StarWind HyperConverged Appliance Reviews

We primarily use the solution just for redundancy. It provides higher redundancy options so that if the server goes down, the other one picks everything up.

The high availability has really benefited the organization so far. You don't need two separate servers. If something were to go wrong with one of the servers, it automatically brings the other server up. It's sort of having a production and a spare, and then when production goes down, you bring up your spare if it takes a bit of time. However, this process is automated. Basically, one goes down, the other one comes up. You don't even know, except via the fact that you get alerts. The servers are on and they are on continuously. Nothing is ever down.

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. 

We have to pay for support, which is high-end support. That can be expensive, at least for us. It may not be that much for others. 

I've been using the solution for four or five years.

The solution is very stable. We've not had any issues with them. We've been using them for at least four years and we've not had any issues with them.

It's very scalable. We are using it for two nodes, however, there's no reason for the product to not support three, four, or five nodes. You just have to scale in the number of VMs that you need and you just add more servers, really.

We have about 100 users on the solution currently.

We do not plan to increase usage. We do plan to move to the cloud. 

Support is great. You can call them anytime if you have issues and they'll respond to you. They are easy to deal with. Sometimes they even let you know that "Hey, you need to do this and that." 

Our servers are continuously monitored 24 hours/seven by them. That way we know when things are getting worse before they actually get worse and before we are no longer able to react. We basically are able to know things before they go down and we can fix them.

We also use Microsoft as well.

The initial setup is easy. It's not overly difficult. 

You only need one person to maintain the solution once it's up and running. Our network admin handles everything. 

We had our engineers work with Starwind to implement it. It was very easy to work with them.

You can pay for support. If you decide to pay the extra amount for premium would depend on how critical your servers are and if the servers were to go down, how much you're going to lose compared to the cost of the service support.

We don't have any licensing costs. The only thing, with a perpetual license, is that we do pay for the support.

We're customers and end-users. 

We tend to update the solution often. We try to use the latest version of the solution.

In the future, we do plan to move to the cloud, and when that happens, we will no longer need this solution.

It's a good product. It's reliable. The post-sales support services are great. This is a very flexible system, it works with basically any hardware. I'll definitely recommend it. What the others are doing is more expensive, and it can do everything with more flexibility and probably less cost.

I'd rate the solution at a ten out of ten as it meets all of our requirements. 

We had non-virtualized and old infrastructure that needed to be upgraded. We use HCA for all of our servers.

We successfully migrated to a virtualized environment, storage performance was increased, and now we had a redundant, failure-tolerant infrastructure. With ProSAFE support, we are sure that our infrastructure is safe and we don't need highly specialized personnel to monitor our infrastructure 24/7.

StarWind HCA delivered us a complete solution that works out of the box. We received everything we needed to get it up and running.

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.

Better overall monitoring software. Maybe integration with Windows Admin Center was a good direction to go with on monitoring software.