StarWind HyperConverged Appliance Valuable Features

Igor Beck - PeerSpot reviewer
IT-Administrator at Milchwerk Jäger GmbH

The straightforward management GUI and the compatibility catalog are great. You can add every StarWind system into one management GUI and have a complete overview of every system.

You can remotly manage new storage volumes and use the maintenance mode for moving your systems physically to other locations. 

You can practically add any NIC or RAM you want. The compatibility catalog is huge. We have a system with an Nvidia Tesla M60 and DDA which works great in combination with StarWind HCA. Also, we are mixing NICs from Intel, Mellanox, and Broadcom without any issues.

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NJ
Head of Infrastructure and Networks at a insurance company with 51-200 employees

The support is great. The guys in support are fantastic and the round the clock premium monitoring and alerting is brilliant. They are always on top of any alerts and quick to solve issues. Recommendations are well received for firmware and patching concerns. We also have the option of remote sessions and guided support. They are very helpful with any queries and pleasant to deal with, always responding in a very timely manner.  

The solution offers amazing availability. There are very few issues over the last few years. We have been running for years and have never had an outage with the HCA.  

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CR
IT Manager at Kanal 75

The simplicity and ease of managing the system are very valuable aspects of the solution.

The support has been very helpful.

We are not using any storage switch to our HCA solution so that holds the price down. That also limits other problems that a storage switch could cause. This reduces the complexity of the system as a whole and drives down the cost.

StarWind hardware is also easy to manage and monitor, saving time for my engineers and reporting any problems directly to Star Wind. 

The most valuable aspect of StarWind is the all-in-one solution that they provide.

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Buyer's Guide
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about StarWind HyperConverged Appliance. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.
RB
Senior System Administrator at Inflexion

StarWind's proactive support is my favorite feature. Having another set of eyes on our most critical piece of infrastructure helps us rest easy. 

Support is fantastic and has been responsive and helpful, and it always seems like you're talking to someone who knows their stuff without having to go through a scripted Tier 1 support experience. 

Their onboarding was fantastic as well. They did a majority of the setup work and provided as much help and guidance as I needed, whether that was them doing the work or providing guidance on how to configure myself.

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SD
Sysadmin at SUN PEAKS RESORT CORP.

The ease of use is great.

The solution is comprised of high-end hardware components.

The 24-hour monitoring is great.

The sales process is easy.

It is extremely reliable, has very very few issues, and has next to no downtime.

The deployment was very fast, and VMs were migrated without any downtime.

SSD Storage is very fast, and everything I want to do is very very speedy.

It is very configurable, with lots of different options.

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dchapman - PeerSpot reviewer
Technology Director at Tryon International Equestrian Center & Resort

Being able to upgrade machines and software during business operations just by switching nodes has been a huge improvement. We have had multiple servers to manage in the past, and any major updates would have to be after hours. This configuration makes it quick and easy to do Windows and software updates without any user being kicked out of applications or having to log back in. We don't have to schedule updates any longer for most products. We are super happy with the virtual environment and the support.

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DR
Director of IT at BLDD ARCHITECTS INC

Having already been familiar with StarWind there really weren't any big surprises but SSD will always be faster than spinning disk of course. I do like that I can manage StarWind with a console running on my local desktop. There is not a lot of management that needs to be done but it's nice not having to go to the Windows server running StarWind, since it is all running on an "appliance" now. I also appreciated the way support walks you through all the startup and migration phases. I appreciated that they were always there to assist and instruct.

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Carl Marshall - PeerSpot reviewer
Network Administrator at Winchester Utility System

Surprisingly, it's the support that's been most helpful. I'm a one-person IT department. I have monitoring in place, however, I need to sleep sometimes. There were issues with our backup software early on that resulted in VMs failing. I'm not going into detail as the issue was with the backup software, not the HCAs. 

I woke up to detailed emails that let me know what had happened, along with event logs and explanations about why it happened. Even though the issue was with the backup software, they were still invaluable in solving the issue.

