StarWind HyperConverged Appliance Reviews

We use the StarWind HCA primarily and in its entirety to serve as our primary hyper-converged infrastructure in order to serve all of our virtual servers. In this environment, we have an RDSH server farm utilizing GPU cards. We also utilize backup software that connects directly to this environment. Being able to have our entire environment run on a single platform by a single vendor both hardware and software is huge for us. We don't have the time or resources to go to many vendors or have them point to other vendors as issues.

This solution improved our environment from an increased user experience and administrative experience. We have had much better uptime and product speed since switching to the HCA platform by StarWind. Our organization has required less 3rd party resources and software to provide speed and flexibility to both our IT staff and our end users. The solution specifically allows us to focus more of our time on software development and process changes utilizing the hardware, as opposed to supporting the hardware itself.

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.

I have not had any issues or roadblocks as of yet that require any improvement. Everything that I have needed has been available in the product. 

The only issues are when Hyper V itself has limitations and I'd love to see support or enhancement in the area of direct-attached GPU cards. It would be great to see even more detailed analytics and scheduling reports of such to keep a focus on when and if we need to upgrade the environment.  

It would also be cool to see support in the GUI for more 3rd party add-ons.

I've used the solution for almost one year.

We used Scale Computing. We switched due to the fact that we were too restricted with Scale Computing.

We have found StarWind to be well over 50% more cost effective.

We also looked into Nutanix and Scale.

We are a small to mid-sized Eye Clinic that in 2015, had to upgrade our Patient Management & Billing system. Deciding to stick with our current vendor, we migrated to their “cloud” product, which is a hosted RDS Farm solution.

Our two-year experience on their “cloud” was coupled with numerous outages and continual slowness issues on a weekly basis. In 2017, we decided to bring the system back on-premises and so we began looking for a solution to run it along with our other virtual machines.

Fault-tolerance was the primary requirement in our search and having worked with VMware vSAN in the past, we knew that it would be a viable solution, albeit one that would exceed the budget. That's when we discovered the StarWind HyperConverged Appliance, a two-node highly available solution that fell within the allotted budget.

We purchased the StarWind solution and it ran flawlessly for two years, then in late 2019, the unthinkable happened. Our clinic caught fire and the building and all of its contents were destroyed. Knowing we had offsite backups, we just needed the hardware to restore our servers.

In contacting our StarWind account rep, they completely understood the circumstance we were in. They accelerated the order, build, and shipment of the new two-node appliance. As management worked on obtaining an alternate building to restore the service of treating our patients, the servers were delivered to my home so that the restoration process could begin.

The StarWind engineering and support staff were a tremendous help as they assisted in the restoration process. Knowing that StarWind will drop and do what’s needed to help a customer in dire straights has won us over as a faithful customer for life.

Thank you, StarWind!!!

Having a two-node, fully redundant host appliance solution that has been 100% reliable makes it easier to sleep at night.

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

When we purchased the StarWind HyperConverged Appliances, they shipped with the Windows-based vSAN solution. Since then, they have released vSAN for vSphere, which is based on a Linux VM and would save us money as we would be able to get rid of the two Windows Server Licenses.

In the future, it would be nice to be able to migrate from the Windows vSAN to the Linux vSAN without having to do a full restore from backups.

We have been using the StarWind HyperConverged Appliance solution for four years.

I'm a value-added reseller for Microsoft. I do some other stuff on these HCAs too, but that's the easiest way to describe it. 

I'm providing a remote workspace for a special, select subgroup of clients who are running a pretty specific product called Infor. I'm pretty experienced with hosting and supporting this particular product, so I decided to also wrap a value-added reselling business around it so that I could give them a full remote workspace, instead of just support for their product.

We're running virtualized workloads for 300 or 400 users at this point. Our goal is to have them log in every day in and run all of their day-to-day work on these virtualized workloads.

The solution has probably saved me 100 hours of implementation work. 

