StarWind Virtual SAN

StarWind Virtual SAN

StarWind Virtual SAN

165 Reviews and Ratings

Overview
Product	Rating	Most Used By	Product Summary	Starting Price
StarWind Virtual SAN	Score 9.8 out of 10	N/A	StarWind Virtual SAN is software-defined storage for efficient storage and backup.	N/A

Pricing

StarWind Virtual SAN

Editions & Modules

No answers on this topic

Offerings

Pricing Offerings
StarWind Virtual SAN
Free Trial
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes

Entry-level Setup Fee

No setup fee

Additional Details

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More Pricing Information

Community Pulse
	StarWind Virtual SAN
Considered Both Products	StarWind Virtual SAN DV Dan Vrabie VP, Finance and IT Chose StarWind Virtual SAN Less resources needed and more cost-effective. Helpful? VF Vincent FREMY RSI Chose StarWind Virtual SAN The ease of use is remarkableThe price of StarWind Virtual SAN is much lower than other solutions of the same range and offering the same services.The dashboard is very intuitive and facilitates access to information.The diversity of configuration tools makes configuration … Incentivized Helpful? LB Larry Bates IT Administrator Chose StarWind Virtual SAN Compared with the cost and complexity of a dedicated SAN or Hyperconverged appliance, StarWinds VSAN is much less expensive. While there is a limit on the number of nodes a cluster can support, we are not close to reaching that threshold. Helpful? Verified User Employee Chose StarWind Virtual SAN VMware has no free tier. The licensing was much more expensive than we could afford. StarWind's basic VirtualSAN tier has surpassed our expectations, so we don't feel there is any need to go for a hardware based or higher cost alternative. StarWind Virtual SAN does everything … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Administrator Chose StarWind Virtual SAN Other solutions were proven to be less reliable in the specific test setup used. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Director Chose StarWind Virtual SAN We evaluated several alternatives, including Microsoft Storage Spaces / Stormagic and Nutanix AHV. StarWind Virtual SAN stood out due to its cost-effectiveness, ease of deployment, and ability to deliver high availability without requiring expensive proprietary hardware. Unlike … Helpful? Verified User Administrator Chose StarWind Virtual SAN Easy installation, easy configuration, easy integration Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Employee Chose StarWind Virtual SAN StarWind is generally more cost-effective, flexible, and suitable for small businesses just like ours rather using a more expensive solution. Licensing per node instead of each CPU is a must. we saved a lot just for this. in a 2 node scenario, like what we have, it's simply the … Helpful? Verified User Analyst Chose StarWind Virtual SAN We had an older NetApp SAN and it was slower and we couldn't upgrade the hardware in it. Now with StarWind Virtual SAN, we can install any hardware that our Windows host OS will allow. Helpful? Simion Vladimir Tehnical Pre-Sales Chose StarWind Virtual SAN Much more affordable, perpetual license Helpful? Tom Esker IT Manager Chose StarWind Virtual SAN Alternative solutions were twice the cost or more which eliminated them. I got input from several companies who used StarWind Virtual SAN and nothing bit good thinsg to say and it was the only option I found that seemed reputable at anywhere near the cost we paid. Incentivized Helpful? Julian Clarke Solution Architect Chose StarWind Virtual SAN Price comparison, faster ROI. Best fit for SMB environments. Incentivized Helpful? JP john perez Senior IT Specialist Chose StarWind Virtual SAN Better value compared to the competition. BYOD for hardware it runs on. Free to deploy version and can be scaled to the licensed version of the product. Full performance of the hardware it is running on. Amazing customer services and support. easy to deploy and can be run as a … Incentivized Helpful? Lawrence Fondrick Sr. Consultant Chose StarWind Virtual SAN Simple but lower functionality/capacity, offset costs comparison. Maintenance costs and support variables decrease ROI for other solutions reviewed. Incentivized Helpful? Seth Weber Network & Systems Administrator Chose StarWind Virtual SAN VMware vSAN requires 3 physical hosts or 2 and a witness, and this was not practical for our situation as we are SMB. StarWind allows us to continue our 2-host virtualization setup and keep all our redundancy and performance. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Manager Chose StarWind Virtual SAN The deployment and administrative management of StarWind are significantly more user-friendly compared to other solutions. It is essential for a solution to be intuitive, especially for individuals who are not highly technical or those managing multiple stacks of products … Helpful? Verified User Director Chose StarWind Virtual SAN StarWind VSAN provided a cost-effective solution without compromising on essential features. The straightforward setup and management were crucial for our IT team’s efficiency. The excellent customer support and proactive monitoring were significant factors in our decision. Its … Helpful? Verified User Engineer Chose StarWind Virtual SAN Better functionality, less complexity, cost effective Helpful? Eren Cakmak IT Administrator Chose StarWind Virtual SAN We have not checked any other competition, as StarWind struck us as a well known, reliable and quick to implement solution with hardware agnostic properties. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Professional Chose StarWind Virtual SAN StarWind Virtual SAN offers more fine-grained features and better performance and stability as compared to the Microsoft Windows Server iSCSI storage server on Windows Server 2019. It also adds the significant benefit of supporting not only HyperV but also VMware and KVM. This … Helpful? Verified User Director Chose StarWind Virtual SAN StarWind Virtual SAN is easier to setup and use, and less expensive. It also has the flexibility of working with Hyper-V or vSphere. StarWind Virtual SAN as a company is also much easier to work with. Incentivized Helpful? Jonathan Armstrong Senior Systems Officer Chose StarWind Virtual SAN HPE and Dell solutions were just too expensive for our budget. HPE's solution lacked performance. Dell's solution is plagued by bad reviews which told stories of broken patching procedures and terrible support experiences. The only company who offered me a trial of their … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Administrator Chose StarWind Virtual SAN Best value for money and less (or no) hardware restrictions. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Consultant Chose StarWind Virtual SAN StarWind Virtual SAN Applicance is available in a hyperconverged scenario, it means you can run it on existing virtual machines and it does the backup against each other by synchronizing the data store with each other. Vmware does not have this type of hyperconvergent approach. … Incentivized Helpful? Raffi Jamgotchian - Cybersecurity for Investment Firms CEO (Chief Executive Officer) Chose StarWind Virtual SAN Scale uses a proprietary version of Qumranet/RedHat for hyperVisor which means another solution that is closed off. Incentivized Helpful?