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Brendan - PeerSpot reviewer
Technology Manager at Tryon International Equestrian Center

High availability with only two nodes has really been enormously valuable to us. Our infrastructure is relatively small and we really didn't need more than two nodes, however, for many reasons, we really needed to have high availability. Being able to accomplish that without extra hardware was huge. 

The ability to use whatever hypervisor that we wanted has also been very valuable to us. We were able to switch over to Hyper-V from VMWare and save on the licensing costs that we previously had with VMWare.

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DR
CEO CIO at Store & Haul Inc

High-availability is what I bought it for.

The hardware footprint size is good. They use Dell EMC boxes for the appliances. They're pretty standard for the industry, as far as servers go. I think they're good.

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CM
IT Manager at Projects Inc.

Nearly all of it is valuable. On a software level, it works really well. I've never had any issues with the hosts communicating with each other. The failover works perfectly. They set up everything on a software level and I've been very happy with it. They can monitor the software remotely and make sure everything's working with our Hyper-V cluster. Overall, I have been very happy with the setup of the software.

The hardware footprint is perfect. It fits in our rack perfectly and we were able to condense a lot of physical servers we had. It has greatly eliminated the excess stuff in our server rack. The footprint is completely acceptable.

We have the ProActive Premium Support and it has reduced our monitoring efforts. It has been very useful. They have been able to detect things such as when there's an issue with the cluster or they're getting some kind of weird reading that I have no idea about. They're really quick to let me know about it and even set up a schedule to address it. I've been very happy with their level of support on that. 

For example, they had messaged me a couple of times in regard to what they assumed was a bad block on our server. That could be very devastating if there is something actually wrong with our data — a corruption or anything like that. They went in there a couple of times and looked at it and made sure everything was okay. I would consider that pretty nice preventative maintenance.

When we first got the appliance, we hadn't done any major updates on the actual hardware itself. They recommended to me that we do an update on it. They pretty much did the whole process for me and that saved me a lot of time on software and firmware updates.

The Premium Support has saved me about ten hours of troubleshooting time. Whenever there's an issue, they're quick to reach out to me. I'd consider that a good value in terms of my time in general. There is less I have to worry about, as far as something going wrong with these servers goes, when they're monitoring it 24/7.

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AT
Systems Engineer & Cloud Specialist at myCRECloud | Cloud Application Hosting

The best feature is the StarWind Manager. It allows us to easily duplicate VMs and manage the infrastructure. Hyper-V is a little clunky, so their software allows for a more friendly interface and easier to manage your servers. 

Another feature I like is the ability to quickly failover in the event of any issues with the three hosts in the cluster. We have had small instances where we need to either perform maintenance on one of the three hosts, or one of the hosts is having an issue. When that is the case, we can quickly drain the roles and force all VMs off that host. 

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CF
Infrastructure Engineer at H. W. Martin (Fencing Contractors) Ltd.

It offers a simple setup. The servers come pre-configured and only require a small amount of setup. The support team is on hand to complete your installation and ensure everything is running smoothly.  

Remote support ensures someone is watching the servers, letting you know if a VM has lost connection or either host has had any issues so you can check the servers and work with StarWind to get the servers back up and running again smoothly. 

Easily expandable CSVs take only a few minutes to get increased.

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MD
Owner at Quo Vadimus LLC

One of the best features is how it just works. We had issues with our hardware on our servers; however, once we have the hardware issue fixed, the StarWind services would sync right up.

The documentation is also a plus. We were able to set it up via the documentation and only needed their support a handful of times.  When we needed help, support responded and followed up, verifying our setup was working correctly. We also used their knowledge base and found it very helpful also.

Not having to purchase specific hardware is a plus!

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BM
IT Manager at Sutton Group

The stability of the system has been the most valuable part. I never have to do anything, it just runs and runs and runs.