In terms of support, we're probably on the low end of requirements because we don't have a lot of advanced stuff going on. We just have virtualized workloads, so once they're configured they're done. But we've had a couple of longer support cases, and over the course of a month, it has saved me, on average, six to eight hours. That's as a one-man shop. If we grow and we start adding more HCAs, I imagine that that time saved increases pretty linearly. The support is really a convenience. I could always schedule my own time to take care of issues, but if there's a minor storage or networking issue, it's nice to bring someone in. 

The major way it has changed our organization is that we came from a four-node, pure Microsoft setup, where we were using Storage Spaces Direct. StarWind is able to run on two nodes, so the hardware cost is quite a bit lower. They include support, so I don't need to keep someone on call in order to handle storage issues. And the fact that they were able to over-spec us for a reasonable price has meant that, over the past six months, I haven't had to worry about overhead and I haven't had to worry about budgeting any more systems. We have enough headspace to expand another 50 percent or so before I'll ever need to invest in direct processing hardware again. And when I do decide to invest more in hardware, I'm perfectly confident that they would just ship us a ready-to-go unit that can be plugged in with three cables and it's off and running.

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.

That situation, where Dell EMC servers were going down, has been my only real difficulty. I do understand that we were using refurbished Dell EMC hardware, so that may have played into the difficulties we were having. But at the end of the day, it ended up being something that the wider audience of Dell EMC was actually aware of as an issue. Neither the StarWind technicians nor the Dell EMC technicians were able to actually identify that problem sooner than a week or so. I found after, doing my own diagnosis and my own technician work, that there was actually a solution out there that many people Dell EMC's forums were aware of. The communication between Dell EMC support and StarWind support, in that particular scenario, left something to be desired, for me. 

I did express those concerns to StarWind and they were very responsive to that. They seem to really appreciate the feedback. I'm hoping that there has been a change that has already been enacted by them as a result.

We installed in March of this year, so we're relatively new. I believe we got refurbished, seventh-generation HCAs.

The stability has been great, with the exception of that one issue I mentioned which seemed to be Dell EMC hardware-specific. That even spoke to StarWind's stability in the sense that we had one host going down regularly without downtime.

We've had zero issues directly caused by StarWind. Everything is contained within the VM guests. Those are just configuration and Windows Server problems. This is definitely the most stable hardware we've had, and I've been involved in this business for eight years, on various stages of hardware. These past six months have been the lowest in terms of overhead so far.

The scalability seems really good. I haven't hit the need for scalability yet, but it seems to scale pretty linearly with the exception of storage. 

The idea is that all the storage is needed between all the hosts. So if we needed to increase our processing capacity, that would scale perfectly linearly. We would spend another X dollars to increase our capacity by 50 percent with an identical server.

I haven't explored storage capacity yet because we're a pretty low-storage-capacity company. But it seems like, with their additional products that aren't HCAs, their storage arrays, that you would be able to increase storage capacity on level with your costs as well. So you're not incurring a lot of overhead for interconnectivity or additional redundancy. At least that's my impression.

At the moment we're probably at 60 or 80 percent capacity across the board in all system resources, including networking. It's a really even 60 or 80 percent. If we can grow the business by another half next year, we'll be at 100 percent capacity. At that point, it would start making a lot of sense to look at adding another host because, if one fails and we have to fail over, we would effectively need to throttle everyone backed by 50 percent.

We don't use the proactive part of support a whole lot but that's really because we're a very simple setup at the moment. They've come to me a couple of times when they noticed some things going wrong, but that's usually when I'm in there reconfiguring things or rebooting servers. When our proactive support expires we'll probably renew because of the fact that they've been really on top of issues, whether or not I've already been aware of them. 

The part where support has really saved a lot of time is not really directly due to the proactive part of it. It has had to do with the fact that when I do need help, if storage is running slower, or if I see that there's some kind of memory-usage issue on the hosts, they're usually back to me in probably half an hour, at the very most, with a solution.

