It is a safe, fast, and cost-effective storage system that improved our systems to have zero downtime. Before we used manual failover methods and systems by other vendors, that required switching master and slave roles which could result in a longer downtime. 

If a storage error occurred outside of our office hours, it could result in critical downtime and production needing to stop. Besides the business continuity, our performance levels have risen from the all-flash setup and active-active sync scenarios.

We took our first step into Hyperconverged with Starwind. For us, it means that we can run our DC with less hardware. 

Our setup came with pre-configured software and hardware in a single system for simplified management. With StarWind's converged infrastructure, we don't need to think of any massive support contracts like the other vendors on the HCA market.

As we already were mainly using Dell servers, their hardware (Dell PowerEdge) fits nicely into our data center. Since we are using all-flash, it will last longer.

We are a small nonprofit, and I am the sole sysadmin. As the sole sysadmin, I am stretched thin across many areas yet must maintain many different systems. 

StarWind's HCA has been very reliable and has allowed me to not worry about the platform that we run our VMs on and instead focus on the VMs themselves. 

StarWind's HCA has also been instrumental in helping us to simplify our server and network environment and provide the capacity and performance we need to virtualize more of our infrastructure.

We upgraded from older servers, and the Starwind HCA is much faster and more reliable. All of the old VMs can do the same job they always did but with less waiting. With 24-hour monitoring, we can worry less about hardware and software failures. Every time the system has detected an issue Starwind has emailed us before anything went sideways. Migrating VMs is much easier now that the Starwind team has configured the HCA boxes. All this has been done without the need for a separate storage device.

The solution has easily deployed instances for multiple fast-paced projects. 

The brilliant synchronisation and migration processes allow for easy patching and upgrading, we have a cluster configured allowing us to upgrade nodes on the fly without downtime and without the need for work out of hours. 

The speed of moving VMs from node to node is fantastic. 

They provide superb monitoring, alerting and support which really helps in taking the burden off the small internal IT infrastructure team. 

The StarWind Hyperconverged Appliance really took us forward in terms of technology, delivery speeds, and management overheads.

Having the HA ability to switch over in real-time is extremely important when running a horse show and restaurants. We can feel confident that if any issue arises with one server, we are instantly online with the next server and have not lost any data. With our horse show software, if any data was not copied over before the failure of the other device, we would have corrupted databases which would be extremely problematic during the horse show. Servers are sized appropriately with plenty of resources. 

This was at a hardware refresh. I was replacing the old three-node cluster with a two-node cluster and going from discrete software/hardware to a Hyper-Converged Appliance. Obviously, the performance was outstanding, however, at a hardware refresh, it better be!

I have noticed a definite increase in performance all around. I would say we were most limited in our previous cluster by disk. There just is no comparison to SSD. 

Even with that said, the HCA screams. I've very satisfied. Install, setup and migrations were foolproof. I love that it's being monitored 24/7. I have previous experience with StarWind support and I know it is excellent. 

Having high availability has definitely improved the reliability of our infrastructure and made server maintenance much easier, which is a significant improvement for the organization. 

The low cost of this solution has also made a big difference in our budget, which has been very helpful. 

The reliability of the VSAN software has also been a big improvement in our infrastructure. 

The quality of support from StarWind has probably been the biggest improvement though as we went from having a relatively low level of support with our previous solution to having a truly top-tier support team at our disposal.

We're getting close to 50 trucks and growing pretty quickly. We have guys out on the road all the time and this system we're putting in place is going to track all of that in the greatest of detail. If anything happens with a load, it's all being communicated back through the system. That includes dispatching the drivers, monitoring the drivers as they're hauling the load, tracking when they arrive at their destinations. All that is done through the system. Any time that it goes down for an extended period of time is a time that we have to operate on paper. As of now, we are familiar with doing that, and we probably will continue to have a backup plan, but it's not nearly as efficient. Someone is going to have to go back and enter the data in later. That could potentially lead to disruption where wrong information goes to the driver, causing delivery of a load to the wrong location or at the wrong time.

