We tested and used the software-only version of StarWind. We wanted to test the software and its behavior.

We looked into all the large vendors such as Dell, HP, et cetera.

We also looked at Scale and decided on StarWind for the cost and glowing reviews.

Yes, we looked at HPE and Lenovo.

We looked at NetApp, VMware, and Nutanix as an alternative.

We looked at a couple of options before selecting StarWind. The price point was in the middle of the road, and it was clear speaking with sales reps that this company had its ducks in a row.

I was already very satisfied with StarWind vSAN.

We considered just buying new server hardware and staying with VMware. We also evaluated Scale and Nutanix.

I looked at other options like the vSAN from VMware, but the prices for our size of company were just too cost-prohibitive. Cost was the main, deciding factor. I compared them apples to apples and Hyper-V was equivalent to VMware especially for the price differences. I talked to several guys in the field. Some were all Hyper-V and some were all VMware. But when I asked them, "Why do you choose this one over this one and that one over that one?" they would give excuses but none of them were really legit anymore.

Some of them had excuses about Hyper-V which had been corrected in later versions. When I really got down to the nuts and bolts, there weren't significant differences, for what I needed, between those two platforms. When I looked at vSAN, it was just so far out of our price range that I said to myself, "Well, there's no way. I'm not going to go high-availability if that's the only option," because it was so cost-prohibitive for us.

I couldn't find a lot of other options, though I might've just overlooked them. I couldn't find a lot of other solutions that were virtualized in the drives. And I didn't want to have a SAN because I didn't want the single point of failure of a single SAN.

We looked at Nutanix and we looked at Dell VRTX and we decided on StarWind ultimately, by a pretty significant margin.

With the Nutanix, we didn't like the fact that pricing was way higher than the StarWind appliances. Plus, if I'm not mistaken, we would have needed at least three of the Nutanix hardware, the HCAs. They also run their own specialized platform. I have more of a Hyper-V background, which is what StarWind bases its virtualization on. There would have been a little more of a learning curve on my end as well. Ultimately, the price was the biggest killer on that.

We only evaluated our history with VMware and decided to make the switch.

We did not look at other options, really. These fit my needs perfectly and were affordable. Had I more time/resources at my disposal, I probably would have sought out other options. In this case, these appliances fit my needs. 

We did not evaluate other solutions.

We did not evaluate any other solutions.

We looked at Dell EMC, Nutanix, Scale, and Nimble.

I evaluated Nutanix, HP, and Dell solutions.

We looked at other providers of a pure storage solution and purchased them with StarWind. We couldn't get anywhere close to StarWind in terms of price.

We evaluated other solutions such as Nutanix and the cloud (Azure). They were much more expensive.  

StarWind had me sold. I was looking at doing a SAN with two Hyper-V's, however, why buy additional hardware when it can be done more simply with the same results.

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

We considered HyperV as an alternative and found StarWind.

We took a look at all the big vendors, including HPE, Dell, Lenovo, and IBM.

We looked at Dell EMC.

We evaluated Nutanix and Dell HCI.

We evaluated offerings from VMware, however, the licensing costs were too high.

We looked at Scale, Nimble, and Nutanix.

We considered solutions from Dell and Nutanix.

We looked at Dell EMC VxRail, Nutanix, HPE Simplivity, and another option. In terms of the differences between these solutions and StarWind, price was a huge factor, as well as flexibility and the additional hardware requirements.

Most of the other solutions we looked at required 10 Gig switches to interconnect all of them, whereas the StarWind solution interconnects directly between the nodes and doesn't require a 10 Gig switch. That probably saved us $10,000 to $20,000 right there.

Nutanix and VxRail were in the final running. We looked at quotes for those and, from what the vendors were telling us, they seemed to be pretty good appliances. But it came down to our price point. StarWind was able to provide a solution for what we wanted - to provide for redundancy. With the other ones, if we were to lose one node due to a hard drive failure or bad memory stick, we wouldn't have enough RAM on the other devices to run everything. We could have asked for additional RAM to be quoted, but they were already at our budget limit.

The other thing we were trying to do, within our budget, was to get a better backup solution in place. We were using System Center Data Protection Manager and we were running into so many issues that it required daily babysitting. We had evaluated Veeam earlier in the year and it just works without any trouble. While working with StarWind to spec out our new environment, they told us about their backup appliance running on Dell EMC hardware. It seemed like the perfect option and getting everything from one vendor makes support much easier. Getting a better backup solution in place was a huge goal of ours and has since freed up a ton of our time.