The main thing I've enjoyed from them is the really fast response when I do need help with reconfiguring or the like. I actually just reached out last week to try and make some networking changes. I got a response in about five minutes and I had an actual solution, with an advanced-tech ready to help me, within about 30 minutes. I don't know if that has anything to do with the proactive part of their support but I would imagine — putting myself in their shoes — that having a customer who is part of proactive support probably accelerates their response a little bit.

I've been really impressed with StarWind so far. They've been really helpful.

I haven't had to talk to StarWind at all for about a month. The last thing was a major networking upgrade request and I was really pleased with their response time. From a small-shop perspective, this is probably the best experience I've ever had in terms of the backing hardware for the services we provide. It's been very nice.

The solution this replaced was all home-brewed. It was all running on a Windows Server. We had a backplane connected to a few different storage area network arrays. It worked well but it incurred quite a bit of overhead just to manage it. If you've ever heard of people working with just Microsoft Failover Cluster Manager with backplanes, it was a bear, both to physically connect and to manage.

The concept of an HCA was actually kind of new to me, at the time. We had been under the practice of putting processing and volatile memory on one box and putting all of our storage into other boxes. That introduced some issues with single points of failure: If your switch fails then your storage is done and if your network switch fails then your communication is done.

I had started researching Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, which I believe was a new feature in 2016. StarWind must have a lot of search engine optimization related to Storage Spaces Direct, because they ended up coming up, really early, as an alternative. They're very active on Spiceworks and they were constantly in threads about Storage Spaces and putting their product out there. I ended up researching them and the total cost of ownership, hardware-wise, was possibly a little bit higher than bringing up your own, but the fact that support and configuration were included in that price, made it a slam-dunk for us.

The implementation was fairly simple.

I had a really big, heavy pair of Dell EMC server boxes delivered to my workplace. I had to schedule some time to go physically into the data center, which is hosted two miles away from my office. The entire installation procedure was really a matter of unbox, throw the rails in, throw the servers on the rails. Each server then needed two power cords and two SFP connections between the servers themselves. And, bare minimum, they need one management connection to whatever your local Cat 5 switch is. That was it. That was really all that that needed to be configured, hardware-wise. 

Once those were up and running, we spent maybe 45 minutes just getting the initial Hyper-V configuration done, and I was off and running. I was able to create and migrate VMs at will. No downtime, no reconfiguration, and literally nothing else.

All together it took about two hours for completely setting up the hardware and getting Hyper-V ready to create guests.

We didn't have an implementation plan. Physically, we had room in our racks and spaces for the power supplies and the cables. The only planning was that I gave StarWind a half-day's heads-up that I was going to get everything installed. They were on the phone and on a remote support session at pretty much the minute that I was ready to do the software side of things.

I enlisted some help to get things physically installed. Once that was done, it was just me and one StarWind engineer. We had to be on the phone for about an hour in total over that entire process. It was just me and that one person. They seem to have their process petty down pat. He was flying through the configuration and I was just sitting in the back seat watching.

We haven't seen ROI yet because we're a pretty low-sales company. We're just sticking with who we have at the moment because we need some more people who are experienced with this Infor product in order to grow the business much. I would expect that we will break even with our hardware investment within the first quarter of the coming year.

That's not bad at all because that will end up being almost right at the one-year mark. Even if we had to throw those servers in the trash at that point we would be at zero loss.

In terms of the hardware pricing, we ended up going with refurbished machines because we're not in quite as critical a situation as other service providers may be. The pricing is pretty comparable between StarWind and other solutions, if you're just talking about hardware and a general support plan. The value starts to come back in a very real way with StarWind when you talk about the reliability of both the hardware and the support structure itself.

Our entire package was around $35,000 for everything, including three years of support.

