

StarWind HyperConverged Appliance and Azure Local compete in the hyperconverged infrastructure category, each with strengths tailored to specific needs. StarWind HCA has the upper hand in on-premises infrastructure with its cost-effectiveness and management simplicity.
Features: StarWind HCA is notable for redundancy, fast live migration, and proactive support. Its software integrates seamlessly with familiar tools, making it virtually invisible. Azure Local offers a hybrid cloud experience with strong Azure Arc integration, Kubernetes support, and enhanced storage, enabling seamless interaction within the Azure ecosystem.
Room for Improvement: StarWind HCA could improve its documentation and Linux support while enhancing its ISCSI setup and management tools. Azure Local struggles with deployment complexity and software-defined networking issues. Improvements in Azure Arc integration and cluster management could enhance user experience.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: StarWind HCA provides simple, rapid deployment and is backed by robust support, praised for availability and proactive issue resolution. Azure Local faces deployment complexity due to intricate networking and relies heavily on PowerShell, which may impact customer service perceptions.
Pricing and ROI: StarWind HCA offers competitive pricing, covering hardware, setup, and support, delivering cost savings and a clear ROI view. Azure Local has higher costs, particularly in licensing and operations, but the value it delivers aligns with enterprise expectations; some users see room for optimizing total cost of ownership.
There has been some return on investment in terms of just time usability and reduction of footprint.
They have more advantages than VMware, especially for containerization, and they provide good support as well.
Not every support team member is very knowledgeable about Azure Stack HCI, creating delays in resolution.
It does not feel like a well-oiled machine yet, with too many idiosyncrasies and insufficient documentation and integration, feeling more like software that is still in beta.
After achieving good maturity, it became easier.
Hyper V seems to lag behind compared to VMware.
There are discrepancies between managing VMs through Azure Arc versus managing them directly, as changes made not using the Azure Arc integration are not easily reflected in Azure Arc.
There could be improvements with Azure Stack HCI regarding the license and price, as they have significantly higher prices compared to other competitors.
The licensing is quite expensive because it's per call.
Azure Stack HCI has been very beneficial for disaster recovery operations.
The integration with Azure using Azure Arc is excellent.
| Product | Market Share (%) |
|---|---|
| Azure Stack HCI | 3.2% |
| StarWind HyperConverged Appliance | 1.3% |
| Other | 95.5% |

| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 4 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 1 |
| Large Enterprise | 3 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 50 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 22 |
| Large Enterprise | 8 |
Azure Local integrates on-premises infrastructure with cloud services, offering tools for software-defined networking, Kubernetes deployment, and VM management. It ensures cost efficiency through existing Microsoft licenses and robust disaster recovery, despite some complexities in deployment.
Azure Local is designed for businesses needing a blend of local and cloud services while remaining compliant with data privacy regulations. It excels in environments demanding high computing power, software-defined networking, and seamless scaling through Azure Kubernetes Service and Azure DevOps. Although it offers excellent VM management and analytics capabilities with Microsoft Fabric, deployment complexity and operational challenges remain. Businesses looking for a robust edge computing solution find significant benefits, especially with efficient local Azure storage and advanced hardware such as the latest processors and SSDs. There are areas needing improvements like multi-cluster management, stability, and Initial setup, which can be cumbersome. Pricing can be a concern against competitors, and enhanced support and training are needed for smoother user experience.
What are the key features of Azure Local?Azure Local finds application in sectors like manufacturing and maritime operations where robust edge computing helps in seamless data management and analytics. Factories benefit from compliance with data privacy rules while blended local and cloud services improve efficiency on ships, providing an alternative to VMware with support for virtual desktops and SQL Managed Instances.
For SMB, ROBO and Enterprises, who look to bring in quick deployment and operation simplicity to virtualization workloads and reduce related expenses, our solution is StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA). It unifies commodity servers, disks and flash, hypervisor of choice, StarWind Virtual SAN, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct or VMware Virtual SAN and associated software into a single manageable layer. The HCA supports scale-up by adding disks and flash, and scale-out by adding extra nodes.
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance consists of StarWind Virtual SAN, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct or VMware Virtual SAN “Ready Nodes”, targeting those, who are building their virtualization infrastructure from scratch. In case there is an existing set of servers, we offer a “software only version”, which is essentially our years proven StarWind Virtual SAN. Basically, it’s the fuel powering StarWind HCA.
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