a rating of nine out of ten.

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.

One to three years.

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.

One to three years.

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.