StorMagic SvSAN Reviews

As a small oil and gas company operating remote sites, including offshore oil rigs worldwide, we manage our software using StorMagic's SvSAN products. Each rig has a server running SvSAN to handle all software operations.

StorMagic SvSAN is flexible and easy to use. It is compatible with various hardware, including Cisco, HP, Lenovo, and Supermicro. The company is also flexible with its recommended specifications, allowing users to exceed them without issue. I have not encountered any problems with StorMagic SvSAN on any hardware vendor I have tried.

The cost of hardware required for StorMagic SvSAN is significantly lower than that of competitive solutions. Their licensing model, based on storage usage, offers flexibility and affordability. For instance, we utilize a two-terabyte license. Overall, StorMagic SvSAN's pricing is comparable to, if not more affordable than other options.

StorMagic SvSAN supports various storage types and brands within a cluster, accommodating past and current technologies. Over the years, we've transitioned from traditional spinning disks to SSDs and now utilize NVMe SSDs, with StorMagic seamlessly supporting each upgrade. While faster drives inherently deliver better performance, StorMagic has consistently functioned without issue across a range of drive types and brands.

Hardware flexibility is as crucial as cost, especially for a smaller company like ours that needs to adapt quickly. With hardware frequently changing, upgrading, and involving different vendors, maintaining flexibility and consistency is essential. Having a solution that works the same way across all vendors, whether it's Cisco or HP, significantly benefits our small support team.

Witness effortlessly manages up to 1,000 SvSAN clusters. While we haven't personally utilized that many, it has effectively handled our multiple clusters without issue. The software's hardware requirements are very flexible. It reportedly runs on platforms as small as a Raspberry Pi. We currently operate it on a small HP desktop computer with excellent results, and it scales seamlessly with the rest of our system.

The primary advantage is its two-host architecture, requiring only two hosts plus a Witness for full functionality. This contrasts with competitors who necessitate three hosts, significantly increasing costs. Avoiding the need for a third host translates to substantial savings, estimated at $20,000. Although StoreMagic's costs remain high, the ability to eliminate a host and its associated expenses results in considerable cost savings.

This Edge Control provides a simple, visually appealing dashboard for easy administration of all clusters. The well-designed interface ensures clear and understandable cluster management.

It provides immediate benefits after deployment.

StorMagic SvSAN significantly reduces downtime in our environment by allowing us to perform maintenance or system updates without disrupting user access. With SvSAN, we can seamlessly switch all running machines to a secondary machine, ensuring continuous operation and eliminating noticeable downtime for end-users. This has resulted in substantial savings on maintenance costs and provided peace of mind regarding system reliability.

StorMagic SvSAN helped us save costs by eliminating needing a third witness host. Their pricing has remained relatively consistent over the past ten years, with only a modest increase of about 10 to 15 percent. Despite this, their pricing is still very competitive, and they have been proactive in helping us find ways to save money. While I would always like to see even more cost savings, I understand that they need to make a profit as well. We've likely saved 30 to 40 percent annually by using StoreMagic, simply due to the cost reductions in hosting and maintenance time across multiple sites.

StorMagic SvSAN provides a hyperconverged high-availability solution with enterprise functionality, and that is all we use it for.

Our use case is that we have small manufacturing sites that require some kind of edge technology to provide virtualization. Bigger platforms do not fit and are very expensive for these small sites. We chose StorMagic SvSAN because it is easy to implement and maintain as we do not have permanent IT staff on these sites.

StorMagic SvSAN has allowed us to create robust and cost-effective hyper-converged platforms on our edge manufacturing sites where reliability and high availability are critical for our production.

As a distributor, we primarily resell and implement StorMagic SvSAN for our customers and partners, specializing in storage solutions for the SMB market. We also collaborate with partners who have expertise in StorMagic.

StorMagic SvSAN is more user-friendly than other software-defined virtual SAN solutions, especially for smaller businesses.

It is capable of working on any hardware, making it cost-effective.

StorMagic SvSAN allows the use of any storage type.

The Witness feature, which can handle over 1,000 clusters, is helpful for our clients.

StorMagic SvSAN offers a distinct advantage over its competitors by including the stretch cluster feature. This functionality, not commonly found in rival products at cost, enhances data availability and disaster recovery capabilities.

