Senior Systems Administrator in Information Technology at Daifuku North America Holding Company (Industrial Automation, 1001-5000 employees)
Chose StarWind Virtual SAN
I don't recall the other solutions by name. Lots of them were appliance based that were much more costly. StarWind was sort of a bring your own device solution but it worked out well for us. The appliances all had upfront costs and then additional costs for connecting to cloud …
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Verified User
Chose StarWind Virtual SAN
Starwind VSAN is also as integrated as these other solutions but its cost point is ridiculously less to integrate. Also, Starwind VSAN literally configures your environment and helps you manage it. Also by extension, you have more flexibility in adding storage to the VSAN …
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
It's well suited for a VMWare Esxi cluster setup. You are guaranteed to have the same CPU chipset to ensure the servers on the cluster are compatible with each other. We've had to stagger the purchase of systems by six months and have had compatibility issues. It's also well suited for I/O such as MS SQL or Oracle databases, Exchange servers, domain controllers. Pretty much any server setup will work with no issues on the HPE Proliant DL line. It's less appropriate as a NAS server, we had purchased one that ran on Windows Storage. Since it was more or less running Windows as a single controller, we had issues where it has locked up and caused an outage.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
For remote locations, where communications are limited and cloud services are difficult to obtain, on-premises servers are the only solution. Hardware solutions require spares in storage for redundancy and are more expensive than software solutions. If communications and cloud computing are highly available, then solutions such as StarWnd Virtual SAN would not be needed.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
iLO Advanced - I feel like this is just a money grab. Give me the remote features, at least the remote console, with the purchase. I'd be OK with paying for the advanced license for more centralized functionality, but straight remote sessions? That should just be there.
Software entitlements and online interaction are a little wanting. This isn't the hardware per se, but enterprise products are often heavily tied to online services and tools and that could be a lot better.
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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!
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
We have been using these servers for many years now and we have used different generations of this product line. We have never faced a catastrophic issue using these and even the smaller issues that we have faced have been dealt with by the technical support team of HP. They have been a reliable partner in our data center.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Very easy to use and manage from an IT standpoint. The user interface is well laid out, provides access to the underlying hardware configurations, and allows customization of storage volumes from each cluster node in your environment. Can provide differing levels of access, so team member access can be set up based on roles.
The solution has been tested under constant usage for 5 years now and there (knock on wood) has yet be an outage. There were instances if human error during the operation and the StarWind reliably intervened, either through a synchronization or reporting of a degredation of interfaces, e.g. the heartbeat interface.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
The software delivered exceptional performance until now with very fast write and speed rates, around 900MB/s through a 10GBit connection on a virtualized fileserver. It meets our demands without any problems whatsoever and we are a very media heavy environment with TBs of raw data.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Overall, HPE support meets our requirements. They offer handy 24x7 phone support with clear case resolution interface. Engineers from HPE know their hardware and software. They are polite and help to find quick solutions for their customers. We don't need to prioritize our service requests to account managers to find how to fix or improve our service support.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
I've used Dell poweredge servers and they were great too, but I found remotely deploying HPE hardware was significantly easier and faster. One thing I love about HPE is when i got to deploy an OS remotely via iLO I can utilize the virtual media URL as opposed to mounting an iso. these eliminates the SSL overhead and the OS can be deployed in under an hour. Mounting an ISO has proven reliable but due to the SSL overhead it can take hours. In addition i found im able to register my HPE hardware with HPE and they provide me a clean IT dashboard of all of my hardware and they give me alerts as to expiring support coverage, if a server is down or reporting an error. its a very solid and reliable solution all around.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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.
The software is very scalable storage wise. The storage is provisioned through config files, which are created either through PowerShell scripts or the Management Console on the paid version. After that the storage is provisioned through iSCSI. In our case, in case of expansion, we would have to run the PowerShell scripts and do another full synchronization to update any remaining backup nodes, but the procedure is clear and even easier via Management Console, just expand the RAID array, punch the new capacity into the console and start the synchronization!
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Allowed us to move forward with running web-based applications and to scale them as needed.
The lack of future driver support has made it difficult to consider upgrades, we may need to go with more expensive hardware in the future to be able to maintain upgrades.
While we have not realized all the business growth benefits we expected from this investment, we have had much more flexibility and options when we need to change our environment to meet the business needs.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
