StarWind HyperConverged Appliance Reviews

Our primary use case of the HCA is to provide a Highly Available, clustered virtualization environment to house all of our internally operational VMs. 

We host all of our internal server infrastructure on the HCA utilizing Hyper-V as our virtualization platform. 

The performance of an all SSD storage array allows us to easily and quickly expand our interal servers as needed without worries of performance degradation.  

The largest benefit to our company was to finally be able to have a no single point of failure setup at a pricepoint that was below that of competing enteprise oriented solutions. 

The HCA appliance replaced aging hardware, formerly cluster-in-a-box solutions, at a savings of over $20,000.00 and provided increased performance and more redundancy. The pricing and discounts given by Starwind on the hardware were unmatched. 

The HCA solution provides increased redundancy in that all storage is duplicated between multiple servers with multiple arrays of drives, rather than depending upon a single storage solution. It also allows us to utilize more cost-effective storage solutions rather than being handcuffed to dual port SSD with their higher price points when the performance far exceeds our needs. 

If you stay with a two or three-node solution, the HCA allows you to eliminate implementing a redundant storage network switch solution providing tons of savings on top of the affordable HCA offering. 

Additionally, the server cluster manager web tool provided by Starwind provides fast information at a glance to give you a complete overview of all virtualization, compute, storage, memory, and network resources throughout your network in a single plane of glass. 

The support and automated monitoring is a huge improvement over our previous vendor's offerings as well. It truly feels like we have a point of escalation on any issues and that provides a large amount of comfort to our small team. 

Shipping options should be explained in detail and offer more white glove delivery options even if it comes at an additional cost for some SMBs without docks. 

Our only pain point has been dealing with the freight shipping initially not showing up when promised, then showing up unannounced, and then sending us some small fees afterward due to the fact that we made them wait (since we weren't expecting them). Starwind has taken care of all of the fees after the fact, however, and they were more than accomodating in resolving the situation. 

We would like more visibility into the reporting that Starwind uses to monitor our solution for errors. We'd like to be able to receive the same data and notifications that their team receives.

We have been using the HCA for almost one year.

So far, we have had zero downtime. 

The product is moderately scaleable. It should fit any SMB and works even in larger organizations. The product allows quick additional of multiple nodes. At a certain point, eventually your storage replication might be better served by dedicated sans rather than the VSAN, or it might be beneficial to check out the newer Storage Spaces in DataCenter edition when it comes to storage scaling up. However, I think the VSAN included with the cluster will meet most small and medium sized deployments by just adding more nodes with additional storage when needed. 

We used cluster-in-a-box from DataON. We switched as they were reaching the end of life and it did not provide an affordable solution to replace it.

The solution offers an easy setup. Support was there to hold hands as needed every step of the way, with a dedicated contact point who took us through the entire process. She was great!

We do not have any warnings to share. 

We looked at options from TrueNas, DataOn, Dell, and HPE. 

We use the StarWind HCA primarily and in its entirety to serve as our primary hyper-converged infrastructure in order to serve all of our virtual servers. In this environment, we have an RDSH server farm utilizing GPU cards. We also utilize backup software that connects directly to this environment. Being able to have our entire environment run on a single platform by a single vendor both hardware and software is huge for us. We don't have the time or resources to go to many vendors or have them point to other vendors as issues.

This solution improved our environment from an increased user experience and administrative experience. We have had much better uptime and product speed since switching to the HCA platform by StarWind. Our organization has required less 3rd party resources and software to provide speed and flexibility to both our IT staff and our end users. The solution specifically allows us to focus more of our time on software development and process changes utilizing the hardware, as opposed to supporting the hardware itself.

The most valuable feature is the flexibility of Hypervisor and there is no vendor lock-in including the hardware the system runs on. I find it powerful and I am able to use the StarWind GUI or the Microsoft back-end Hyper-V. Everything works hand in hand and neither side forces me to do something in a specific way. Being able to log on to the GUI to see specific data and usage statistics, executing clones, starting and stopping VMs, etc., is great.  These all seem like minor things but have had major impact on our productivity.

I have not had any issues or roadblocks as of yet that require any improvement. Everything that I have needed has been available in the product. 

The only issues are when Hyper V itself has limitations and I'd love to see support or enhancement in the area of direct-attached GPU cards. It would be great to see even more detailed analytics and scheduling reports of such to keep a focus on when and if we need to upgrade the environment.  

It would also be cool to see support in the GUI for more 3rd party add-ons.

I've used the solution for almost one year.

We used Scale Computing. We switched due to the fact that we were too restricted with Scale Computing.

We have found StarWind to be well over 50% more cost effective.

We also looked into Nutanix and Scale.

