StarWind Virtual SAN vs. VMware Cloud Foundation

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.

It is best suited for an on-premise cloud solution where customer can shift their entire production environment. Also, the customer has a preference for a Homogenous Infrastructure Environment where budget is not a challenge. It is not at all suited for a Heterogenous Environment, e.g., a Public cloud where integration becomes a huge issue, also in SMB sections where budget is challenging.

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• 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.

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• Cloud enabled Solution.
• Support Container based Apps.
• Cost efficient.
• Supports both Public and Private Environments.

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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

• The Deployment is complex.
• Recommended Number of Physical Nodes is three or more; with less than 3 Nodes, it becomes difficult to install V-SAN.
• Need for better integration. If we go on the public cloud, it is a huge challenge while integrate with an open source platform.
• Cost can be marginally reduced. SMB segments still prefer a separate license instead of VCF, or they postpone their purchase plans.

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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!

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

Although the public Cloud Model follows Opex Costing Model, it actually leads to very high costs also, the infra model in my organization is not suited for a Public Cloud Model. Hence We decided on an On-Premise Model, and the best suited was VMware Cloud Foundation, which is a complete Software-Defined Scale-Out Architecture. I also prefer a Homogenous environment; i.e, support and services from a Single OEM, so that I Can get faster resolutions to my tickets raised.

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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!

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• 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.

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• My organization has a size of 1300+ employees, using multiple applications and an exchange mail server that is hosted on On-Premise Cloud, hence scalability has not been a challenge.
• Having hosted my Production environment and Mail exchange Server on VCF, there has been optimum resource utilization with very little scope downtime. Hence have been able to save a lot of funds on Hardware resources.
• Due to the size of my organization and due the data load, I have been able to save on Resource Utilization and Organization Funds

Incentivized

Independently Invited by TrustRadius

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