We looked at Nutanix, Dell Compellent, EqualLogic, VMware ReadyNodes, and Scale Computing.

We evaluated HP.

We looked at Dell Equal Logic SAN Storage solutions.

We looked at options from TrueNas, DataOn, Dell, and HPE. 

We also looked into Nutanix and Scale.

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.

We evaluated VMware vSAN, however, the cost was too high.

We also looked at Nutanix and HPE Simplivity.

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. 

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

We evaluated Cisco and DataCore.

We looked at Microsoft storage but what we wanted was the resilience and the dynamic replication of data across two comms rooms. Before, we did that with EqualLogic SANs and physical Hyper-V hosts, whereas now, what we've got is the storage and the hosts in one box in each comms room, with StarWind.

We looked at multiple solutions, including HPE and Dell. Dell had been our partner up until this point, but the truth of the matter is that we couldn't afford their products anymore. The cost of their products had just moved out of the reach of a school with the kind of funding we have.

All these products have the ability to do what we wanted to do: real-time failover, real-time data between both comms rooms. The step up to achieve with some of the more well-known players is quite large though. In fact, it's an order of magnitude in terms of money. In layman's language, there are tiers, or steps, that you would have to climb to get more functionality. For example, you could start including cloud, cloud storage, and more. But the jumps and the tiers with StarWind are much closer together. The costs in taking those different steps are still there, but they are much more reasonable. That's because they're wrapping up all the technology in one box, rather than buying separate boxes for separate things.

Unfortunately, in my experience, there is quite a turnaround of technical guys within the organizations you deal with, and it's not easy to get continuity from the people at most organizations to look at your particular problems. What they always want to do is sell you their "gold" product, which is fantastic and very exciting, but if you can't afford it, you can't afford it. That was frustrating for me.

I would speak to Dell, I would speak to HPE, and they would jump up in the air and say, "Oh yeah, great. We can sell you one of those, and six of these, and that will do it. Fantastic." And that would do it. But we just didn't have that kind of money. And when we went back to the table and said, "Well, that's really great, but we can't really afford that," their reaction was, "Oh, well, that's not very interesting, because we will have to this product in instead. And then you can't do this, and you can't do that." And then it was not worth buying from our perspective.

With StarWind, they were much more flexible in looking at compromises and, because it's all built into one box, they could offer us opportunities to do things in a different way and still get the majority of the functionality we wanted. With a lot of the bigger players, if you bought the kind of functionality we wanted, you got a lot of other stuff that we weren't going to use, and obviously that was built into the price. With StarWind you can pick and choose, a little bit more, which elements you want to adopt and use, without having to go to the next, big, more expensive box or software revision.

If I have to decide, if I can choose, I will never evaluate other options. I know the market. I have been in the IT business for over 35 years. I know what's good and I stick with what's good and I don't need to compare every other solution in the world.

I don't think we considered anything else like this. Our other choice would have just been to update our SAN and update our other Windows servers: keeping the old model but with new hardware.

We have evaluated other HCI solutions and Storage vendors such as Nimble Storage, Scale Computing, StorMangic, Dell EMC VRTX etc.

We also evaluated Nutanix.

We also looked at Dell HCL, however, it was more expensive and complicated.

Yes, we evaluated Dell EMC VxRail and Scale HC3.

Yes. We evaluated Nutanix, HPE, Dell, NetApp, Scale.

We did look at moving hypervisors and HCA platforms but passed because the amount of change to management would have been a lot for the current staff.

We also looked at Nutanix, HP Simplivity, VxRails, and Scale.

We evaluated other options including VMware vSAN and HPE. 

I looked at Dell EMC storage. The only option was Compellent, which was highly expensive. I looked at Nutanix which was still highly expensive.

I also looked at StorPool; I liked the idea behind it, but I didn't like their implementation. It's roughly the same concept but requires more hardware. They take a bunch of servers that are not purely storage servers but which have the compute and memory. It's a rack mount server with all the storage inside and they aggregate the storage.

StarWind was all-in-one and consolidated on two servers. StorPool would have been three servers just for the storage. I would have had to buy two more new hosts to be the compute.

We looked at Nutanix and found it did almost the same thing but for more money. In fact, StarWind was nearly one-third of the price; it cost us £36,000. That includes five years of monitoring. If we have to reboot we get an email from them saying, "Is everything okay guys?"  We tell them, "Yeah, yeah, it's fine. Don't worry. Patching". The Nutanix was near enough £110,000 for relatively the same amount of performance and storage.

There were no additional fees for StarWind. That amount is for five years, done and paid for.

We did not evaluate any other options.