StarWind Virtual SAN is software-defined storage for efficient storage and backup.
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StorMagic SvSAN
Score 7.1 out of 10
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StorMagic SvSAN is simple storage virtualization that eliminates downtime. It provides high availability with two nodes per cluster. Organizations use the solution to keep mission-critical applications and data online and available 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
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Pricing
StarWind Virtual SAN
StorMagic SvSAN
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
StarWind Virtual SAN
StorMagic SvSAN
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
Optional
Additional Details
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More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
StarWind Virtual SAN
StorMagic SvSAN
Considered Both Products
StarWind Virtual SAN
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 …
The combination of overall cost and quality of support makes StarWind Virtual SAN stand out as our product of choice. We have not come across any other product that is inexpensive enough to be affordable for SMB, enough support that makes you feel supremely confident of the …
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.
The StorMagic SvSAN solution is certainly suitable for two-node architectures where business continuity is required at a reasonable price, with a workload that is not particularly complex. It is not the right solution if you have a virtual environment with a large number of VMs and workloads that require high performance.
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.
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!
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, we had a similar occurence, where we needed to re-provision the SSD cache and the StarWind Support (Yaroslav) helped through remote support and a switch to the Free version afterwards.
Deploying the solution is fairly simple. A system administrator with basic data centre knowledge can configure the StorMagic SvSAN suite independently by following the guides provided. Troubleshooting is greatly simplified thanks to the features available in the management interface. The dashboard allows you to easily manage the technology thanks to a very intuitive and well-designed interface.
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.
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.
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.
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!