It's too early to say whether or not this solution will save our company money. Right now, I very much think it's going to. Even if I were to have one substantial instance of downtime - if I were to just build it out on a regular host and the host went down and I had to spin up another host and bring up backups, etc. That downtime, right there, would be significant money lost. I'm pretty sure that it will save money but I can't say that it's 100 percent sure since we haven't been through that scenario yet.

We used to have a lot of issues with our database servers. At one point, we had a database front-end that required five different servers to run, literally five physical servers. Just one of those computers going down would effectively halt the whole database. Bringing in these units really helped us condense our infrastructure and make things more reliable and redundant. That has definitely been the biggest key value in this.

In terms of redundancy, we were completely physical before we brought these units in. We had no virtual infrastructure at all. In addition to that, nothing was redundant. These really helped to give us some form of redundancy in a pretty compact package. With a lot of hyperconverged units, you need at least three of them, sometimes four of them. One thing that was attractive with StarWind was that we could get it in two units that communicate directly. It is a pretty self-maintained hyperconverged appliance. That was something that was really appealing.

Overall, it has helped to improve our system's performance greatly.

It improved our organization by providing us with more resources to allow us to grow our customer base. 

We were able to make a call and quickly get the assistance we needed and had a cluster built in no time. 

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. 

The best part is the ability to fail VMs over quickly and hassle-free. It is extremely easy to make any changes and modifications.

These appliances have been great for our Failover Cluster, combining storage, network, and compute resources in a single package. StarWind's Virtual SAN software replicates storage in the background, letting each node in the cluster use its own local storage instead of having to create an actual storage network. The ease between setting up the HCA appliances and my previous setup is significant, as is ongoing maintenance.

StarWind also offers ProActive Support that remotely monitors the appliances and automatically opens a ticket and initiates contact when a problem is discovered. As the only IT employee here, it's been pretty great.

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. End users are also pleased with the noticeable performance increase from switching to local storage from 1GB ethernet.

StarWind HyperConverged Appliance has made the servers redundant, reducing downtime from just having a single standalone server with a much lower hardware cost than having an extra storage device which then reduces the redundancy unless purchasing much more hardware that increases the cost significantly. 

The added speed of using standard HDD and SSD meant we could increase what services are stored on the servers without having to have additional servers. 

Also, the servers' support reduces downtime when things go wrong. The support team has always ensured we are back up and running in a short amount of time.

Before StarWind, we used HP Lefthand.  

While HP lefthand did work, the price difference was a major. Once we started to use StarWind, we found it to be very reliable and fast.  

We are very happy with moving from HP Lefthand to StarWind. During the conversion of Lefthand to Starwind, we used the support and found it very helpful. They were very knowledgeable and easy to work with.  

We needed three servers for our setup when we were using HP lefthand.  With StarWind, we were able to downsize to only two.

We condensed an entire rack of servers/switches and SAN storage nodes down to 4U for two Dell R730xd's, we had more storage, and it was much faster all around. It improved all services running on the new cluster and took up less space and less energy.

Our ERP system performance improved for all users. Lengthy overnight batch jobs were suddenly completed much earlier and enabled us to re-shuffle a lot of tasks into a smaller time window.

We are also finding it easier to maintain two host servers rather than the previous five.

StarWind HCA has provided a much-needed upgrade to our aging VMware environment and infrastructure in terms of hardware, cost, and performance. 

All of our virtual machines, across the board, are snappy and running at peak performance. 

Due to the hardware, performance, and redundancy improvements provided by the StarWind two-node setup, we can take advantage of the setup and migrate critical physical servers to our virtual environment. 

Much to my surprise, while moving one of our critical systems from a physical server to a virtual server, users have commented that they have noticed a significant increase in performance on their end when using specific software. 

Also, the high-availability setup provides peace of mind in knowing that there is inherent redundancy provided in our configuration. 

We had an old server infrastructure from two major vendors that ran without flaws yet were no longer state of the art and thus reached its limits in terms of memory and processor for large projects. 

In addition, the support for the servers was expiring, and we wanted a solution that would allow a live migration in real-time. After extensive research, we decided on StarWind. It has the advantages of a storage solution yet is priced much more attractively than the competition (when considering hardware in the premium range). 

