PeerSpot user
Operations Manager at Lipman Insurance Administrators Inc.
Real User
Has excellent support in the rare case you need them

What is our primary use case?

StarWind is the highly redundant storage solution for our company-wide hardware agnostic Hyper-V environment.

How has it helped my organization?

StarWind VSAN allowed our small business to build a fault-tolerant storage architecture using SSDs and off-the-shelf chassis that is high-performing, high-functional, fault-tolerant, highly available, reliable, and easy to use. Best of all, we achieved all of this for a fraction of the cost of other solutions. For eight years now, StarWind has been extremely reliable and easy to use.

What is most valuable?

  • Very simple to use
  • Hardware agnostic
  • Extremely reliable
  • Feature rich
  • Cost-effective!
  • StarWind also has excellent support in the rare case you need them.

What needs improvement?

Encryption: I would love to see "at rest" data encryption as a new feature for organizations like mine looking for ways to simplify this mandated compliance issue.

Buyer's Guide
StarWind Virtual SAN
May 2024
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For how long have I used the solution?

More than five years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

We have not had a single major issue in eight years of using StarWind. Every release upgrade has been seamless and required no downtime. It has saved us from multiple hardware failures with no downtime. A truly redundant, reliable solution!

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Very easy to scale. I am not aware of any limitations.

How are customer service and support?

In eight years we have never needed support for an issue with the software. I have called a handful of times to have them confirm my understanding and review my configuration.  They have always been very helpful and thorough. A+.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

No.

How was the initial setup?

Very simple to use. Most of the UI is self-explanatory but StarWind's website has easy-to-follow documentation and recommendations, and their support staff is one of the most thorough and patient I have had the honor to work with in this industry. A+.

What about the implementation team?

In-house with minimal StarWind support.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

I have not seen any other storage solution that delivers the features that StarWind does for anywhere near the price. Licensing and support costs are very simple and straightforward.  

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

Dell EMC, Nimble, 3PAR.

What other advice do I have?

Make the switch to StarWind! Your life will be much easier, and you will have extra budget to spend elsewhere!

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Arcwell R. Hernandez - PeerSpot reviewer
Director/Solutions Architect at TechOps Trinidad & Tobago LTD
User
User-friendly and flexible with good support
Pros and Cons
  • "It has improved our organization in terms of its uptime as our main cluster has never been offline due to a SAN failure."
  • "It could have a dashboard so that you can check all servers' SAN health and performance."

What is our primary use case?

This solution was implemented for a Hyper-V production build, where we used StarWind virtual SAN to create and build a redundant DataStor for our clusters. Once this was completed, management and troubleshooting were simple as the application is very user-friendly and highly flexible in terms of configurability. We have never encountered any issues with this product, as it is very reliable.

How has it helped my organization?

It has improved our organization in terms of its uptime as our main cluster has never been offline due to a SAN failure. This is a huge plus for us as we need our data available 24 /7. 

What is most valuable?

There are not many futures I can recall that would stand out to me the most, as the entire application functions as one working function.

What needs improvement?

It could have a dashboard so that you can check all servers' SAN health and performance.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using this solution for approximately five years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The solution is very stable.

How are customer service and support?

very good

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We did not previously use a different solution.

How was the initial setup?

Technical support was more or less straightforward.

What about the implementation team?

it was done in-house

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We did evaluate VMware.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises

If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?

Other
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Buyer's Guide
StarWind Virtual SAN
May 2024
Learn what your peers think about StarWind Virtual SAN. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: May 2024.
772,679 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Virtualized Solutions Engineer at Quanti solutions
User
Top 20
Improves processes, is user-friendly, and has an intuitive interface
Pros and Cons
  • "The management and monitoring have been very easy since the solution's dashboard is very simple and user-friendly."
  • "They need to improve the speed of the interfaces, thus allowing for better traffic on the network."

What is our primary use case?

The solution can be used for configuration and management as well as a backup repository.

I have used it for Veeam Backup and Replication and VMware NFS Datastore and it has really worked well.

One point to highlight is how easy it is to configure and manage. You don't really need to be an expert. However, it is important to know the storage concepts.

Simply by following the intuitive interface, you can configure your devices. Following a tutorial, you get the basic administration you require.

How has it helped my organization?

The process of choosing this product was not very difficult. It fit what we were looking for and it fulfilled the technical requirements for the project. As for the IT department, the management and monitoring have been very easy since the solution's dashboard is very simple and user-friendly.

What is most valuable?

In the implementations that I have carried out with StarWind, something that is noteworthy is the way in which it impacted the processes based on the way the solution was chosen to how it was implemented.

What needs improvement?

They need to improve the speed of the interfaces, thus allowing for better traffic on the network. They should continue with the development of protocols such as LACP that allow aggregation and maximal connectivity.