We evaluated other options and, overall, the thing that made us go with StarWind was really the community involvement, mostly on Spiceworks. They're on Reddit too. Seeing how active they were in proactive troubleshooting and in answering sales questions for whoever was asking was a big deal. The fact they had extra manpower to handle that kind of stuff speaks really well to how efficient their support structure is.

Look long and hard at your current hardware. There is a significant utility in sticking with a single vendor for stuff like this. If you are at that point where you need to refresh pretty much your entire environment, or a significant portion of it, I would say you should seriously look at StarWind because they would potentially be able to take care of just about everything, hardware-wise, as long as you're a small enough shop and you're ready to really commit.

Up until implementation, in March of this year, we were very reliant on ourselves and sub-contractors to support the hardware configuration and make sure everything was up and running. We had to be super-proactive about being on top of Microsoft issues because anything that is 100 percent reliant on Microsoft can go completely haywire if the wrong Windows Update runs. So the biggest change, and the biggest thing that we learned, is that it's nice to be able to rely on an external company, as long as they know what they're doing. We've been able to call StarWind for anything to do with the framework we're built on or anything to do with the substrate that Hyper-V is running on, no matter what happens, and know they're going to take care of it.

I'm the only one dealing with administration or maintenance of the HCA and it will probably stay that way, just for security concerns. It's a lot easier to stay compliant if I'm the only person that can do any of that. We do subcontract to other people for support of our customer VMs, but that's a whole different game. That's all built on the StarWind framework.

StarWind is an easy 10 out of 10.

The number of physical servers in our environment was quickly growing. It seems every new software package we purchase needs a web server, utility server, and database server.  

We started searching for a hyper-converged solution and went with StarWind.  

Since we implemented the solution four years ago, we have had zero downtime and have not had the need to add any new physical servers to our environment. This has completely stopped our server racks from growing out of control.  

We only have two hosts and have only needed to upgrade storage and RAM.

We were able to consolidate our ever-expanding server rack down to two hosts.  We have not needed to purchase new physical servers in four years. 

The only purchases we have made are additional RAM and storage drives.  

This has been a massive cost saving for us. We now only need to worry about server licenses and not costly hardware when taking on new projects.  

Also, the time it takes to admin the system is slim to none. Support handles the upgrades. The hosts came preconfigured, and it was plug-and-play.

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.

We have had a great experience with StarWind, and it is hard to find much that needs to be improved. 

The 24/7 monitoring is good but not great. There is a bit of a delay in receiving the emails. We are in a bit of a rural location, so we occasionally will lose internet. We typically receive emails from StarWind to notify us that our system is down a few hours after the outage.  

The monitoring and report software is a bit hit and miss. I don't use it much as it is a bit slow and buggy. 

I've used the solution for four years.

The stability has been rock solid. We have experienced zero downtime. 

The solution is endlessly scalable.

This is the first solution we have implemented into production.

Hosts came preconfigured and required a short phone call with support to set up.

The implementation was done over the phone with support.  

The setup is very simple. The hosts came preconfigured. Everything was up and running for about an hour on the phone with support. 

The price seemed a bit cheaper than comparable solutions. 

We looked at Scale, Nimble, and Nutanix.

It is a great solution. We will definitely be using them in the future when it is time for new hosts.

We mainly use this as failover and to not have the expense for additional or separate storage. 

Our environment is pretty small and with less than 50 users. We only have two servers in the failover cluster that are part of Starwind Storage. 

Prior to Starwind, we always had to schedule maintenance windows and have all of our services down. Compared to before, our downtimes have decreased substantially and maintenance windows have almost been eliminated. Not to mention, I no longer have to come in on weekends.  

Prior to Starwind, we always had to schedule maintenance windows and have all of our services down. Compared to before, our downtimes have decreased substantially and maintenance windows have almost been eliminated. 

It's also been really great that we can schedule maintenance on the servers themselves during on-hours. Since we are able to migrate our VMs from one node to another, this makes it really simple. 

