StarWind Storage Appliance Reviews

We were looking for the two-node HCA. We found that VMware was also a solution, but it was a bit costlier for us. We couldn't bear the cost, so we were in search of other products similar to VMware. We found the StarWind solution. 

Initially, we took a trial license, implemented it, and tested it for one month. Then we found that it suited our requirements, so we installed it in our production environment.

So this is how we approach the storage.

There are very few OEMs providing two-node clusters with software-defined storage. This is one of the beauties of this tool, even with a single node failure, it's stable and handled well. In a one-node cluster, it provides a full data store. 

In my company, we have customers at remote sites for whom we use the solution most of the time. In our company, we want to have an edge location where we do not have many user activities. In our company, we use a two-node cluster most of the time since we have multiple location sites where we deploy two to four nodes. My company uses StarWind Storage Appliance to support some manufacturing units and some remote users where there is no advanced WAN connectivity.

I would say data protection and easy management are the most valuable features of the product since most of the time, I have seen that whenever in our company we have some issues, though there is a sequence, we can shut it down, and it is easy to manage. The best part of the solution is that the payments made towards the licensing part are on a per-node basis.

We were using 4GB FC to support our 3-host ESXi cluster and switched to StarWind over 10GB iSCSI. We installed one 2-node SAN for proof of concept, then another one so we could retire our FC SANs, then another SSD-based one when we needed better performance on critical VMs. We were able to select hardware from our preferred vendor. Two of the clusters run on standalone servers, and the SSD SAN runs on our ESXi hosts, giving us a hyper-converged environment for those servers that need the additional performance.

We had end-of-life (and end-of-support) 4GB FC switches and SANs which were going to cost us a ton of money to upgrade, and decided to switch to iSCSI over a 10-GB backbone.  Going with iSCSI simplified our infrastructure. Instead of running FC for storage in parallel with our ethernet, we were able to purchase 10GB switches that could handle both and that gave us combined visibility and manageability with one management interface which also handles our periphery switches and wireless in one interface.

StarWind Storage Appliance's demo version should be similar to the paid one. 

I have been working with the product for one year. 

We conducted in-depth internal testing of the StarWind Storage Appliance, evaluating its performance across a range of hardware configurations, including both standard fast drives and full SSD systems, such as the HPE ProLiant DL380 Gen10 and Gen10 Plus, with various HBAs configurations. Our testing revealed that the software effectively harnessed the full potential of these systems, delivering performance in line with our expectations for the hardware.

One of the most valuable aspects is its affordability and the quality of support it offers. The support team is quick to respond, even for users who are not engaged in a production-ready demo but are simply evaluating the software. This extends to the community as well, where even without a formal service level agreement, the support team remains attentive and responsive. Its user-friendly interface makes it an attractive option, especially for customers who may not be highly tech-savvy.

I manage a number of different IT environments ranging in the 10 to 500 staff level, and the StarWind Storage Appliance is one of the products that I use in this role.

StarWind is very good, performance-wise. I opt for all-flash arrays every time, and I see they made the announcement that they are only selling all-flash. This is a great move, as all-flash at the server level is an absolute game-changer.

Whole environments run so much smoother and this really makes the IT admin's life easier. If we have to deploy on-premises servers, it's all-flash or nothing for us.

Having instant failover redundancy helps me sleep easier at night.

It's the main storage (CSV) for our Microsoft Hyper-V Cluster. We have two devices on Dell hardware that have StarWind VSAN installed, they have 25GB NIC in between for storage replication and all the storage is replicated so we can easily work on one node while the other is active. It's in Active-Active state so the load is shared. The storage is formated as CSV and it works over iSCSI protocol so we use our same network so there is no need for expensive fiber links. We run hundreds of virtual machines on this storage that needs to be always available. 

It improved our uptime dramatically where we did not have any outage in the past 12 months. Also, we were using multiple storage vendors in the past and were able to replace them with a single StarWind solution. As its primary software solution, you can choose the hardware it operates on, if you have purchased just the software license is really easy to move it from one hardware to another or increase the underlying storage system or add more hard drives as your need increases. An additional benefit is their support which is great.

We use it together with Microsoft services.

The integration with StarWind Storage Appliance is the most valuable.