StarWind Virtual SAN has been a great product for us. The setup was easy to deploy, and management is simplified compared with traditional SAN solutions. Redundancy is achieved at a fraction of the cost when compared to other solutions. We opted for premier support which includes StarWind software support, OS support, Veeam support, patching, and OS updates. 

In addition, our environment is proactively monitored 24/7. We've had experience with other solutions such as NetApp and Dell SAN, however, StarWind was by far a better solution for us. 

When I joined the company, they were running everything off a single bare-metal server. The downtime was common, there were rampant issues, and backups were simple file copies on a schedule (no configuration backups).

As a jack-of-all-trades IT guy I knew that virtualization would be a massive boon in many aspects, but was intimidated at the prospect of building out a whole system from scratch myself.

StarWind's HCA proved to be an ideal solution. Support held my hand through the setup and configuration of the hypervisors and allowed me to easily migrate the company's ancient bare-metal server to a proper virtualized HA setup.

Downtime is almost non-existent now. Services are compartmentalized to different VMs and backups are full of images that could be spun up on the cloud in a pinch. 

Uptime alone has been substantially increased. 

Repair efforts have been reduced to nearly nothing. 

Monitoring is provided free of cost to StarWind, which also reduced expenses.

In instances where we had issues outside of the HCA, StarWind support has gone above and beyond to help us diagnose Windows issues. 

I've been in IT for 15 years now, and you kind of expect to have to "work on things" as part of your job description. That said, we're 3 years in, and I have yet to "need" to work on anything with the hardware or software. It just works.

Our organization has improved via:

• Internal/operational efficiencies via the central management
• Improved compliance and risk management
  
• Cost management
  
• Product functionality and performance
• Strong proactive customer service and support
• Managed Support and service for the HyperV environment
• Alert Notifications via email 
• Redundancy and 24/7 alert system via the managed service provider
• User-friendliness of the interface
• Great phone support 
• Managed updates such as Firmware and StarWind Software
• Sales specialist recommendations in the case of hardware upgrades

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 machines perform much better than what we were previously using; they are workhorses. We have had zero issues with them over the years we've been using the solution. Support is extremely helpful and the application is easy to set up and configure. 

It has also helped us to schedule less downtime as we're able to run all of our machines off of two nodes while we patch. Being able to live-migrate virtual machines from one box to another goes extremely quickly and is never noticed from the end-user side.

StarWind's Appliance improved our organization by no longer having a single point of failure. Our previous solution had a separate storage bay where the StarWind HCAs each have their own bay that can hold all our VMs and run replication using the StarWind Software.

Our old solution only supported Gigabit connections, while the StarWind solution also supported 10GB. Each node runs two Mellanox interconnects and came with two 10GB ports for our usage. We now have two cables running from the nodes through to the rest of our network and have set up SET (Switch Independent Teaming) for our Hyper-V Cluster solution.

This has been great for our organization.  

We run probably 16 virtual machines, and all of them are now highly available, and highly redundant.  

Also, we no longer need to replicate across hosts on our production site. Doing that was a very clunky, very time-consuming way to do any restore, and it was only up-to-date as of that moment in time (when the snapshot was taken).  

With this solution, we can now do maintenance on our hosts during the day. The other day I "moved" all VMs to one host, took the other down, and did all its maintenance. That afternoon, I moved everything to the other host and did maintenance on the 2nd host - all without the users noticing.

It has brought us to another level in redundancy. We have two replicated copies of our data on-site in HA, which we then backup locally and then offload a copy to the cloud.

We also went with the all-flash solution, so our IOPS jumped exponentially.

In addition to that, we have started to implement a 10G backbone with the StarWind HCA being the first in it.

Before StarWind, our virtualization infrastructure was combined with several different vendor offerings. This created unnecessary complexity and administrative overhead trying to support and maintain.  

We also had equipment going end-of-life, which created challenges and required 3rd party vendor warranties to keep running. Managing all the different hardware and software made troubleshooting very difficult for our team.

StarWind appliances eliminated multi-vendor complexity and drastically simplified our virtualization landscape.  

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.

By having multiple servers, we are able to perform maintenance on one server while the other is still operating. The speed of the flash drives helped with performance, and the support that StarWind offers is very professional and accommodating.