We haven't had any problems with Starwind, but some of our VMs have had issues and the proactive support from Starwind meant they knew about the issues before I knew and they were on it straight away. 

When we needed to make some upgrades to the server I contacted Starwind to discuss the changes and they were very helpful and easy to contact. The support is probably better than I have used compared to any supplier.

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reviewer1671795 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Director at Southeast Aerospace, Inc.

The high-quality hardware options, directly affecting performance, have significantly improved the user experience and are well worth the cost. Granted, the solution was cost-effective and reasonable compared to other "brand-name" solutions out there. 

24/7 support has also been extremely valuable. We are located in Florida and since we migrated to the StarWind setup only a couple of months ago, I've already had to reach out to them outside of business hours to walk me through the shutdown of our systems thanks to two hurricanes. I needed assistance due to my unfamiliarity with the hardware and software, and they were happy to oblige. It was a smooth experience, and I appreciated their help.

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Artur Eichmann - PeerSpot reviewer
Systemadministrator at WebID

We were looking for a solution that would allow live migration, however, we didn't want to spend a lot of money. We wanted an attractively priced system that offered all the advantages of a storage solution and not the disadvantages of having a highly available environment 365 days a year that would not allow any downtime. That's why we chose StarWind. It offered us a hyper-converged independent cluster with a complete package. A VM can be migrated directly in real-time in the event of a failure, and if a complete failure is imminent, a switch is made to the backup with 25 GB. 

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ML
Senior Systems/Network Administrator at Storm Industries, Inc.

The most important feature for us is the simplicity of the product. We are a small IT team and can't afford to spend much time managing and maintaining the servers/SAN.  

With our old traditional SAN, we had to manage servers and a complex SAN system that was connected to switches and then back to the servers. These three pieces made it very difficult to manage. We could not manage this on our own and had to pay third-party vendors to manage it for us. With StarWind, we do it all ourselves with the help of tech support.  

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ggazeley - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Manager at a construction company with 11-50 employees

The customer service has been the most valuable feature of the product to me. From the initial purchasing process to the initial setup and configuration to installing routine firmware updates years later. I've been consistently impressed with the quality of the support. It's easy to get a live person on short notice, and the reps always seem to know what they're doing.

Their software is also pretty user-friendly. After having support hold my hand a few times, I feel like I can almost completely manage everything myself. Still nice to know they're there to help, though.

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MR
General Do It All at Western Idaho Cabinets, Inc.

Support is the highest on my list in terms of great aspects. You simply cannot have issues, as they're on top of monitoring and resolution. 

Uptime is the second-best aspect of the product. The software solution is so solid, you don't really have issues; however, when you do, support is there to jump in and help you fix it. 

Honestly, with those two items, there's no reason to "not" use them. In my experience, you want your solutions to work, and when they don't, to get them fixed fast. It's a combo that StarWind has perfected and is the reason I don't even want to look anywhere else for other solutions.

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AS
Information Systems Manager at Innotech W+D

Instead of having multiple servers and managing them separately, we could have redundant HyperV servers. This creates efficiencies in terms of the management of the servers.

The central management of servers and StarWind software that can show us the health status of the servers are great. 

Product functionality and performance are wonderful.

Customer support is proactive and contacts us if anything needs to be paid attention to with good follow-ups.

The user-friendliness of the interface is great.

Redundancy of Hardware via RAID and power system is good for critical environments. 

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AH
Systems Administrator at a non-profit with 11-50 employees

The software itself is actually really simple. There isn't much to it at all. 

GUI navigation is simple and intuitive. UI Options are simple and easy to find. 

From one single interface, I am able to connect and or disconnect to any of our servers and see their current status. 

The UI itself lets you add targets, devices, etc. You can view recent events, performance, etc. 

A nice feature that was recently added was the StarWind Command Center. It allows you to manage all of your clusters from a single point. 

