StorMagic Software and Solutions

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.

It could be a little bit more intuitive in terms of the way you set it up initially. The interface has recently undergone a revision. I have been using the new version for only a few weeks now. The older version of the web interface for StorMagic SvSAN was a little bit clunky and not as intuitive as it could be. The newer one is a little better, but it is still a little bit clunky in places.

I have not tried the centralized control called Edge Control. It probably addresses some of the issues that I have in terms of centralization and not having to log in to individual members in order to administer them. I have not used that yet, so I do not know how well that addresses the issues that I have. Currently, I have to log in to the individual StorMagic SvSAN members in order to administer them to update the software and see their status.

It has been about three years.

We have not had any lagging or crashing. We use SvSAN in a way that is not incredibly stressful on the product. It is a medium use case in terms of the amount of data that is flowing back and forth, but we have not noticed any lag or crashes based on SvSAN. When you get a power outage at a branch, that is not SvSAN's fault.

We have only used it in the one configuration that we have, and that was just with the two-member servers. We did occasionally look at adding a third member when we needed more storage or more processing power for a cluster, but we would have had to get into a little bit more complexity in terms of networking to do that because we are not using a 10-gig switch. We are directly cabling the servers together, so scalability is a little bit difficult. In the way we are using it, it is a little bit difficult to scale, but that is an intentional choice on our part. If we used a 10-gig switch, scalability would have been easy and fine, but the way we are doing it with direct cabling inherently makes it less scalable. I do not see that as a downfall of the product. It is a known limitation of how we are using it, but it saves us 12,000 dollars for installation, so we will take it.

It is great, and I do not say that lightly. I have worked with a lot of support teams over the years, and theirs is small because I end up getting the same people regularly, but they are very responsive. They respond quickly. They always follow through till the problem is actually solved. They are very clear. They know very much what they are talking about. They are willing to remote in and help in real-time, so their support has been excellent.

Positive

It is on the machines. The Witness can be in the cloud. It can be in your own data center. It can be wherever you want. The product itself runs on the local servers.

For its implementation, we went through a beta period with the test equipment, where I tested it out and learned how it worked, and I had help from support in doing that. Once we got to actual production, it took only a few days. It probably took us three days to get the hardware out there, get it all set up, and work with StorMagic to make sure that we were setting it correctly for the first one. It was about a three-day process initially, and now, I can certainly do it in the afternoon.

One person can deploy it. After the deployment, SvSAN requires very little maintenance. They send out software updates occasionally, but I found that the software update process is pretty simple. You just upload it to the individual servers. You use their Web GUI to deploy it, and that is the end of it. It is straightforward.

It is a fair trade. It is a little bit expensive at first blush just in terms of the initial licensing cost. I have been in the tech industry for a long time. I have worked for startups, and I understand that the licensing cost is how you pay the bills. They have to have money to develop their product. While it is less than other solutions, such as vSAN, for instance, it is still significant. However, it is well worth it in terms of the quality of the product and the support that it allows me to have. We are buying the flagship product from them. We are always buying premium support and all the features that we need, so it is a little bit steep upfront, but it is less than other solutions and comes with excellent support.

SvSAN's licensing model is based on usable storage capacity. It is a lot more intuitive. If I need 12 terabytes of storage, it is counterintuitive to me to have to think about how many CPUs the server that I want the storage for has. It does not make sense to me to consider processing power and the number of CPUs I have for processing in the licensing cost of a storage product. It seems a lot more intuitive to think about how much storage I need.

We have remote branches in various different places where we need VMware clusters, and we wanted to have shared storage for those clusters. We looked at VMware's vSAN product, but we did not go for it because these remote locations are space-constrained in some cases and have harsh operating environments. We are a shipping company, and these are warehouses with small server rooms. We found out that VMware vSAN required us to have three servers in order for their vSAN product to work, and it also required that we had a top-of-rack 10-gig switch. That added significant space and expense to the layout or the footprint that we wanted to have, whereas, SvSAN only required us to have two servers and did not require a top-of-rack 10-gig switch. We talked further with them and just ended up going with their product for remote branches, and we have loved it so far.

With SvSAN, it was a little bit of a learning curve for me. It was a little bit complex to start with just because I had not gone too far into that world previously, but their support was very good at walking me through the process, explaining what they were doing, and getting me set up. It would have been a little daunting if their support was not as good as it was at the initial setup.

It costs us significantly less to use SvSAN. We did not have to buy three servers, and we did not have to buy a separate 10-gig switch in order to make it work, which was the case with the VMware vSAN solution. It was significantly less for us to go with SvSAN just in terms of hardware.

In terms of the hardware and brand flexibility, we have not had any restrictions. We are pretty much using Dell hardware with their RAID controllers and no particular brand of SSD hard drive. We have not run into any limitations that way. If we were locked into a particular thing, that would be a problem. It would not feel great. As long as it works with whatever Dell is putting out at the moment, it would be okay for us.

I have not used the Stretch Clusters feature. I have also not used SvSAN’s management and monitoring console called Edge Control. I have seen demonstrations of it. I have not tried it yet.

To a colleague at another company who says StorMagic is a relatively small, less-known company, I would say that it is true, but so far, that has not been a disadvantage at all. In fact, it has been an advantage. Their support team has a relatively small group of folks, but they are very knowledgeable and very responsive. They get the job done well. It is true that they are not a huge company, but that has not been a detriment so far.

I would rate StorMagic SvSAN an eight out of ten.