We had to engage with support several times during the migration as we made licensing changes, and moved virtual servers from the old host to the new ones. The response time was quick and although there was a bit of an accent, I had no trouble understanding as the work was being completed.

The old solution we had worked. It was starting to show its age and it consisted of several more pieces of equipment than the StarWind HyperConverged Appliances.

It has saved us time because there are fewer devices to update. We no longer have to worry about updating our hardware SANs, which would actually cause a brief outage, even though the upgrades are advertised as non-disruptive. We just update the StarWind software every once in a while with no downtime.

In terms of overall systems performance, the latency has been reduced. Instead of having to go through two iSCSI connections, the way we had things layered before, everything is direct. We purchased the all-flash HyperConverged Appliance to replace our SANs that had spinning disks. That has definitely reduced the storage latency. We have noticed a substantial performance improvement with our database applications, compared to our previous storage.

StarWind has definitely saved us money. The other solutions we were looking at were priced much higher than this and they didn't necessarily have full redundancy. The other companies provided solutions without enough resources to lose a node and still keep everything up and running. Most of those solutions also required dedicated 10 Gig switching. We are also saving money on the normal support renewal costs since we don’t have separate SAN devices or need dedicated 10 Gig switching.

The solution has provided our company with a fully redundant virtual environment at half the cost of a traditional SAN implementation. Previously, we had the traditional SAN environment of 2-3 virtual hosts, 2 SAN switches for iSCSI, and then one storage array/server (all Dell hardware). The problem was the single point of failure (SPoF) at the bottom, which was the one storage server. Due to the cost, we could only afford one storage server, however, this meant we had a completely fully redundant SAN solution at half the cost and rack space footprint.

It works perfectly both in Microsoft Hyper-V virtualization solutions and in VMware virtualization solutions, integrating perfectly with the solutions of said manufacturers. Specifically, most of the solutions that we have implemented have been with Microsoft Hyper-V; its integration is complete.

StarWind provided better performance and amortization of the implementations we did for clients, making their computer system a stable and agile system. The solution is bug-free and highly available

StarWind, with all SSDs and directly attached servers, gave us far superior performance than our previous setup. We can now have vMotion VMs in a matter of seconds rather than minutes. 

Although we haven't removed the previous equipment yet, I'm looking forward to removing all the cables running through all the switches. Also, having all the extra space on the rack is going to be nice. This will substantially reduce the amount of noise in the datacenter. 

Having this all backed up by pro-active support gives us good peace of mind.

It has removed the need for large shared storage that is not directly attached to the virtual hosts make it a deal to deal with, it also self heals in the event of any major incident or down time, along with the 24/7 support and the most knowledgably staff when needed.

It has allowed me to expand my virtualization foot print whilst reducing my overall physical server foot print.

This solution has allowed me to remove other storage solutions reduce physical footprint of equipment as well as power usage.

It cut down the need to run multiple pieces of hardware to achieve the same goal, this also freed up valuable rack space. 

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. 

We also used the move to StarWind to finally move to an all-flash array away from traditional HDDs, the performance improvement was noticeable right away and we are so glad we did so. 

The HCA appliance replaced aging hardware, formerly cluster-in-a-box solutions, at a savings of over $20,000.00 and provided increased performance and more redundancy. The pricing and discounts given by Starwind on the hardware were unmatched. 

The HCA solution provides increased redundancy in that all storage is duplicated between multiple servers with multiple arrays of drives, rather than depending upon a single storage solution. It also allows us to utilize more cost-effective storage solutions rather than being handcuffed to dual port SSD with their higher price points when the performance far exceeds our needs. 

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.

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

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.

StarWind HCA has improved our business by ways of reduced management overhead, increased compute and storage performance, reduced rack space requirements, reduced rack power usage, and improved redundancy.  

The reduced management and improved redundancy are probably the most important as it directly increases the time staff can focus on other tasks  Simply put, StarWind HCA "just works". Furthermore, having ProActive Support as a "second set of eyes" allows us to catch issues without constant "babysitting".

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.

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 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.

We went from a vSphere compute cluster with an external SAN made by a company that is in perpetual financial trouble and have shifted business focus several times. Not only was our traditional SAN expensive, but we also had no confidence in the vendor. StarWind HCA is commodity hardware, so we eliminated the proprietary hardware issue. 