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MS
Senior IT Support Specialist at Seneca Family of Agencies

Having high availability is a must in our environment and works flawlessly. Their service is top-notch and if a node goes down they immediately are following up with us to make sure that everything is working smoothly. 

We have a massive amount of storage for future expandability. 

Being a small team the service that we receive from them gives us peace and mind and knowing that if something were to go wrong they would be able to step in and support us in getting the application back up and running as soon as possible.

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JC
Systems Analyst at The Bethany Group

The most valuable thing I have found is the 24/7 Support. Their support team is extremely helpful, and they are pretty friendly and knowledgeable. They monitor your hardware and provide support when you migrate to the new service. 

During our migration, we have sent multiple requests for support and made changes that have caused the network connection to flap. Within minutes of the nodes flapping, we would have a new ticket open with StarWind with them requesting information about the downed Node(s) and asking us if we require any support on getting them back up. 

The team has benefited us and offered support and documentation for the migration and general inquiries about their Hardware/Software.

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NC
IT Director at SSB Security State Bank

One of the most valuable things we have seen so far is that we can have all of our VMs fully synchronized to another host at all times of the day in real-time. We no longer have to run replication jobs from one host to another (just in case one of the hosts dies, or is unavailable). Now, we can rest easy knowing that if one of our hosts goes down, the VM will run automatically on the other host. It is easy to move VMs around and to find the right fit for memory/CPU usage. That said, we can run all VMs from one host if/when needed.

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DM
Works with 11-50 employees

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.

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AI
Director of IT at a computer software company with 201-500 employees

It's very easy to deploy and manage. 

I like the idea that the storage is virtualized and that StarWind is a software company with a product that can be installed on any hardware you want/prefer. It will work with any networking equipment you have. 

Their proactive support is great and just offloads the whole management of the hardware/software of the HCI for you. The updates to the new versions are very easy and straightforward. Best of all, it's done by StarWind support engineers so you don't have to worry about it.

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BG
IT Manager at Conestoga

Some of the features that have brought the greatest value have been the unified architecture, reliable support, and host monitoring. Not only do we have a unified platform that is simple to use, yet their level of support has been exceptional.  

The support staff was knowledgeable and helpful from sales to deployment and migrating our workloads. An added bonus was their monitoring service.  Anytime we have an outage or an issue with our StarWind appliances, we receive an alert from StarWind support. They also monitor for updates that our hosts and software need.  

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NB
System Engineer at Selux AG

It flat out just works. It requires very little time to administrate. The support is great; they can quickly install updates/patches when available. 

Most of the time, they send me notifications before I even know anything is wrong.  

We have had a few drives go bad, and they worked directly with Dell to get things fixed fast. This is one less thing we need to worry about daily.  It is also incredibly easy to take a host down for maintenance. Updates can be readily on one host while the other runs all of the VMs.

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DE
Director of IT at Kelly Aerospace, Inc.

The ability to balance servers across the appliance effortlessly and knowing that if we do experience a hardware failure we can keep on trucking is the most valuable aspect.

I cannot say enough about their support team. They are the greatest and extremely knowledgeable. Proactive support is a lifesaver.

The setup was simple and very fast. Servers came pre-configured for our environment and as soon as they were in the rack, Starwind got them up and running.

Monitoring the servers is a breeze and is possible all on one screen. This makes managing the environment super easy - even for a novice.

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SB
Global IS Admin at Benshaw, Inc.

The presence of built-in storage saved the company from having to purchase a separate storage array and related network equipment. When we looked at the costs for a storage array, they were somewhat higher than the solution from StarWind.

Knowing that the virtual machines will continue running in the event of one of the servers failing provides peace of mind. Also, having support readily available in the event of a problem helps as well.

We were impressed by all of the redundancy built into the solution to protect it from failures.

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KS
Systems Administrator at Hospice of the Western Reserve

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.

