StarWind HyperConverged Appliance Scalability
You can scale the system very well. You always have the possibility to add another host to your HCA complex if you need more processing power.
View full review »RB
reviewer2084550
Senior System Administrator at Inflexion
The solution would scale easily and with only mild effort. The HCA we chose had plenty of extra slots for disk and RAM if we needed to expand in that way. Each of our nodes had two CPUs with no room for more. That said, adding another node would also be an easy option if we needed to do so.
View full review »NJ
reviewer1822314
Head of Infrastructure and Networks at a insurance company with 51-200 employees
The scalability is good. We have added more RAM over time.
View full review »Buyer's Guide
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about StarWind HyperConverged Appliance. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
768,246 professionals have used our research since 2012.
The product is very scalable.
View full review »DR
Dan Reynolds
Director of IT at BLDD ARCHITECTS INC
It is highly scalable. Fortunately, we are on the lower-end side of scaling.
View full review »It is extremely scalable.
View full review »DR
David Rager
CEO CIO at Store & Haul Inc
It seems very scalable. Obviously, my host only holds up so many drives but I can expand there. I can add a third, fourth, fifth, sixth node onto the end of the cluster if I want to. I don't know if there's a max to it. I didn't ask because in the next 20 years I don't see us hitting four hosts or five hosts of that size. From everything I can see, the scalability is good.
I have one physical box that runs my domain controller and all our other VMs are on the StarWind appliance, except, perhaps the secondary domain controller which might not be in the cluster. But every other VM we have is in the cluster. So about 95 percent of our servers are on their host and I would probably continue forward with that in the future. If we outgrew these boxes, I would just throw another one into the cluster. I would definitely go forward with StarWind as long as the benchmarking works out and things continue to go like they have been. I would continue to expand our environment with them.
View full review »CM
Claire Madison
IT Manager at Projects Inc.
It could be relatively scalable. We're at where we need to be with two of them, but it seems it would be very straightforward to get a third one, for example, if we wanted additional redundancy or more computing power.
It's being fully utilized to drive our day-to-day production. We rely on it every day to drive the business, so it is very key in our infrastructure now. I could see us getting an additional unit if the business needs demand it. I don't think we will have a demand for it within the next five years, but if it happens, if we have rapid growth, I would definitely look into getting another unit.
Currently, we have about 100 end-users of the solution in our organization.
View full review »AT
reviewer1852140
Systems Engineer & Cloud Specialist at myCRECloud | Cloud Application Hosting
This is a great solution that offers robust scaling options.
View full review »We're small and will likely not have to worry about any serious upscaling in the near future, however, it would be very simple to throw more appliances into the cluster should we need to.
View full review »CF
reviewer1954026
Infrastructure Engineer at H. W. Martin (Fencing Contractors) Ltd.
The scalability is good.
View full review »BM
Barry Miles
IT Manager at Sutton Group
The solution is easily scalable. We purchase new nodes or expand the existing nodes if you can, which we have done.
View full review »It looks like we have the option to scale up our solution to three, four, five, or however many nodes we would like. We may be going from a two-node to a three-node solution, so it's good to have these options.
View full review »Regarding the hardware, there are still delivery problems, however, the software can be attached to any backup or cloud solution.
View full review »ML
reviewer1852095
Senior Systems/Network Administrator at Storm Industries, Inc.
We don't have too much experience with scalability as we only had one site.
View full review »The scalability is not ideal. That said, what physical on-prem solution is? No matter what product you choose you're going to have estimate your storage in advance and hope it lasts a good long while. If scalability is king, then a cloud solution is probably best.
View full review »MR
reviewer1945293
General Do It All at Western Idaho Cabinets, Inc.
We do not need to scale. Still, you can scale to more than 3+ servers in the StarWinds solution.
View full review »MS
reviewer1831260
Senior IT Support Specialist at Seneca Family of Agencies
The machines work great and with the amount of storage we originally had purchased. We are in no danger of running out anytime soon.
View full review »JC
James Ching
Systems Analyst at The Bethany Group
The solution is very scalable. Only half the slots for both Memory and SSDs were used when we built our complete solution.
View full review »NC
reviewer1734918
IT Director at SSB Security State Bank
The solution is easy to fit to the size of your organization/network.
View full review »DM
Daniel P.
Works with 11-50 employees
This solution is very scalable. We bought it with plenty of room for expansion as well, so we don't have to worry about outgrowing it anytime soon, but if we do, it is a simple no-downtime, procedure.
View full review »AI
reviewer1365102
Director of IT at a computer software company with 201-500 employees
Solution is very scalable. Its easy to add more nodes and StarWind support will usually pre-configure and add them to the cluster.
View full review »BG
reviewer1944000
IT Manager at Conestoga
Our experience has been positive when adding additional StarWind appliances to scale out when additional compute resources have been needed. Support is easy to get a hold of if there are any questions when scaling their appliances with additional resources or adding to a new environment.
View full review »NB
reviewer1934964
System Engineer at Selux AG
The solution is endlessly scalable.
View full review »DE
reviewer1845939
Director of IT at Kelly Aerospace, Inc.
The solution is very scalable.
View full review »SB
Shawn Bender
Global IS Admin at Benshaw, Inc.
It seemed that we would be able to increase the scale as needed.
View full review »KS
Kristopher Skully
Systems Administrator at Hospice of the Western Reserve
StarWind’s virtual SAN is limited to synchronizing storage between two or three nodes, which is perfect for us. To scale further, they use a grid architecture, but I don't think that will be necessary for us.