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.

Overall, the solution has improved our system's performance. We were with Dell products before and those products were getting towards seven years old so they were at end-of-life. This product has an element of SSD, in our particular solution. The way that the system uses SSDs to cache out load onto the SSDs for regularly-used data means that it is a much better and more modern solution. We can definitely see that in the performance.

For example, we use some database services for our management information system that manages all the kids' data. There are a lot of ways that that information is accessed, through different applications, both internally and externally. Parents might be pulling attendance information from that service. The performance of the servers in that environment is much improved on the StarWind product over the standard Hyper-V host. The fact that the storage and the hosts are on exactly the same hardware reduces the network latency and all the other bits that contribute to the speed as well.

StarWind has also saved our organization money. It has probably halved the cost of a full SAN and individual-host solution.

Using the StarWind solution, I was able to consolidate all the servers, hardware and firmware, with a three-node StarWind cluster, based on Hyper-V. As a result, in this company, I have seen gains in I/O rates on the order of ten times what they were and a better performing environment.

Overall, the solution has definitely improved our system's performance. When I started with this firm last year in May, they really had a poor performing environment. The StarWind solution has made everything at least ten times faster.

The fact that it has helped increase the redundancy and failover capabilities is implicit. It's a hyperconverged solution. It's all-inclusive. It runs all the time and the technology takes care of failures. It works as it should.

The solution has also saved us money.

StarWind delivers what they promise. In this case, the client is a company working in the food sector and they don't have innovative demands. What I have implemented for them has already brought them ten years ahead of where they were.

By using this solution we have reduced some of our physical machines and virtualized them. We've consolidated some other standalone, virtual hosts into the single cluster. It's really helped that P-to-V movement and reduction of other hardware and services.

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. A lot of it has to do with updated hardware. The previous hardware was probably ten years older, but still, we were concerned about that overhead with virtualization and it's not present.

It has improved our performance and the support/time required to manage and maintain the HCI solution. It's an all-flash storage subsystem which provides really good disk read/write I/O and law latency. 

With proactive support, StarWind deploys and configures the solution for you. They also help you to migrate any workloads/VMs from the existing solution that StarWind is replacement for. 

They do proactive monitoring so if they see any issues like disk being in predictive failure or some lag/error on the solution they will reach out to you/call you proactively and will fix the issue for you.

The solution has improved our ability to prepare for future needs by easily being able to add servers, storage, backup devices, and more. 

With their highly knowledgeable sales and support team, we are not anxious about upgrading our equipment or suffering long downtimes. We were hosting our ERP environment outside the organization which limited some of the functionality. 

With the HCA appliance we are comfortable with it being in-house and finally get to take advantage of some advanced features we have been missing out on.

It was much more affordable to replace our aging virtual environment with Starwind HCA than traditional hardware. We needed to come up with a budget-friendly solution to replace our old hardware. The support costs were skyrocketing on the old hardware and the performance was severely lacking. Using Starwind allowed us to replace our existing hardware with much faster hosts - and we benefitted especially from the all-flash storage which gave us a significant performance bump compared to our old environment. Overall, it has been a great implementation. 

It has achieved our goals of centralizing storage management because of the StarWind Virtual SAN, added fault tolerance, and simplified Microsoft server licensing, by using the Datacenter edition.

StarWind HCA is much more reliable than our original failover cluster solution. Not even just by being more modern hardware, the virtual SAN allowed us to dramatically decrease our footprint and power consumption in our data center and is much simpler to manage. 

Any issues we've had along the way have been Windows issues as opposed to problems with the StarWind vSAN software.

Our two goals were to improve performance and add high availability. Even before implementation, the StarWind team analyzed our current workload to determine which HCA would be appropriate for us. This allowed us to make a decision based on data rather than guesswork.

Performance has been excellent, and we have really noticed a big improvement from our old system. Our other goal, improving fault tolerance, was immediately realized with the installation of the second HCA node. We have been running flawlessly since day one with zero downtime. The second node also allows us to perform maintenance without having to take servers offline.

Our environment went from a hodge-podge of Hyper-V servers of various ages and capacities to a simple-to-manage three-node cluster. The three nodes are interconnected, so we didn't even have to invest in additional network infrastructure.