We are using Starwind HCA for a Hyper V failover cluster at our community college. We use our virtual environment to run nearly all operations at our school. It has slowly grown while replacing old physical hardware with virtual machines. It runs all email, file shares, SQL databases, IT management, PR display devices, and network security software we use to protect our environment. It replaced more expensive and difficult to maintain hardware that was not able to perform all tasks Starwind is able to.

It was much more affordable to replace our aging virtual environment with Starwind HCA than traditional hardware. We needed to come up with a budget-friendly solution to replace our old hardware. The support costs were skyrocketing on the old hardware and the performance was severely lacking. Using Starwind allowed us to replace our existing hardware with much faster hosts - and we benefitted especially from the all-flash storage which gave us a significant performance bump compared to our old environment. Overall, it has been a great implementation. 

The hardware is nothing special, just Dell servers, but the real value is in the software and support. Support is knowledgeable and quick to respond to any issues we have. They helped us configure it from the beginning and were there for us through the few issues we had during the initial configuration.

We also opted for 24-hour support monitoring for any issues. They are extremely quick to respond on issues we even cause ourselves such as bumping a network cable.  They can identify the issue and guide us to fix it without downtime.

We would like more complete documentation to manage on your own without support - even though they are great to work with. Sometimes I like to have a better knowledge on my own in case an extreme situation happens that needs to be fixed immediately. 

The management console could use a facelift. It appears to do everything needed, but sometimes it is not clear what various options are or do which could be tied back to the documentation. A complete single pane of glass for monitoring would be helpful to self-solve issues without involving support and logs.

I've been using the solution for two years.

The solution is very stable as long as you realize there can be possible split-brain issues with sync if multiple nodes lose power at the same time. This is where the nodes do not know which is the more up to date so they are not sure which way to sync. Support can help resolve the issues should they happen.

Ours is a 3 node, but appears to scale much larger as needed.

Technical support is quick to respond and proactive with our additional support.

Positive

 We used a traditional host and separate SAN for shared storage costs, which were too high to replace.

The initial setup is easy with Starwind support.

The vendor team configured our environment without issue.

Pricing is all in one. It is nice to bundle everything together for budgeting purposes.

We also looked at Dell HCL, however, it was more expensive and complicated.

We were able to consolidate four of our Hypervisors (with no redundancy) into two HCA servers with High Availability. We now have replication across both servers and fewer servers in the rack to power and we are all-flash now.

We also implemented the 10G ports on the StarWind Servers, beginning our step into a 10G backbone. This allowed our rack to become significantly less crowded with cable management.

Our HVAC is having to run less and I am sure there are some cost savings associated with that as well.  

It has brought us to another level in redundancy. We have two replicated copies of our data on-site in HA, which we then backup locally and then offload a copy to the cloud.

We also went with the all-flash solution, so our IOPS jumped exponentially.

In addition to that, we have started to implement a 10G backbone with the StarWind HCA being the first in it.

The most valuable feature they have is their support. We opted for 24-hour monitoring and support, which has already paid for itself. I had decided to move cables around and when they saw it, they and reached out to me to get it corrected.

On top of that, during our initial configuration and migration, they were able to work through any issues that may have come up, mostly due to the specific legacy equipment that we were trying to migrate to the new servers.

The command center is a nice piece of software that lets us view our entire setup.

They have a pre-install questionnaire and it asks about network addresses and such. I made the mistake of thinking they were asking about my current setup. They received that information and applied it to the new servers. When they arrived, I noticed it before we patched them in, which would have caused several IP conflicts.

I think that the pre-installation questionnaire was a little confusing and ambiguous. I could have asked for clarification but I just filled it out and sent it. It would be nice if they were just very clear on what they were asking for.

We are new to StarWind HCA and have been using it for about four months.

Stability-wise, we have had no issues as of yet, whatsoever.

This solution is very scalable. We bought it with plenty of room for expansion as well, so we don't have to worry about outgrowing it anytime soon, but if we do, it is a simple no-downtime, procedure.

Technical support is their best feature!

The initial setup was both straightforward and complex, but their support handled everything.

Implementation was through StarWind and was a great experience.

I was able to bring the price per year down by going out to a five-year plan. That works for our situation, it may be different for yours.

We evaluated Nutanix and Dell HCI.

We are an SMB that hosts our ERP on-site. Our infrastructure is shared with a group of inter-related companies, so uptime is critical since several entities rely on our core services. StarWind HCA is the core of our network and hosts all of our critical VMs. We needed a cost-effective HA solution that was easy to manage, as we have a very small IT department that is concentrated mostly on business process improvements. The last thing we need is complex systems to manage taking our focus away from that.

We went from a vSphere compute cluster with an external SAN made by a company that is in perpetual financial trouble and have shifted business focus several times. Not only was our traditional SAN expensive, but we also had no confidence in the vendor. StarWind HCA is commodity hardware, so we eliminated the proprietary hardware issue. 

