StarWind HCA Reviews

StarWind HyperConverged Appliance serves as our hardware and storage for our sites. StarWind replaced our traditional SAN and host infrastructure. The company needed to replace the end of life server infrastructure while introducing new technologies like hyper converged platforms. StarWind also solved the problem of needing redundant storage without breaking the bank.

StarWind's custom hardware configurations really hit home for my company. We were able to custom size a solution for every site which really saved us money in the long run. I wasn't left with over sized hardware at a smaller site. Their deployment services were great. They helped us deploy our first two sites then we deployed the rest on our own.

We had a hodge-podge of Hyper-V servers of various ages, capacity, and speed - some being upwards of 10 years old. Finally got budget to upgrade and made the most of the money by going HCA opposed to traditional host + SAN. Going HCA allowed us to not have a huge expenditure on networking.

We did use their services for the initial setup. I'm sure we could have figured it out on our own, but getting a 3-node cluster set up in a few hours and set up right was well worth it.

very easy to work with

We are an IT service provider. A new area that we wanted to branch out into is hosting services/data for our customers. Starwind HyperConverged appliances helped us do just that. With two clusters, we are now hosting critical servers for our customers and are also able to give our customers offsite data backup for their onsite servers with disaster recovery into our private cloud.

Starwind tech support fully implemented our 2 clusters with very little needed on our end. Once we rack and stacked the boxes and connected them according to their diagrams they remoted in and performed all required configurations to get us online. We were not migrating existing VMs so they did not perform any migration tasks. The servers are new Dell servers covered by Dell tech support that Starwind will work with if there is ever a hardware issue.

It's being used by the whole organization, we run one of our private cloud colocation facilities with StarWind and it's our main SAN storage in our HQ.

We purchased StarWind VSAN as an appliance from them. The whole process was very smooth. Appliances came preconfigured, it was just plug and play.

We were planning on upgrading our ERP system that was running on physical servers that were near end of life and were looking at implementing a virtual infrastructure for use for the new ERP system and future servers.

Did not use.

We are a small to mid-sized Eye Clinic that in 2015, had to upgrade our Patient Management & Billing system so deciding to stick with our current vendor, we migrated to their “cloud” product which is a hosted RDS Farm solution. Our 2 year experience on their “cloud” was coupled with numerous outages and continual slowness issues on a weekly basis. In 2017, we decided to bring the system back on-premise and so we began looking for a solution to run it along with our other virtual machines. Fault-tolerance was the primary requirement in our search and having worked with VMware vSAN in the past, we knew that it would be a viable solution but also one that would exceed the budget. That's when we discovered the StarWind HyperConverged Appliance, a 2-node highly available solution that fell within the allotted budget. We purchased the StarWind solution and it ran flawlessly for 2 years, then in late 2019, the unthinkable happened, our clinic caught fire and the building and all its contents were destroyed. Knowing we had offsite backups, we just needed the hardware to restore our servers. In contacting our StarWind account rep, they completely understood the circumstance we were in and accelerated the order, build, and shipment of the new 2-node appliance. As management worked on obtaining an alternate building to restore the service of treating our patients, the servers were delivered to my home so the restoration process could begin. The StarWind engineering and support staff were a tremendous help as they assisted in the restoration process. Knowing that StarWind will drop and do what’s needed to help a customer in dire straights has won us over as a faithful customer for life...thank you StarWind!!!

We are currently using StarWind HCA to build out a flexible, distributed storage system. We had a myriad of file, application and database servers that ranged from physical to virtual. StarWind helped us consolidate and make the necessary physical to virtual server moves (P2V) and the entire process was very pleasant. This system also allows us to achieve high availability (HA) across the entire IT infrastructure that we are responsible for which was a major driving decision. This was all completed at an affordable price point for an SMB, which was also a key element for an NPO.

StarWind allowed us to migrate everything to a single Hyper-converged High Availability Hyper-V Cluster. We were able to shut down all of our legacy hardware and Hyper-visors and build in more redundancy. This also allowed us to bring some systems back out of cloud hosting which saved us additional money.

We used to have 4 Dell PowerEdge hosts running various version of Microsoft Hyper-V with no redundancy.
We are also running out of storage space and have been dealing with the increasing complexity of Windows server licensing. We investigated and received proposals from three vendors (Dell, Scale Computing and StarWind). Ultimately the main decision point was cost. StarWind is the only vendor that only needs two nodes to set up the cluster. Not only did we save on the extra node, we also did not have to license another Windows Server Datacenter edition. Our StarWind HCA has been in production for over 12 months, and we have had no issue or a single instance of downtime so far. And it has achieved our goals of centralizing storage management because of the StarWind Virtual SAN, added fault tolerance, and simplified Microsoft server licensing by using the Data Center edition.

StarWind HCA delivered us a complete solution that works out of the box. We received everything we need to get up and running. Support was really helpful, they configured the whole cluster and helped us a couple of times when something went wrong during configuration. HCA with ProActive support guaranteed us that migration from our old environment went smooth and fast.

We had to replace an aging classic infrastructure because the cost to support and maintain every part of it was pretty high. Also, the SAN was becoming rather complex to maintain, and the time to resolution on tickets was pretty long with that vendor.
We spent some time looking at different solutions, since we have resources with experience on a wide range of hyper-converged solutions, including VxRail, Simplivity, and Nutanix. To a point, we did get quoted from a highly renown solution, but it was simply too expensive.
Then we found Starwind. They were offering a Hyperconverged solution that is very well priced and offers remote monitoring/support, resolving both the cost and support issues we had with the previous multivendor solution.