Cisco Cloud Object Storage (COS) vs. StarWind Virtual SAN

IBM Cloud storage is a platform for backing up and archiving an unlimited amount of data in a simple, inexpensive, and adaptable manner. It adds additional smart tier capabilities, such as automatic tier categorization and cost optimizations depending on data activity. More secure storage of sensitive information through encryption and fine-grained regulation. A single, permanent, safe, and inexpensive location for all that historical data is IBM's cloud. Now, with query-in-place and machine-learning technologies, developers may create a data lake from which to draw meaningful insights. Offering both high levels of data durability and transmission speed, it is ideal for storing sensitive information on devices that must remain unchanged. Because of the service's excessive latency, a conventional database cannot be stored on it.

Incentivized

For companies that have 4-5 or more servers, StarWind is a great solution to provide high availability for a low price. It can scale up very nicely for larger implementations to more like 15-20 servers with ease. Although we haven't used it for even larger environments, it's doable. What its not appropriate are really small locations that have 1-2 servers. Unfortunately no one seems to have a good HCC solution in this space.

Incentivized

• Cisco Cloud Object Storage closely monitor the stored content in the entire system.
• Different collaboration tools are deployed by Cisco Cloud Object Storage.
• Cisco Cloud Object Storage has deployed [international] standards to avoid insecurity occurrences.

Incentivized

• the StarWind Virtual SAN allows us to use Starwind Management Console to confirm health of the sync
• The High Available nature of the deployment means we can fail over VMs without end users noticing any downtime
• Their support is proactive alerting when firmware updates are needed (including iDRAC firmware) or when there are any warnings in the event logs, and schedule a time to remediate the issue with you.

Incentivized

• Data import can take a bit long
• Save complex data is not so simple

Incentivized

• Complexity: StarWind Virtual SAN can be complex to set up and manage, especially for organizations with limited IT resources
• Limited protocol support: StarWind Virtual SAN supports a limited number of protocols, primarily iSCSI and SMB3
• Limited scalability for storage-only deployments: In storage-only deployments, StarWind Virtual SAN has a limit of 32 nodes per cluster
• Lack of reporting and analytics: StarWind Virtual SAN has limited reporting and analytics capabilities, which can make it difficult to monitor and troubleshoot performance issues
• Limited backup and recovery options: While StarWind Virtual SAN provides some basic backup and recovery options, it lacks advanced features such as snapshot management, backup scheduling, and offsite replication

StarWind Virtual SAN is a great solution and is now an integral part of our network of servers. The product is superb and the support has been amazing. It's perfect for our organisation and we won't be looking to come away from it any time soon!

Incentivized

Overall I like the usability of StarWind Virtual SAN because it is a "Set-up and forget" software. Once you correctly have set up the parameters, StarWind Virtual SAN pretty much rolls by itself. The biggest fact that one needs to keep in mind, though, is that the licensing for StarWind Management Console needs to be purchased separately, and while managing StarWind Virtual SAN through the paid Management Console is really easy and is well documented, going the free or - in other words - PowerShell Template route can be taxing if you are not that deep into the topic. You need to be especially careful with it if you switch from paid to free because using the templates incorrectly can cause issues.

Incentivized

Never went out of availability with StarWind.

It improves the overall performance.

Their support team is dedicated to providing top-notch customer service and is always available to help with any questions or issues that may arise. Their expertise and responsiveness have proven invaluable in ensuring the smooth operation of our virtualized environment. With such excellent support, we feel confident in our ability to utilize this product to its fullest potential, and we highly recommend it to others.

Overall the setup was easy, we did require some help from the technical support team but other than that, we followed all of StarWinds prerequisites and everything else just fell nicely into place with hardly any downtime. The downtime was only due to moving VMs from our previous cluster over to the new StarWind storage cluster.

Incentivized

The storage capacity on Cisco Cloud Object Storage is amazing and the data protection functionalities are very active. The Cisco Cloud Object Storage has [the] most cluster storage management options and [easiest] tools which offer amazing capabilities on easy management of multiple media files through the Cloud services without risking any information.

Incentivized

We have found the solution surprisingly simple to use. The management
console allows us to monitor the solution and we have configured email
alerts to alert us about critical issues. These alerts have been proven
to work in an actual failure scenario, for example, when we had a memory
issue with one of our servers that caused the entire server to crash.
The management console also allows us to monitor the solution
performance and provides us with access to system logs.

Is is future proof for us.

• It saves lot of time and resources by keeping data all in one place which ultimately increases ROI as time is money.

Incentivized

• It eliminates the need for expensive storage hardware and provides an affordable software-defined storage solution.
• It allows organizations to use commodity hardware, reducing the dependency on proprietary hardware.
• It ensures that data and applications are always available, reducing downtime and increasing productivity.

Incentivized