As for the V2V converter, it would be a good option to develop it not only as a converter but as an option for the migration of virtual machines between platforms, creating integrations with Azure, AWS, and GCP. 

It could even be a way to migrate machines between HyperV, VMware, Nutanix, and other virtualization and hyper-converged environments.

For how long have I used the solution?

I've used the solution for four years.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We had indeed tried a different solution, however, we opted for StarWind. Qnap did not have everything we needed at the moment.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

The cost-benefit ratio is really well balanced.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We looked into Qnap and Synology.

What other advice do I have?

This is a very user-friendly product that works well overall.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Application Engineer at Rakuten
Real User
Easy to use with good data replication and very helpful technical support
Pros and Cons
  • "The fact that the solution is vendor-agnostic allows it to be used with any virtualization vendor while remaining a powerful abstraction over storage."
  • "StarWind Virtual SAN architecture is slightly complex and requires the team to carefully identify and study how the solution integrates with VMware vSphere."

What is our primary use case?

Our team was looking for a reliable and cost-effective solution for our VMware vSphere platform.

VMware vSAN wasn't an option due to cost and scalability issues.

Enabling storage high availability across multiple nodes was our top priority as we couldn't risk having any downtime in case a node was to fail.

We ideally wanted a dedicated set of tools to administrate and perform maintenance on our hyperconverged storage.

That solution had to be as platform agnostic as possible so that we could reuse it with another vendor.

How has it helped my organization?

The product provides a robust and cost-effective alternative compared to other available products.

StarWind Virtual SAN allows our team to aggregate our cluster storage in a scalable way without seeing an explosion in the licensing costs.

It let us decouple our hyperconverged storage from the actual virtualization plartorm.

As an agnostic software solution, StarWind Virtual SAN could be re-used in other projects across different teams with another virtualization vendor. That aspect was key to the success of our department as all teams were able to work together.

What is most valuable?

Data replication is useful as it enables storage high availability on the cluster.

The fact that the solution is vendor-agnostic allows it to be used with any virtualization vendor while remaining a powerful abstraction over storage.

There are easy-to-use tools for the administration and maintenance of hyper-converged storage.

StarWind Virtual SAN also let us fine-tune the desired level of replication across all nodes, allowing the administrator to specify a custom number of fault to tolerate across the cluster nodes.

What needs improvement?

StarWind Virtual SAN architecture is slightly complex and requires the team to carefully identify and study how the solution integrates with VMware vSphere.

Tooling is spread across web UI plus desktop clients which can sometimes be confusing as the team isn't always sure which tool to use during maintenance procedures.

Also one drawback, when compared to VMware vSAN, is that StarWind Virtual SAN requires a lot of network interfaces in order to provide the same data replication and node redundancy features.

For how long have I used the solution?

I've used the solution for one year.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

We have never encountered any bug or problem that would bring the cluster down.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

We are very happy with scaling, especially regarding licensing.

How are customer service and support?

Technical support is very responsive, helpful, and friendly.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We did not use a different solution previously.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup was a bit hard to do by ourselves as there are many moving pieces and tools to operate. However, support helped us a lot with setting everything up.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

I'd advise users to consider the scalability of the project as licensing can become a problem with competitors' products.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We did ook at VMware vSAN.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
reviewer1378515 - PeerSpot reviewer
CIO at Sheremetevo Security
Real User
Updates to server hardware are now painless and done during working hours with zero stress
Pros and Cons
  • "Updates to server hardware are now painless and done during working hours with zero stress. We had a RAID failure a few months back, and nobody in the building even noticed and there was no after hours time used for repair."
  • "We would like the documentation to be more complete. Most items are covered, but if you don't know something, you may need to contact their support."

What is our primary use case?

We are using VSAN in our cloud environment to provide CSVs to the Hyper-V Group. We are using a converged environment, so we have two commodity class servers configured as a high availability StarWind cluster and then we have many Hyper-V compute nodes that access the CSVs from the StarWind cluster.

We can use Veeam to back up and replicate the virtual machine files from the CSV/cluster.

We use SPF + 10 GbE modules off the shelf and 10 GbE switches off the shelf. We were able to create a redundant network infrastructure to support our SAN network.

How has it helped my organization?

Creating a high availability cluster required the configuration of the cluster on our hardware and the shared space to access the files has improved my organization.

Using the StarWind VSAN solution allowed us to reduce costs by using equipment that we already owned.

StarWind has allowed us to virtualize our environment without the huge expense of a dedicated SAN, putting cluster technology and its benefits within our reach. Server downtime was a constant threat to our operation before StarWind but has never been a problem since.

What is most valuable?

Updates to server hardware are now painless and done during working hours with zero stress. We had a RAID failure a few months back, and nobody in the building even noticed and there was no after-hours time used for repair.