Of course, there is also the fact that if a node goes down, we have one to back it up and continue with our day without management worrying.

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. 

There really isn't much to the software itself. It's not something I use on a daily basis and mostly only when needed. I'd have to say I am usually tinkering with the software maybe on a monthly basis, if that. 

The only area that the product could improve would be user training. I've had to learn most of the ins and outs by myself or by asking questions when I have to get tech support involved and that's pretty rare.

I've used the solution for five years.

Support is top quality and their response is exceptional. It's probably one of the best supports I've dealt with. 

Positive

No, we did not use a different solution previously.

It was straightforward and not complex at all to set up. It did take a little bit of time for the setup, however, we never ran into any issues. 

Implementation was done through a vendor.

The cost wasn't a huge issue for us as it was purchased as a bundle. 

Yes, we looked at other options, however, we needed something ASAP and this was the best solution overall.

We were looking to replace a large amount of older physical servers and move to a smaller footprint with a lot more virtualized systems. We also wanted to be able to increase the uptime of our server by being able to failover between nodes. 

We had all our eggs in one basket - a single powerful Hyper-V server running VMs which ran our business systems and customer systems. If that machine had died our business would've died. We implemented HCA and were then able to load balance and have resiliency for all of our systems across the infrastructure estate. 

We initially ran with a demo system, a couple of older servers with some high-speed network cards configured using the Starwind software - which was provided as a demonstration even with some technical support for a number of months, so that we could try the system out. 

We had some very niche bespoke software that we provided to the recruitment industry, which in turn used some bespoke indexing and categorizing software that was very picky on how it runs. Starwind amazed us by being able to host this bespoke software on the HCA and failover between nodes with Live Migrate without any issues whatsoever.

Starwind HCA allowed us to provide customers with a much higher service level. We could guarantee 99.999% uptime. Previously, we were not confident enough to offer this. 

We were able to reduce the footprint of our physical servers in the datacentre, by virtualizing most of them and running them as VMs on the HCA. We were therefore able to reduce costs in the datacentre.

We also had peace of mind in that we were able to retire a lot of older hardware and consolidate on to brand new powerful hardware. 

It also looked fantastic in the data center.

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.

Perhaps the initial configuration and documentation could be a little clearer and simpler to follow. It is a little fiddly and easy to make mistakes. I remember that I had to follow the instructions very carefully during the initial setup.

Also what is slightly disappointing, although understandable, is that the demo/free version of Starwind vSAN reverts to "command line only" and limits access to the GUI when the trial license runs out. Perhaps this license time limit could be extended to allow further evaluation time.

We have used the solution for four years.

The solution's stability is absolutely faultless.

From what I understand, it can be scaled up and out as required - although we never needed to do this. Scale up by adding more RAM, more CPU and more disks. Scale out by adding more HCA nodes. If we had more budget we would've added more RAM to the nodes, or added an additional node when we initially bought the system.

Technical support is absolutely fantastic, always eager to help, and technical support was fast and concise.

Positive

The initial setup is straightforward, although it is a little fiddly and tricky to follow. It's best to implement this when you can't be interrupted.

We handled the implementation in-house.

We saved a lot of money by reducing the data center footprint by half.

This is the best value HCA available. 

We also looked at Nutanix and HPE Simplivity.

If you are looking for an HCA solution and other vendors are proving excessively expensive, I would advise companies then take a look at Starwind instead.

We were running out of storage on our on-prem servers, so originally the HCAs were brought in to combat that and relieve some of the load on the veteran machines. Our file servers, along with one of our file storage, have moved to the HCA. I have put our Exchange server on it and the backup of the domain controller is on it as well.

We are using the latest version. We just implemented the HCAs. We added clusters and have moved some of the old virtual machines onto these new HCAs.

