Learn what your peers think about StarWind HyperConverged Appliance. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: October 2024.
How quickly the StarWind solution replicates also gives us the confidence to know that in the event of catastrophic failure of any piece of hardware, we won't be far behind before things went wrong.
CIO at a renewables & environment company with 11-50 employees
Real User
2022-05-04T15:17:00Z
May 4, 2022
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.
Systems Engineer & Cloud Specialist at myCRECloud | Cloud Application Hosting
User
2022-05-03T21:07:00Z
May 3, 2022
The StarWind array has greatly improved our workflow internally as it is quite easy to use and provides robust features that allow us to provide anything our clients need quickly and efficiently.
Server Administrator at John Wood Community College
User
2021-10-11T16:10:00Z
Oct 11, 2021
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.
Director Of Information Technology at a outsourcing company with 11-50 employees
Real User
2021-05-16T19:25:00Z
May 16, 2021
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.
Director of Technology Services at Lees-McRae College
Real User
2020-05-27T19:11:00Z
May 27, 2020
However, StarWind HCA won us over in two areas: price and support. We were actually able to install an all-flash StarWind HCA for less than other vendors' spinning rust solutions! We were able to roll five years of warranty and support into the purchase price and still save thousands of dollars upfront.
Systems Admin at a tech vendor with 201-500 employees
Real User
2020-01-29T11:22:00Z
Jan 29, 2020
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 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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
IT Infrastructure Analyst at a retailer with 201-500 employees
Real User
2019-10-30T06:14:00Z
Oct 30, 2019
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.
IT Manager at a transportation company with 51-200 employees
Real User
2019-10-20T10:33:00Z
Oct 20, 2019
Overall, the solution has improved our system's performance. I was concerned about the physical-to-virtual conversion of our database server. It's actually much faster now, as a virtualized host on this Hyper-V cluster.
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...
Systems Administrator at Hospice of the Western Reserve
Real User
2019-08-29T09:32:00Z
Aug 29, 2019
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... StarWind was able to provide a solution for what we wanted, - to provide for redundancy.
For SMB, ROBO and Enterprises, who look to bring in quick deployment and operation simplicity to virtualization workloads and reduce related expenses, our solution is StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA). It unifies commodity servers, disks and flash, hypervisor of choice, StarWind Virtual SAN, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct or VMware Virtual SAN and associated software into a single manageable layer. The HCA supports scale-up by adding disks and flash, and scale-out by adding extra...
StarWind's proactive support is my favorite feature.
The high-quality hardware options, directly affecting performance, have significantly improved the user experience and are well worth the cost.
Having this all backed up by pro-active support gives us good peace of mind.
The product runs wonderfully and has already gone through several failure tests.
Being able to upgrade machines and software during business operations just by switching nodes has been a huge improvement. We
Repair efforts have been reduced to nearly nothing.
StarWind is very resilient and built off of quality vendor hardware.
We were able to set it up via the documentation and only needed their support a handful of times.
How quickly the StarWind solution replicates also gives us the confidence to know that in the event of catastrophic failure of any piece of hardware, we won't be far behind before things went wrong.
It improved all services running on the new cluster and took up less space and less energy.
UI Options are simple and easy to find.
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.
The setup was easy to deploy, and management is simplified compared with traditional SAN solutions.
The StarWind array has greatly improved our workflow internally as it is quite easy to use and provides robust features that allow us to provide anything our clients need quickly and efficiently.
With proactive support, StarWind deploys and configures the solution for you.
It did not hurt that the price for the hardware and three years of support cost less than the disparate hardware the cluster used to run on.
The solution has easily deployed instances for multiple fast-paced projects.
The most valuable aspect of StarWind is the all-in-one solution that they provide.
The pricing and discounts given by Starwind on the hardware were unmatched.
The low cost of this solution has also made a big difference in our budget, which has been very helpful.
We run probably 16 virtual machines, and all of them are now highly available, and highly redundant.
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.
The initial setup seems to be very straightforward.
The sales process is easy.
We opted for 24-hour monitoring and support, which has already paid for itself.
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.
The presence of built-in storage saved the company from having to purchase a separate storage array and related network equipment.
The full suite of redundancy gives a nice sense of security for the whole environment.
The option to deploy a hyper-converged system without an expensive storage switch was a benefit.
With StarWind's Proactive monitoring we can go about our day helping our customers and not have to worry about our cluster's health.
However, StarWind HCA won us over in two areas: price and support. We were actually able to install an all-flash StarWind HCA for less than other vendors' spinning rust solutions! We were able to roll five years of warranty and support into the purchase price and still save thousands of dollars upfront.
In our experience with StarWind, the support has been by far the most valuable feature.
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 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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Overall, the solution has improved our system's performance. I was concerned about the physical-to-virtual conversion of our database server. It's actually much faster now, as a virtualized host on this Hyper-V cluster.
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...
High-availability is what I bought it for.
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... StarWind was able to provide a solution for what we wanted, - to provide for redundancy.
The initial setup is straightforward once you know what you're doing.
We no longer need multiple staff members performing small, mundane tasks.
This solution came preconfigured. All we needed to do was plug it in and move our VMs.