The ability to use off the shelf hardware (servers, RAID cards, SSDs, etc.) is also invaluable in terms of cost and flexibility.

The configuration is so much simpler, with fewer points of failure to worry about. Integration with Microsoft clustering has been perfect, allowing us to leverage our investment in MS server licensing to the fullest

What needs improvement?

The product can be improved:

  • There is no good way to see how all networks are distributed on the console. Besides, once they are created and highlighted, everything seems to be going well.
  • If we stay with Virtual SAN instead of managed devices, it would be nice to have more automated tools to manage iSCSI connections in Windows, which can be a bit confusing at first.
  • We would like the documentation to be more complete. Most items are covered, but if you don't know something, you may need to contact their support.

For how long have I used the solution?

We are using VSAN in our company for about one year.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The solution is very stable. We have tested storage network outages with failure of one or two nodes. The solution is able to stay online or repair itself with ease

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

The scalability of this solution is impressive. We're very happy to use it.

How are customer service and technical support?

The experience of work with clients/technical support is very positive. Everything is fast and available.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup wasn't difficult.

What about the implementation team?

We have implemented through a group of suppliers. Their level of experience is quite high.

What was our ROI?

Will soon pay off by reducing downtime and maintenance costs.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Make sure that you understand what all of the pieces do and don't make the assumption that you can drop support once setup is complete.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We immediately chose Starwind because our system administrator had experience with this product in the past.

What other advice do I have?

This product is definitely worth the investment.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Private Cloud

If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?

Other
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
IT Manager at a hospitality company with 51-200 employees
Real User
Two-node device gives us storage replication; we can do updates without a complete storage shutdown
Pros and Cons
  • "We are able to do maintenance by bringing down one node at a time, rather than having to schedule a complete shutdown."
  • "It would be helpful to have a little more insight into what kind of performance the VSAN cluster is utilizing; something that would be more proactive on our side, versus their ProActive Support."

What is our primary use case?

We're using it in our DR site for replicating virtual machines from a primary site. We needed a solution that took up less rack space, so we went with something that converged infrastructure. It's providing storage for our virtual platform.

How has it helped my organization?

It provides some fault-tolerance redundancy. Originally, we just had a single point of failure for storage. By having StarWind with a two-node device, we're able to replicate storage and then we can do updates, maintenance, and repairs, without having to bring down our entire storage platform.

It definitely saves us time. We are able to do a lot of our maintenance during production hours, rather than having to schedule after hours. We are able to do maintenance by bringing down one node at a time, rather than having to schedule a complete shutdown, and it's easier to schedule with Dell EMC or whoever else to make sure that they're available for any support during that process. By having StarWind, we're able to minimize maintenance impact and coordinating different support to be available around those timeframes.

It's helped maintain high-availability. Having a second unit replicating is providing us with the availability that we need to make sure our virtual machines have the storage connected they need to be operational.

What is most valuable?

We just use it for the storage replication. We haven't really utilized any of the other StarWind functionality in it.

What needs improvement?

It would be helpful to have a little more insight into what kind of performance the VSAN cluster is utilizing; something that would be more proactive on our side, versus their ProActive Support.

For how long have I used the solution?

Less than one year.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

It has been rock-stable. No issues.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

The scalability is there. We just have a two-node, so everything is connected together, not through a switch. I'm assuming that with the help of StarWind the scalability would be limitless.

We don't have any immediate plans to expand. If we did need to, it would be more of a compute expansion, so we would use the existing storage and use additional compute clusters.

How are customer service and technical support?

We don't use the ProActive Support. We have the Standard level. It's very good. We haven't had any issues with it. They're very responsive and knowledgeable.

The only issues we had were during the implementation. We haven't had to reach out for any post-installation help.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We were using a single Dell EMC storage device. There was no software solution. We were looking to build out a DR site. We wanted to avoid having a single point of failure, like we did at our main location. If everything went well during our DR site rollout, we would configure a similar setup in our corporate location.

How was the initial setup?

Surprisingly, the setup was straightforward. We were up and running with the VSAN within a few hours. Then we started doing some production virtual machines. We didn't really run into any issues with the VSAN part of it. The Windows updates caused an issue that we worked through. Support was very helpful with that.

It was a new deployment. There really wasn't any type of timeframe where we had to meet critical deadlines. We did have a plan to get our DR site up and running, and VSAN definitely made it a lot easier for us to do that.

The deployment required two of our IT staff and one person from StarWind.

What about the implementation team?

It was just our internal IT and StarWind Support.

What was our ROI?

It has definitely made things a lot easier to deploy. Our biggest issue was not being tied to a hardware vendor, so if we decide to switch from EMC Dell to HPE or Supermicro, we can continue to use the StarWind solution across the different hardware brands. That's especially important with drive prices changing. We're able to use commodity drives instead of hardware-branded drives. That's an area where there have been some cost savings.