To have someone looking at the alerts when the network, or at least when the HCAs go down, this means I don't have to keep checking the clusters and virtual machines to make sure everything is playing ball. It's peace of mind that I don't have to keep checking and administrating that. Eventually, I will have a lot more use from it. I'm right at the end of the setup stage, but I'm still allocating resources from these HCAs into the virtual servers. So, I have not gotten the full run out of these yet.

I have seen improvement in my system’s performance. Our Exchange servers are behaving a lot better. Our system is a lot quicker. We were having delays before, where emails were taking two to three minutes. That is a lot longer than you would expect. Now, sitting on its own allocated HCA, it is almost instant. Therefore, email service has improved. The original use for this was just to increase our storage capacity, which it has done very nicely. I suppose we won't have to look for storage now for a long time.

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.

The only real flaw that I have seen so far is this hard drive that was accidentally ejected because when it was received and added back into the RAID. There was an error there. It was not added back into the RAID correctly, so I have an outstanding hard disk. Apparently, a guy just knocked it with his hand as he was in my office, so it was just a small eject. He said that he didn't crash into anything. That is the only thing that has reared its head. The support team was straight on it. I have people coming out this week to replace it because remotely they couldn't add it back into the RAID. I think maybe the HD got corrupted.

I have all the ports I need in the back. When you're sitting them next to each other for replication between HCAs, it's quick because it has these dedicated iDRAC cables in the back. However, this means I can't have them in separate locations. We could run it through the network to replicate the regular gigabyte Ethernet, but that would be quite slow, especially with the setup. I don't really know how you would change this because I've got a large site. My original on-prem server is quite far away just in case there is a fire (or whatever), so the other one could pick up the redundancy. Having them next to each other defeats the purpose slightly if there was damage localized here, because I would lose both of them at the same time.

We have been using it for about three months now.

We did not install it straightaway. We were waiting for a couple of bits, so it was a late install.

The stability is good. I have had no downtime nor issues. You don't have to maintain it.

The only time I heard from the actual support was when that hard drive went down. As that was caused by a physical thing on our end, I can't really say that was a stability issue.

I sort of overbought on the storage needed for what I thought we would need in the future. The scalability is there. One of the main reasons I went with StarWind is because we can just keep adding. Possibly, in the future, our other sites will get added as well to have one centralized system. Though, I've not asked them about the specifics of what that would entail. But its scalability is definitely there, and hopefully, we won't need it for a long time. We might though as we have used a lot more data than I thought we would use so far.

As it stands, this is the setup that we will be using for a while.

They are great at monitoring.

The Proactive Premium Support has helped to free up an employee, as I'm the only one here at this company. It's a big company with a few schools attached, and obviously, my time is critical. I probably would've been knocking my head a lot longer than necessary, but Boris knew what he was doing and jumped straight in. We had a couple of hiccups and he knew what he was doing every time.

Transfer time was a big time saver when we were migrating the data server, because it was huge. Originally, it was only hooked up to the one gigabyte per second Ethernet going to the domain switch, then back. Because that would have taken forever, support talked me through how to do this another way, step-by-step.

I'm not 100 percent that we have the Proactive Premium Support. I'm fairly certain that we have the Proactive Premium Support, but it could be that I've just been dealing with the standard support. In which case, it's amazing. If it's the Proactive Premium Support, then it's great as well. It's around the clock, very friendly, and informative. While I've only spoken to Boris, he never seems to sleep.

It fits into our racks very nicely. Before, we had a couple of data modules which were plugged in. They were huge, bulky, and heavy. They didn't fit in the racks. This is the replacement to those data modules. It was by looking for an alternative that I got turned onto StarWind in the first place. StarWind’s support system, along with the way it plays nicely with Hyper-V and the existing setup, makes it nice and tidy. I've had no overheating. The fans have been nice and quiet as well. The ventilation is on point.

My reseller, Softcat, tipped me onto this solution. I asked them for data storage plugins and this is what they suggested. They were the one that turned me onto StarWind.

It's exactly what I was after when I started looking for these type of appliances.