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RF
Systems Engineer / Systems Administrator

The redundancy, lower rack space footprint (no switches are needed for the SAN), and ease of management are the most valuable aspects of the product. At the same time, the technical support staff has been one of the most knowledgeable that I have ever seen. I purchased the support package where StarWind Support will support every aspect of the HCA - the virtual hosts/hardware, StarWind Software, and VMware vSphere/ESXi server software. The ease of installation was a plus and it was very easy to understand the concepts of the HCAs and the StarWind software.

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GJ
CEO at Geyma Sistemas de Informacion

For us, the greatest value that StarWind brings to Geyma and its clients is the proactive support of the implementation carried out. They monitor the servers, hardware, and services that are running at all times, notifying us very quickly if there is a problem with the implemented infrastructure and quickly triggering the alarms to be able to apply a quick and simple solution to the problem that may have arisen.

For this reason, we consider it a complete and reliable solution and we offer it to our clients.

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CS
Software Developer at CanPay Software Inc.

The solution is plug and play. I was very happy that everything was delivered all tested and setup ready to go. I simply racked the servers, plugged them in and called for setup. It's so simple.

The simple two 1U server setup with all flash disks connected together with an ultrafast redundant Mellanox nics is great. It has saved us space and increased performance. It also reduced the noise pollution and energy costs.

The proactive support is a very valuable feature. I have not yet had to use support for anything major, however, I have asked a few questions and there is always a prompt reply.

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RL
IT Infrastructure Manager at TPRG

The easy way everything can be configured and ready to run in less than a day is great. 

The support staff knows the product inside out and any issues that were thrown up they knew how to resolve immediately.

The ongoing maintenance and monitoring are key to the product catalog and allow for smooth and seamless ongoing use. 

It is helping reduce out-of-hours calls and it also helps with identifying predicted failure patterns, to assist in the very most uptime of production servers 365 days a year and 24/7.

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RP
IT Manager at Streeter Marshall LLP

The replication between the StarWind boxes. As I stated previously, although we have had no real issues, we have been able to simulate failures and be able to see that the failover kicks in immediately. 

This replication also allows us to perform maintenance easily on the ESXi environment for things such as software updates as we can quickly move all of the computing to a single server and shut the other one down without the need for any downtime during the working day. This means less time out of hours is needed to perform tasks that would have previously meant someone had to work late to complete them.

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JH
IT Manager at TrendHR

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. 

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MM
Director Of Information Technology at Rocco's Collision Center

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.

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CS
IT Support Manager at Chippewa Valley Eye Clinic

In our experience with StarWind, the support has been by far the most valuable feature.

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HM
Owner at Data Barn

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.

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CG
CIO at a renewables & environment company with 11-50 employees

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! 

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PT
Network and Information Systems Engineer at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

Live migration between nodes was quick and simple. The management interface was clean and intuitive. The system ran with no issues whatsoever, it never had any problems.

It was able to run all of our VMs without struggling one bit.

We were able to run Hyper-v and Failover Cluster Manager. Therefore we already knew how to use these, being Microsoft certified engineers. These fit easily on top of Starwind, in fact, the Starwind software is pretty much invisible in the background, running cleanly underneath the Hyper-V and Failover Cluster Manager.

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MT
Network Manager at Riverston Schools

The support is the most valuable feature. The support has been amazing. It's around the clock. One of our hard disks accidentally ejected without me knowing or being onsite. They called and told me about it before I had a chance to see it myself.

It has helped to increase redundancy and failover capabilities. The cluster is there, so I now have four levels of failover. If one of my machines goes down, there are two pairs of redundancy machines, so it fails over onto the next one.

The most important virtual servers have gone onto these new HCA. This is automatic so if one of these goes down, then the cluster would just take over and allocate to the next one. Even if I'm offsite, which I am quite a bit, we're still up and running.

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BP
Works

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.

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DG
Director Of Information Technology at a outsourcing company with 11-50 employees

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.