User Ratings
	StarWind Virtual SAN
Likelihood to Recommend	9.8 (161 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew	8.6 (14 ratings)
Usability	9.0 (31 ratings)
Availability	9.1 (2 ratings)
Performance	9.1 (2 ratings)
Support Rating	9.4 (119 ratings)
Implementation Rating	8.8 (8 ratings)
Configurability	9.1 (2 ratings)
Ease of integration	9.1 (1 ratings)
Product Scalability	7.3 (2 ratings)
Vendor post-sale	9.1 (1 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale	9.1 (1 ratings)

User Testimonials
	StarWind Virtual SAN
Likelihood to Recommend	StarWind 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. DV Dan Vrabie VP, Finance and IT Read full review
Pros	StarWind 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 Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Cons	StarWind 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 GG Giedrius Gedeikis Network System Administrator Read full review
Likelihood to Renew	StarWind 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 SN Stefan Novak Principal of ICT Infrastructure and Services Read full review
Usability	StarWind 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. LB Larry Bates IT Administrator Read full review
Reliability and Availability	StarWind 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. Incentivized Eren Cakmak IT Administrator Read full review
Performance	StarWind 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. Incentivized Eren Cakmak IT Administrator Read full review
Support Rating	StarWind 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. Derek Clarke Director Business Services Read full review
Implementation Rating	StarWind 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 SN Stefan Novak Principal of ICT Infrastructure and Services Read full review
Alternatives Considered	StarWind 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. Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Scalability	StarWind 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! Incentivized Eren Cakmak IT Administrator Read full review
Return on Investment	StarWind 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 Verified User Anonymous Read full review
ScreenShots	StarWind Virtual SAN Screenshots