Also, the ability to be hardware agnostic means we're able to shop across vendors for better pricing.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

It's priced fairly. It was definitely cheaper than the competition. The licensing terms are straightforward and reasonable.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We looked into Tegile and Tintri, about two years prior. We've also looked at some Dell EMC solutions. We were able to go with any hardware vendor we wanted to and the reviews for the software solution showed that it was highly recommended.

What other advice do I have?

Utilize the StarWind installation team to get you up and running. They do everything from start to finish and even make sure that your production workload is running sufficiently.

We haven't used the Log-structured Write Cache feature or the NVMe over Fabrics target. Right now, our solution is all solid-state disk.

In terms of maintenance, a lot of it is scripted or managed automatically. It just takes one person to periodically check in to see if it's performing well and if there are any errors. That person is a systems administrator.

I would give StarWind VSAN a nine out of ten. They have good support. It's reasonably priced. It gives you the ability to scale. It offers good storage availability.

Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
PeerSpot user
System Administrator at Keller Digital
User
The windows-based software environment allows a shared storage system to be set up at no cost
Pros and Cons
  • "StarWind Virtual SAN is a very mature software that supersedes its capabilities with my use cases."
  • "The console is something that I believe could be enhanced."

StarWind Virtual SAN is a very mature software that supersedes its capabilities with my use cases. When it comes to being an easy and fast-to-understand software, StarWind Virtual SAN has too many features for just using it in a few minutes - which I like, because it works.

The windows-based software environment allows a shared storage system to be set up at no cost, which also can be used productively usage with PowerShell.

The software is very deep, complex and profound with many features and the learning resources were pretty tough to find.

A web management interface would be nice, especially for those coming from other solutions that have it. All setup and configuration are done through a dedicated Windows application, so you'll need to install it on every computer you'll be using to manage your cluster.

Most documentation is primarily Windows-based, so it can be difficult to find instructions for the Linux VSA. However, support can often help you find documentation.

The console is something that I believe could be enhanced. It's technically sound, but it can be enhanced and/or made more intuitive. Adding a few right-click options to the interface is my preferred method of searching for specific menu items instead of having to search the entire interface.

Maybe some of these points are will be improved in the future. Other than that, we are very likely to continue using this software for our work.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
CEO, Founder at a tech services company with 1-10 employees
User
Cost-effective, fast and helpful support, and offers real-time replication between servers
Pros and Cons
  • "The most valuable features are high availability and real-time replication between two servers."
  • "The StarWind Management Console is available only for Microsoft Windows/Windows Server, and should also be available for Linux and macOS, as it would reduce implementation costs."

What is our primary use case?

Our hardware is located in one of the largest data centers in the country, where we have high availability services for our company. Our internal systems include VPN, hosting services like website, email, database, DNS, FTP/SFTP, and SMB/CIFS.

Replication is between two servers with SAS and SSD storage, based on Dell servers. Network connectivity is 40GE for data synchronization and1GE for the heartbeat, directly connected.

We are using WMware vSphere as a hypervisor. This solution is highly scalable and cost effective.

How has it helped my organization?

This solution improves many areas in our company including performance, data availability, and data security.

StarWind VSAN allows us to build high availability and real-time replication, even between two servers. It offers multiple scaling and replication capabilities and includes health and performance monitoring tools. For this reason, we can build highly available services for our company, which are currently essential for the organization's activities.

Our current implementation allows us to maintain the company's production continuity and to maintain constant access to data processed by the company.

What is most valuable?

The most valuable features are high availability and real-time replication between two servers. StarWind VSAN immediately copies all data to the second server over the 10GE/40GE network to ensure instant failover. Multiple connections can be made for the heartbeat. 

What needs improvement?

The StarWind Management Console is available only for Microsoft Windows/Windows Server, and should also be available for Linux and macOS, as it would reduce implementation costs.

For how long have I used the solution?

We have been using StarWind Virtual SAN for one year.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

This product is very stable.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

The scalability of StarWind Virtual SAN is very good.

How are customer service and technical support?

StarWind support is amazing. They are helpful and respond very quickly.

Support is available via teleconference, as well as online. They not only assist with the selection of the appropriate solution but also, help with testing and production implementation.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We did not use another solution prior to this one.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup was straightforward. It was done via teleconference, which made it very simple.

What about the implementation team?

The vendor team assisted us with deployment using teleconference technology. They have a high level of knowledge and skill.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

The StarWind VSAN business model is very cost-effective.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We evaluated VMware vSAN and StorMagic.

What other advice do I have?

The StarWind VSAN product is very well developed in many areas.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Buyer's Guide
Download our free StarWind Virtual SAN Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.
Updated: May 2024
Buyer's Guide
Download our free StarWind Virtual SAN Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.