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RB
IT Manager at Bonitas Trust

What makes it valuable is the high-availability. In the education field, when you've got students in classrooms, any loss of service disrupts the lessons to a point that the whole lesson is affected. For part of the business which isn't business-critical, to have a little bit of a hiccup wouldn't be such a big thing, but here, it's the high availability of service that is important.

Also, the ProActive Premium Support has picked up some issues that we wouldn't necessarily have noticed ourselves because the depth of monitoring is pretty aggressive. You have to resolve those issues with StarWind by giving them updated logs, so it does put an onus on you that forces you to be doing a better job. But in terms of day-to-day monitoring, we still do that for each of the servers within it to see if there are any specific problems that are causing performance issues. Ours is probably more of a high-level monitoring than StarWind does in its ProActive monitoring.

So, there are levels to it. They come up with some good stuff in the ProActive monitoring that we wouldn't necessarily have noticed very quickly. The upshot is that you then have to work with them to troubleshoot that issue.

We still have to do a lot of stuff that StarWind doesn't do in their ProActive monitoring, but it gives us peace of mind that somebody else is watching the services 24 hours a day, so that we're notified if there's a potential issue. All the issues that we've had have been potential problems that have been picked up and resolved before they became problems. That's the real positive spin: Because it's proactive, it's stopping you from actually having the issue that would affect end-users.

We do use network monitoring tools to monitor the network and the core processing of all of the servers in our environment, including the StarWind, but we do leave the higher-end stuff to the ProActive Support guys. There are only two of us who are full-time in IT in our organization, so we can't really afford to have bought into something that would have had a big overhead in terms of day-to-day management. StarWind is one of those things that, once it's set up and working properly, there are some checks that you would do naturally on a daily or weekly basis, but there's a whole raft of reporting tools and you're notified if there's a potential problem. It is a put-it-in-and-off-you-go kind of thing. Once that initial commissioning has been done and it's in and working, it's pretty seamless.

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RM
Interim CTO at Royal Koopmans

The most valuable feature is the high-availability. We have three nodes, and all data will be synched instantly through all the nodes. Even if we had a disaster where two nodes failed, containing dozens of critical machines, almost automatically, all the loads would be run on the remaining node. So it features high-availability and provides business continuity. They are the most important elements for me.

It's also fine-tuned, so the performance is the second most valuable feature. It provides great performance. I've only seen I/O performance like this in solutions that are ten times more expensive than the StarWind solution. In the SMB market segment, you cannot sell Dell EMC-like solutions. Thus, StarWind would be the best solution with the best price for the performance that you receive.

I only have three nodes, so the footprint is very small, yet I can provide all the IT services that the company requires, including a very demanding ERP system. It would fit in a half-rack if you put everything in one place. But of course, it's high-availability, so you have to spread it between locations. But the footprint is really small.

In addition, we have full support from StarWind, 24/7. They know about issues in our environment before we know about them. They see, for instance, network errors before we do and what implementations we have. They send a message to us and our engineers respond with a local, physical check on what is happening. Although the environment of StarWind is great, the overall network environment of the company where I'm working is not so good. StarWind notices when there is something wrong in the network, an issue which might affect the performance or the availability of the StarWind solution. We instantly know whether our problem is in the network, before we actually know about it ourselves, by their sending us emails about the site being down or an error.

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CK
IT Manager at a transportation company with 51-200 employees

The fact that it has eliminated a separate SAN has been really handy. We moved away from an older SAN and that's one of the reasons we got this. The synchronization has also worked really well. From a feature point of view, it does what it's supposed to do and that's the best you can hope for.

The ProActive Premium Support feature has helped for sure. If there's an issue that we don't know about, we get an alert email. They are very proactive. Where it has created an even greater benefit for us is purely on support. If we have a problem, I can send an email and within an hour somebody's trying to set up a remote session with us.

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JE
Server Administrator at John Wood Community College

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.

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HY
IT Director/Senior Software Developer at Hillis-Carnes Engineering
  • 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.
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AE
Systems Administrator at Wilkin & Guttenplan, P.C.