There is redundancy, so if one node has an issue, the users have no idea and everything stays functional! There is a noted increase in speed both on the production loads as well as the backup (Veeam) being much easier to manage and running significantly faster.

Power consumption is down, so there was less need for UPS capacity and cooling as well. 

StarWind has given us the ability to have a failover cluster without the complications of a SAN network. We are able to offer extra services to our customers that we haven't been able to in the past. Small companies can be wary of the large cloud providers so having a StarWind HCA cluster we were able to give our customers the ability to grow into the cloud while also staying with a company they have worked with and known for years. With StarWind's proactive monitoring we can go about our day helping our customers and not have to worry about our cluster's health.

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

The StarWind infrastructure provided a preconfigured package of software and hardware in a single system for simplified management. With StarWind converged infrastructure, the compute, storage, and networking components were easy to modify to fit our needs at all the locations.

It was a lower-cost solution that enabled us to replace our existing end-of-life infrastructure while taking advantage of new technologies like hyper-converged infrastructure.

This product also enabled us to standardize our server hardware. 

The cost to support and maintain every part of the aging infrastructure was pretty high. Also, the SANs were being rather complex to maintain and the time to resolution on tickets was pretty long with the vendor.

StarWind offers an hyper-converged solution that is very well priced and offers remote monitoring and support, resolving both the cost and support issues we had with the previous multivendor solution.

We can do updates without any problems. We can move all my VMs to one host and do updates on the other host. We can bring it down, move everything over to the other host, and then update the other host and bring it down.

In terms of redundancy, with my last solution, if we had two VMware hosts and one host went down, everything would transfer over to the other host. StarWind HCA is the same concept except that we don't have the single point of failure of the storage array anymore. It's all in the hosts. We don't have to worry about the storage going down. It used to be that if the storage array went down, we were dead in the water with both hosts.

Our only real choice, other than StarWind, was to buy a Dell EMC Compellent which would have been double the cost and would still be just one Compellent. So if we wanted redundancy, we would have had to put together a solution that would triple or quadruple the cost. StarWind saved us a considerable amount of money.

It's just taken over the job of something that was going out-of-support. The only thing that we have really noticed as being a massive improvement — because of the live migrations, because it's disk-based rather than iSCSI — is that it is super-fast now.

It's fairly instant. Before, live migrations meant we had to leave it on a countdown. So if we had to move stuff around quickly, we had to do some quick live migration. It would take a few minutes and only one could be done at a time. There is an improvement in having a new Windows Server. The 2008 R2 Server that we replaced didn't have PowerShell for Hyper-V, but obviously this version does. We've just scripted it and, bang, with the improved response times from it being disk-based instead of iSCSI, trying to shove an 8 Gig memory file through goes a lot quicker. It's not really something that's saved our ops at any time but the improved performance is pleasing.

It hasn't increased redundancy or failover capabilities, it has just like-for-like replaced. We did have three servers, two switches, and a disk array, whereas now we just have two servers. There's a big chunk of less stuff doing the same stuff. So we've consolidated. We're doing the same with less. It has saved us money in the sense that there is less stuff to pay out warranty on.

This solution came preconfigured. All we needed to do was plug it in and move our VMs. The migration was seamless and we have had no issues. This solution has allowed us to take advantage of newer technologies, maintain our servers with ease, and reduce downtime.

We chose StarWind HyperConverged Appliance because it could be easily integrated into the existing IT infrastructure. Being a 100% software-defined hyperconverged platform, StarWind HCA leveled the possibility of hardware or software issues in the case of the Hyper-V host failing. All the critical VMs have been migrated to StarWind HCA, and if a failure of Hyper-V host occurs, automatic failover of VMs to the other node without any service interruptions is observed. Thanks to synchronous failover clustering, a non-stop application availability and unbeatable data security were ensured. We managed to build a fault-tolerant and highly available IT environment with a reliable and cost-effective solution. We also took advantage of StarWind ProActive Support AI. Support administrators kept continuous track of the system's status and informed about critical issues. So, with StarWind HCA we managed to achieve uninterrupted IT infrastructure work and peace of mind.

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

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