The setup of the actual hardware was straightforward. Adding it to the existing network was complex. It would have taken me maybe a week of work to get the end result, instead having my hand held through the whole process was invaluable. It saved me a lot of time.

There was lots of different sessions involved with the deployment. If you put them altogether, it took probably a day as we had to stop and break. I had to go do other things and Boris also had to do other things, so we did the deployment in bits. 

The implementation strategy was loose. As long as it was off hours, so I could switch a bunch of machines off, that was essentially it. As long as I had this approved from Boris, that was our strategy. I looked at what resources we needed on which virtual machines. Then, I made the decision on what to transfer over, moving the most important things over.

I had Boris (from StarWind) for the setup, and he was amazing. We have the Proactive Premium Support, since we paid extra to get it. I probably wouldn't have been able to set it up on my own to get it to play with our existing network and on-prem setup. The support guys were sending me photographs and explaining some of the basics that I probably should have known. They have been great.

Kudos to Boris. He has been great, supportive, friendly, and dedicated. 

I am the only person using and maintaining the solution.

It's not really in place of anything that would be costing us. We just had to upgrade because the storage was basically kaput. Savings-wise, I don't think it will save us any money, but it's not going to cost us anything more either.

We might see ROI from time saved. But I'm the only employee, so it'll probably take awhile to cover enough of my time to make that money up.

I was quite hesitant to buy these, and I don't know why. There is a bit of a start-up cost. Having never used HCAs before, I was reluctant to buy it. I would suggest that you jump in and do it, as I wish I hadn't wasted so much time.

We did look at other options, just not HCAs. We looked at static storage to plug straight in.

I spoke to Softcat about alternatives, but they said StarWind was getting glowing reviews from very similar networks across education. So, I felt that I would give them a try. Their presentation was really good, and they seem friendly and very knowledgeable. Essentially, that's what I needed - someone to help me move through the process since I hadn't added HCAs before.

Compared to other solutions out there, StarWind was cost-effective. For example, we would have had to buy at minimum as much as these HCAs cost us going forward, if not more. 

The biggest lesson that I learned was I should have started as 1st Line Support. There was a situation where our old network manager had to leave quite suddenly, and there were definitely holes in my knowledge. So, I learned quite a lot just through the setup, Boris talking me through different types of connections, and some Hyper-V stuff. I suppose that I also learned a lot about HCAs in general and how they fit into network clusters since I hadn't touched on clusters before.

I would rate it a 10 (out of 10). I'm very happy. It's exactly the solution I wanted to the problem, then extra on top.

We are currently using StarWind HCA to build out a flexible, distributed storage system. We had a myriad of file, application, and database servers that ranged from physical to virtual. StarWind helped us consolidate and make the necessary physical to virtual server moves (P2V), and the entire process was very pleasant.

This system also allows us to achieve high availability (HA) across the entire IT infrastructure that we are responsible for, which was a major driving decision. This was all completed at an affordable price point for an SMB, which was also a key element for an NPO.

The solution has allowed us to focus on streamlining our IT Infrastructure. We no longer need multiple staff members performing small, mundane tasks. We have ProActive support and alerting that takes care of our day to day infrastructure management. We were able to consolidate a number of servers and truly cut down on our overall storage costs.

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.

The only thing my team has recommended improving on is possibly a StarWind-customized GUI to monitor the overall system health, similar to 5nine Manager.

There is nothing else I would recommend improving because everything from sales, installation to post-install service for the past year has been great.

One year.

Previously we used a mix of physical and virtualized servers. This was antiquated and inadequate for our organization, so we gave StarWind a try.

For organizations such as ours (NPO), the Microsoft Hyper-V route was too affordable to pass on. Some of our team prefers VMware, but Hyper-V has been pretty good for us with StarWind.

We evaluated other options before choosing this solution, including some time we spent working with Scale HC3, and a little with SimpliVity.