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

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reviewer968163 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Operations Manager

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.

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reviewer1462674 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Network Engineer at inSync Computer Solutions

The configuration we purchased was built on Hyper-V, so there was no additional training for staff. The rest of the management tools are on Windows, so anyone with a little bit of IT background should be able to figure it out.

The full suite of redundancy gives a nice sense of security for the whole environment. Support has been stellar and we're notified of an issue before we even knew about it. We worked with support to get parts replaced and delivered the next business day and there was no downtime to the users!

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reviewer1390521 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Service Supervisor at VIP Technology Solutions Group

The most valuable feature is its Proactive support. They monitor the health of the cluster and hardware and reach out if they see anything out of the norm. They will then work with us through the entire resolution process whether it be a hardware issue or an issue with the StarWind vSAN services. If the issue turns out to be hardware related they will then work with the hardware manufacturer and get any replacement parts needed. Their techs are also very knowledgeable and have always been able to resolve any issues without any kind of long drawn out escalation process no matter the time of day.  

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EJ
I.T. Manager at a real estate/law firm with 201-500 employees

It's flexible. There are so many other solutions that have got very specific requirements, like vSAN from VMware and Microsoft S2D. Those tend to be very specific in terms of their requirements. This is more flexible. We had two separate servers that were not the same spec and the ordered solutions required that at least these specs should be very close. We didn't want to go out and buy new servers. And so, in that sense, it's flexible. It can run without those strict restrictions that other ones have.

It didn't require some of the high-end components, especially with regards to the NIC cards and the storage. In other cases, they require SSDs or a mix of SSDs and hard drives. In this case, it doesn't. 

Basically, it's fairly flexible, and it wasn't expensive compared to the others. If we had gone with another option, it would have taken a lot more money in terms of getting what we wanted.

The support is excellent.

The UI is very good. I know that you have the option of not going with the UI and then just use the PowerShell-based admin options. However, the UI just adds another level of simplicity to the whole thing. 

The sales guys are good. They tell you what you need and they don't oversell their product or anything like that. They tell you this is there, this is there. They are easy to talk to. I've had relations with them for quite some time.

The solution is very scalable.

The stability of the product is very good.

The initial setup seems to be very straightforward. 

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reviewer1442208 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Manager at Westmoreland Mining LLC

The support has been impressive. 

The option to deploy a hyper-converged system without an expensive storage switch was a benefit. This reduces the complexity of the system as a whole and drives down the cost.

StarWind hardware is also easy to manage and monitor, saving time for my engineers. The most valuable thing about StarWind is the all-in-one solutions that they provide. 

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DR
Works

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.

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RF
Systems Admin at a tech vendor with 201-500 employees

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.

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AL
IT Infrastructure Analyst at a retailer with 201-500 employees

We bought their ProActive Premium Support. That's why they email us when we have rebooted to patch, and they check with us that everything is okay. We've not really had any problems with it, so it has not really presented with any real-world benefits yet. Obviously there are benefits to it because it's monitored. We do monitor stuff onsite, but it's good to have backup. We're a small team so that is one of the major benefits of it.

The software is great. It's very easy to understand. I've not delved into any of the command-line stuff, but there's no real need to script it. Since it went in, pretty much the only thing that I have needed to do is increase device image sizes, and that process is very straightforward. As part of the installation, the StarWind representative took me through it. We just migrate everything to the other server, put it into maintenance mode, increase the size, and commit.

There really isn't any maintenance. It's fairly self-sufficient. 

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AW
Civil Engineer at Crossroad Engineers, P C

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.

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PG
Technical Consultant at GMA

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

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reviewer977253 - PeerSpot reviewer
Works at a non-profit with 1-10 employees
  • Proactive monitoring and support
  • The ability to achieve high availability.  
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reviewer1026594 - PeerSpot reviewer
Works

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.

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Buyer's Guide
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about StarWind HyperConverged Appliance. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
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