StarWind Virtual SAN is software-defined storage for efficient storage and backup.
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Veeam Data Platform
Score 9.0 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
Veeam’s® premier product, Veeam Backup & Replication™, delivers availability for all cloud, virtual, Kubernetes and physical workloads. Through a management console, the software provides backup, archival, recovery and replication capabilities.
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$428
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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 …
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.
These products are awesome, but not cost-effective for me. VMware vSAN integrates like a glove if you are running fully VMware environment, not other hypervisors. ONTAP Select is awesome, like a real cabinet, but licensing is a bit complex, and expensive. in both cases in a …
Verified User
Technician
Chose StarWind Virtual SAN
I selected "Windows Server" since I couldn't find S2D in the list... S2D just sucks overall. Crap UI. Crap CLI. Megacrap documentation. VMware is very expensive...
We used HPE lefthand and tried several enterprise grade NAS systems from Lenovo. We have also had a few Dells Poweredge systems. I like StarWind the most due to the agnostic approach with the hardware. Easy to change hardware and keep your license. Also easy to swing data and …
We evaluated and received pricing for the native vSAN solution from VMware. We also looked at the discontinued solution from HPE. StarWind easily provided the best ROI. It also provided a mature solution from a company that is focused on storage solutions. Technically, the …
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 …
Other SAN vendors offer specific features that StarWind doesn't, such as more 3rd party integration (like backup and snapshotting) and nicer management and alerting, but between the huge premium they charge for those features (their "special sauce"), as well as usually …
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.
We have a small deployment with a handful of physical hosts and two dozen or so virtual servers. It's been a perfect fit for us to manage all those backups and to restore entire systems from or even pull specific files/folders from a backup as needed if just a few things need changed/rolled back.
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!
I have used many other data backup products that are on the market. I trust the configuration options within Veeam to do as they are labeled, without any specific back end software changes that may cause backups to fail if you don't use a systems integrator.
I trust the product for my own home environment as well due to relationship I have with the product at work.
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.
Veeam is fairly simple in terms of how it is set up; its not an overly-complicated dashboard that can be intimidating to less technically-inclined users. Veeam also offers good instructional videos to help users work through how to do specific functions. I appreciate that they have specific video tutorials rather than having users scroll through a cumbersome manual.
The Veeam Backup & Replication solution is up and running every time you need it as it was planned. In more than 3 years that we have been using the product every night, it might have failed or presented an error once or twice, so the availability percentage is almost at 100%.
Veeam does a good job with backing up our servers in a timely manner. We are still at the beginning of our Veeam use and are pleased with the speed at which we can access the system as well as the backups and restore points. Veeam is definitely superior to our previous backup system in terms of speed and accessibility
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.
The support team has never asked me to jump through silly hoops or waste time on pointless exercises. They seem to truly have a handle on what may be wrong. In fact, when we were having trouble getting our license renewal setup (because of yet another license migration at Veeam) a support incident got us connected to the right people to get our renewal done in time.
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.
(I assume this question should say "Veeam" and not "Crownpeak Universal Consent Platform") Planning is key. Planning your backup schedule, size, data restore points, replication if you're doing that, &c. Testing is also important; make sure you back something up and then do a test restore. Set up alerts so you know if things aren't working (or even if they are, always good to know that too).
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.
We used Zerto and CA Arcserve to address these needs without migrating to Veeam Backup & Replication. Zerto is a very successful instant backup and we are still using it now. It does what Veeam application cannot do in instant replication. CA Arcserve, on the other hand, is clearly lagging behind the Veeam Backup & Replication product and does not meet today's requirements.
In terms of scalability for our company, Veeam was able to cover our backup needs with ease. They have options for even more individualized backup if we were to need them; i.e. if a specific workstation needs its own independent backup. We have not used these resources yet, but I am confident they will be beneficial to our company in the near future.
Confidence before starting riskier maintenance windows is a large component of what veeam is able to offer for us
Some of the segmentation between different backup servers across our data enters causes unnecessary delays or backups that are duplicated unnecessarily
Lack of certain storage vendors being natively supported requires hacky workarounds not fit for a production environment