We have about 1,100 users and eight offices. There are two locations where we have servers. We installed this at our headquarters location. Next year, we're going to be upgrading our equipment in another location with more of StarWind’s HyperConverged Appliances.
We're in the process of decreasing our on-premises footprint. Our main initiative is to move everything into Microsoft Azure, but there are several things that need to stay here on-prem. That's what the hyper-converged system is for.
View full review »RF
reviewer1036590
Systems Engineer / Systems Administrator
You can scale the HCAs by adding more CPUs, memory, network ports, and when needed, adding another node.
View full review »RL
reviewer1854726
IT Infrastructure Manager at TPRG
The scalability is amazing as it allows for a scale-out and scale-up approaches combined in a single cluster.
View full review »JH
Jason Holder
IT Manager at TrendHR
The product is moderately scaleable. It should fit any SMB and works even in larger organizations. The product allows quick additional of multiple nodes. At a certain point, eventually your storage replication might be better served by dedicated sans rather than the VSAN, or it might be beneficial to check out the newer Storage Spaces in DataCenter edition when it comes to storage scaling up. However, I think the VSAN included with the cluster will meet most small and medium sized deployments by just adding more nodes with additional storage when needed.
View full review »HM
HunterMorgan
Owner at Data Barn
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.
View full review »CG
reviewer1684866
CIO at a renewables & environment company with 11-50 employees
We see no issues with scalability. I doubt we will outgrow the system, although we do always like it faster. You can add more storage, more RAM, and more nodes as needed.
View full review »PT
Paul T
Network and Information Systems Engineer at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
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.
View full review »MT
Matt_Thomas
Network Manager at Riverston Schools
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.
View full review »RB
Ross Bullock
IT Manager at Bonitas Trust
In terms of the solution's hardware footprint, it's very scalable. It's important that you look at future-proofing as much as possible when you buy the product. It's important that you think about three to five years' worth of growth. The ability to upgrade is always there, but that's going to come at a cost later on. Obviously, technologies change reasonably quickly — certainly server technologies, disks, and arrays, etc. So it's good, if you want them to be truly resilient with each other, to keep them at one state of firmware revision, rate controllers, all running at the same level, etc.
For us, scalability is an interesting thing because we have two comms rooms and we want to keep things resilient between those two comms rooms. We have the option, obviously, to increase the space and add additional memory, just like with any other server. We could add a third StarWind appliance and increase our capacity in that way. Clearly, if we were going to do that, our resilience wouldn't be quite equally spread because we'd have two appliances in one comms room and one in another. For us, there are many more options than we would have with a traditional SAN. Certainly, we're not constrained by it in any way.
View full review »RM
ReinierMuller
Interim CTO at Royal Koopmans
StarWind is almost infinitely scalable. It depends on the use case. You can scale it on-premise or you can scale it towards the cloud. And then you get the disaster-recovery option included because you can easily move the machines from on-premise to a StarWind solution in the cloud. But for my current client, the cloud is not an option, with all its manufacturing equipment in-house. You have to have the computer system close to the points of contact.
View full review »CK
ChrisKlose
IT Manager at a transportation company with 51-200 employees
One of the reasons we got it was that we could deploy with as few as two nodes. We're not a large environment and a lot of solutions out there started at three nodes and more. This was attractive because it was just two. I understand it could scale but we're not going to scale it.
We have approximately 100 users using basic Windows functions like file shares. The common user would you utilize those things which are running off of this solution.
We don't require much staff for maintenance. We only have two onsite administrators, me and someone else. Between us we can handle the Windows updates and additions of VMs if we need to.
View full review »JE
reviewer1691742
Server Administrator at John Wood Community College
Ours is a 3 node, but appears to scale much larger as needed.
View full review »HY
Ho-Ching Yung
IT Director/Senior Software Developer at Hillis-Carnes Engineering
It's good for what we do — an SMC with hybrid cloud.
View full review »It meets the needs of smaller organizations. I think they are upfront that the HCA solution is not tailored towards large organizations.
View full review »If we had smaller needs, the amount of expansion would have been more. We went fairly large since we only get money once in a blue moon. There is some additional storage scalability, although not a ton.
We can add plenty of RAM. If we wanted more CPU then sure, those could be replaced!
View full review »If you provide your own switches instead of doing their direct connect option you should be able to scale this solution very well. If you go direct connect you are limited to 3 nodes. Adding additional storage should be easy if you have available hard drive bays.
View full review »EJ
manager921597
I.T. Manager at a real estate/law firm with 201-500 employees
It's very scalable. We are using it for two nodes, however, there's no reason for the product to not support three, four, or five nodes. You just have to scale in the number of VMs that you need and you just add more servers, really.
We have about 100 users on the solution currently.
We do not plan to increase usage. We do plan to move to the cloud.
View full review »It is easy to scale.
View full review »AL
Andrew_Lee
IT Infrastructure Analyst at a retailer with 201-500 employees
It would be fairly easy to add to it. We could add a third node with another card.
View full review »AW
Andrew Wolf
Civil Engineer at Crossroad Engineers, P C
None at this time.
View full review »PG
PieterGrootendorst
Technical Consultant at GMA
In terms of adding processes or new user licenses, we've never had to do that, but from the documentation and speaking with support, it is relatively easy.
Buyer's Guide
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about StarWind HyperConverged Appliance. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
768,246 professionals have used our research since 2012.