It is not difficult to administer all of our storage clusters using Edge control. 

StorMagic SvSAN is the right management tool for StorMagic and enterprise customers, providing a cost-effective solution. It reduces downtime by about 40 percent.

StorMagic SvSAN offers cost savings compared to other software-defined virtual SAN solutions. It has significantly improved the organization by providing reliable support and straightforward configuration procedures, benefiting both my enterprise and SMB customers.

StorMagic SvSAN is a hyperconverged, high-availability solution with enterprise-grade functionality. Its vendor—and hardware-agnostic design makes it a cost-effective choice for businesses seeking high availability.

StorMagic SvSAN is deployed in ROBO locations for many clients worldwide, typically running on two VMware ESXi hosts. For example, I have configured StorMagic on HP servers.

We chose StorMagic SvSAN for its cost-effectiveness, ease of management, and straightforward installation and troubleshooting processes.

StorMagic SvSAN has no specific hardware requirements, but local drives on each server are necessary, starting with two or three. Since deployments range in terabytes, scalability is essential. StorMagic offers a flexible licensing model starting at 12 terabytes, allowing for easy expansion by purchasing additional licenses as storage needs grow.

StorMagic SvSAN offers cost-effective hardware requirements compared to competitors like VMware vSAN and Nutanix, which can be expensive. 

SvSAN boasts no hardware dependencies, allowing installation on various compatible servers from HP, which we are using, Dell, and others without specific hardware needs. This flexibility makes it an accessible and budget-friendly option. Additionally, the licensing costs for SvSAN are significantly lower than those of VMware vSAN.

We utilize the Witness feature on our third node, an HP StoreEasy NAS solution, where we perform configuration similar to a Windows Witness.

We have a dedicated witness, not shared among all sites. Each site has its dedicated witness.

StorMagic SvSAN is a cost-effective unified solution that has undergone rigorous testing and validation in our labs. We conduct thorough proof-of-concept trials before proposing this solution to customers, ensuring it is a reliable and robust option with minimal issues.

StorMagic SvSAN has saved us 20 percent of our time and costs.

We have not encountered any downtime caused by StorMagic SvSAN.

We use StorMagic SvSAN primarily to provide a cost-effective hyperconverged system for my clients using VMware. This reliable solution, designed for small and medium-sized enterprises, allows them to leverage various storage types and brands within a cluster without limitations.

We implement StorMagic SvSAN for our clients because it is a cost-effective solution that meets all their needs.

StorMagic SvSAN has lower hardware requirements compared to competitive solutions.

The StorMagic SvSAN has simple hardware requirements for getting started.

StorMagic SvSAN's flexibility allows clients to utilize any storage type and brand within a cluster without limitations.

The witness feature is great because it can handle up to 1,000 clusters.

We use the stretch cluster feature for all of our customers.

One of StorMagic SvSAN's biggest advantages is that it includes all features as standard, eliminating the need for add-ons. This comprehensive licensing model allows users to build both single-site and stretch clusters without incurring additional costs.

StorMagic SvSAN has improved my organization by offering a modern Graphical User Interface, ensuring reliability and minimizing maintenance efforts. The main strength lies in simplifying customer processes by reducing the need for additional storage systems, thus saving costs in server hardware procurement and maintenance.

We aim to achieve high availability, and 100 percent uptime, and StorMagic SvSAN helps us accomplish this.

StorMagic SvSAN is a cost-effective solution that eliminates the need for customers to purchase additional storage systems. Instead, they can utilize simple server hardware with sufficient disk capacity and high-performance disks, reducing overall expenses.

The purpose is that since I work for a manufacturing company globally, our requirement was to install smaller VMware clusters in our production plants around the world. We can't, for production and business reasons, move to a whole cloud environment because some specific software and applications need installation on-site. At the moment, we have this small two-node VMware SXI cluster in five global locations: Flint in USA, Brazil, India, China, and Germany. We use StorMagic to virtualize and provide a hyper-scale environment for these two nodes instead of buying dedicated storage. StorMagic resolves the issue of having to buy specific storage for the nodes. We use the StorMagic board to visualize and share between the two nodes.