We also substantially reduced network complexity by eliminating that standalone SAN. That reduced complexity has allowed us to concentrate on improving other areas of our network.

Proactive support has been great, you will receive an email from StarWind soon after their telemetry service sees anything out of the ordinary with either the StarWind services or any critical issue related to your cluster of VMs. The appliance support goes beyond my expectations by helping with some Hyper-V issues that may not be directly related to the StarWind services.

The most valuable feature is its simplicity. It really isn't any more difficult to manage than a standard Hyper-V cluster.

Communication could have been improved during the implementation process. I've also been looking forward to further development of their management console which has been slow to materialize. StarWind is promising full cluster management and backup integration in a single-pain-of-glass console.

Possible new features could be CSV-level snapshot capability, Veeam integration, and maybe a more straightforward setup. Granted, you don't have to worry about setups with the HCA, but if you want to implement StarWind vSAN in a lab to test it is a tedious setup process.

We've been running our StarWind HCA for about two years.

Technical support has been willing to help and train even on simple questions.

We previously had a vSphere cluster with a standalone SAN. We wanted a less complex solution.

The initial setup is really easy. StarWind handles it.

In-house with StarWind help.

The HCA price is all-inclusive (setup, hardware, support, warranty), except for your standard Microsoft Server licensing.

We evaluated Cisco and DataCore.

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.

We use the solution as a high availability failover cluster in our data center.

StarWind HCA is much more reliable than our original failover cluster solution. Not even just by being more modern hardware, the virtual SAN allowed us to dramatically decrease our footprint and power consumption in our data center and is much simpler to manage. 

Any issues we've had along the way have been Windows issues as opposed to problems with the StarWind vSAN software.

Reliability and overall uptime are key as we're also hosting client environments in addition to our own. Bumps along the way have been resolved with the help of StarWind's fantastic support, and, as previously mentioned, pretty much any and all issues we've had have been Windows issues as opposed to their software, which their support has been happy to help troubleshoot and is refreshing to see

The proactive monitoring is nice. Knowing that they're watching for issues simultaneously with us. 

However, the response time is usually several hours after the issue occurred. Any disruption is felt immediately by the users, so we're already troubleshooting within a few minutes, and we reach out to support if needed before the proactive alert comes through to us.  

We've used the solution between three and four years.

We use this as our primary data center computing and storage cluster for small/medium businesses. The StarWind HCA serves our domain, email, SQL,  storage, files, and other miscellaneous analytics and automation needs.  

We run VMware on our nodes and we host Windows and Linux VMs. This cluster is a priority-one infrastructure component, it cannot fail or go down. We require quick compute as well as high I/O to support VDI users as well as general server type needs. This cluster serves the core of our business.

StarWind HCA has improved our business by ways of reduced management overhead, increased compute and storage performance, reduced rack space requirements, reduced rack power usage, and improved redundancy.  

The reduced management and improved redundancy are probably the most important as it directly increases the time staff can focus on other tasks  Simply put, StarWind HCA "just works". Furthermore, having ProActive Support as a "second set of eyes" allows us to catch issues without constant "babysitting".

We find the improved redundancy, two identical nodes that can focus independently, as well as reduced management both highly valuable.  

The redundancy of two identical nodes that can run alone allows us to have truly "no single point of failure" in our computing and primary storage infrastructure.  This allows us to handle updates or physical server maintenance without a degradation in performance.  

We also appreciate the lack of management needed to handle sync between nodes or just general housekeeping, the nodes just run and work! 

The overall product documentation and knowledgebase articles could use some rewriting and clarification. Sometimes the documents reference old versions which are unhelpful. Other documents were written and seem to be translated into English so the writing is not clear. 

I would also appreciate some more technical documents on how the HCA appliances function, how sync occurs, the use of PowerShell on Linux systems, and some other details. None of this would stop me from recommending StarWind though since you rarely need to review documentation.

I've used the solution for almost one year.

The stability has been great. We have not had the HCA system fail whatsoever. Minor issues are handled gracefully.

We see no issues with scalability. I doubt we will outgrow the system, although we do always like it faster. You can add more storage, more RAM, and more nodes as needed.

Service from initial questions and review, to demo, to purchase, and post-purchase support has been great.

Positive

We previously used standard computing plus a SAN system. We switched to reduce our rack space requirements and improve redundancy.

The setup was very simple. Support helped every step along the way.

This was done in-house. We have some technical knowledge. Again, support was very helpful.

ROI is hard to measure, however, so far, it has paid for itself in reduced management and improved redundancy.

The pricing is very competitive, especially with ProActive support since you gain a "second set of eyes" on the system to monitor for errors which allow staff to not focus on the StarWind cluster all the time.

We evaluated VMware vSAN, however, the cost was too high.