First of all, it's flexible, easy to deploy, and very stable. It simplifies and reduces basic maintenance and deployment projects, which is important for us due to the huge amount of activities to handle. For our solution in production plants, stability is crucial as it can be challenging to have dedicated facilities for our servers and IT staff. It is a stable and robust solution. Compared to features about hyper-scaling and storage optimization, it's also cheaper, which is very useful, especially in this period. Overall, it is the right solution for our needs.

I use StorMagic SvSAN technology in conjunction with VMware servers to enable the sharing of local storage among multiple hosts.

StorMagic SvSAN's Witness feature effectively monitors the status of hosts, determining whether they are online or offline. This is its primary function.

The stretch cluster functionality is essential to the SvSAN system, and it performs as expected.

StorMagic SvSAN provides storage clustering capabilities and effectively monitors host availability.

StorMagic SvSAN's monitoring console, Edge Control, remained easy to administer even after extended periods of inactivity, such as several months.

The primary benefit of StorMagic SvSAN is its cost-effectiveness compared to its competitors. We saw this benefit immediately after deploying it.

StorMagic SvSAN reduced downtime in our environment by 50 percent. We use it on two hosts. Without SvSAN, any updates would require taking a host offline, affecting all its hosted VMs.

The benefits became more clear over time. I liked saving money per location. That extra 10,000 dollars we did not have to spend per location was great, but I did not initially realize how hands-off and easy it was going to be. Once it was set up and some time had passed, I saw that it just sat there, worked, and did exactly what it was supposed to do, and I did not have to think about it.

We use SvSAN's Witness feature all the time. I have read that it can handle up to 1,000 SvSAN clusters, but I have not pushed it to anywhere near that limit. It is great, and that is why you do not have to have a third server like you do with the VMware solution. Witness provides Quorum for the storage group that you are building, so you have two servers that contain the storage and are members of the group, and then you have this third member that is off-site. As long as that third member is reachable and the Witness can reach the two various members of the group, you have Quorum. It allows you to detect and respond to failure within a group if there is such a thing.

We only compared the capacity of Witness to similar features in competitive solutions, such as vSAN, in theory. The vSAN solution from VMware requires a whole separate third server, and that would be per instance. For every remote branch we have, we would have had to have another 10,000 dollar server as opposed to going with SvSAN where we could just have two servers and then have one Witness that services all of our StorMagic installations. It is not just per branch. That one Witness covers the whole enterprise, so it saved us a lot of money.

I believe that the use of StorMagic has reduced downtime. We have not had a whole lot of failures. It has saved us time, particularly, because I am able to do maintenance on the member servers without having to bring down an entire site. If I have those two servers running StorMagic, I can do maintenance on one of them while the other one uses StorMagic to keep presenting the shared storage and keep the virtual machines running so that I can do the maintenance I need to do. I have not used a competitive solution in the field, so it is a little bit hard for me to quantify the reduction.

StorMagic has helped us save on costs. It has saved us the server cost because we have to have one less server per site. We do not need the third server. That is an 8,000 to 10,000 dollars investment per site. It also saved us the cost of the 10-gig top racks that we would have had to use with other solutions. We did not have to buy that. I do not know exactly how much that is, but that is a significant expense as well. The fact that SvSAN allowed us to use a two-node cluster as opposed to requiring a three-node cluster with a 10-gig switch saved us significant amounts of money on hardware per location. Based on the rough pricing of the types of servers that we are using in the 10-gig switch, we saved at least 12,000 dollars per site because we used SvSAN.

StorMagic SvSAN provides a hyper-converged HA solution with enterprise functionality. The cost-effectiveness is great. It has saved us a lot of money on hardware, and I have had absolutely no problem convincing my bosses to continue using it because it does what it says it is going to do. It is a set-it-and-forget-it piece of software, and it saves us at least one-third on every installation we do with it just because of not having to buy that third server and 10-gig switch.

It is cliche to say it, but it really is a set-it-and-forget-it software. I set it up, and the few times I have had to call support have just been because I have not had to touch it for a while, and I forget how to do certain things. The part I like most about it is just that it does not require a lot of touch. It does exactly what it is supposed to do, and it is straightforward.