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Product Details
What is StarWind HCA?
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA) is a turnkey hyper-converged platform that merges compute, storage, network, and software into a nuclear 2-node footprint. The solution is designed to simplify HCI management for Enterprise ROBO, SMB & Edge, while offering flexible scalability and powerful performance.
Users can start with two nodes, based on HeartBeat, that can be switchless and function without additional equipment. StarWind HCA is a software-centric architecture that removes the need for proprietary components. StarWind Engineers perform the configuration, testing, migration, and integration for users, free of charge.
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance:
- allows using 100% of underlying storage performance
- has no hardware compatibility lists (HCLs)
- does 2- or 3-way replication + local RAID 5/6/10
- does VAAI and ODX data offloading
- includes load balancing and data locality
- does VM-centric hypervisor-level snapshots, and more.
To minimize CapEx and OpEx further, StarWind ProActive Premium Support (included in every license) substitutes an IT squad for the sake of cluster health assurance. ProActive Support monitors user environments 24/7/365, and uses machine learning to detect abnormal behavior so issues are prevented before they can become a problem.
The vendor presents StarWind HCA as a hyper-converged world enclosed in a tiny “building block” that comes at a reasonable price.
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Deployment Types | On-premise |
---|---|
Operating Systems | Windows, Linux |
Mobile Application | No |
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Reviews and Ratings
Reviews
(1-25 of 43)- Popular Filters
- Storage Sharing
- Perfect for cluster hypervisor solutions
- 24x7 monitored system
- n/a
- n/a
- n/a
- Virtualization
- Hardware redundancy
- The central management
- in the past due to time zone differences to get to phone support later in the afternoon sometimes we could not get a hold of second level technical support on the same day. however we feel that this has been improved in the past year. Normally we can get to first level support immediately and then if an escalation needed, we schedule a time with second level support later
- Customer portal to schedule a time
- Discounts on Upgrades
Absolutely the correct decision
- Replication
- Redundancy
- Provide storage
- Product update notifications
Excellent product, even better support
- Very stable.
- Takes up very little physical space.
- Excellent support.
- Easy to implement and use.
- Nothing to be improved.
Great Product and Support!
- Easy Implementation
- Easy GUI
- Excellent Customer Support
- User Training
Reliability and simplicity is good!
- Simplicity and ease of management were great. Much easier to maintain than other complex redundant solutions.
- Proactive support is great and available 24/7.
- Reliability have been solid (no downtime at all) for 5 years.
- Support team has slight accent but is not too difficult to understand.
- Emphasis on security can be improved. Things like default passwords were not changed initially until requested.
- Can't really think of much else...If I had to split hairs...on reboots sometimes it took a while to sync with the other node. Max was 30 minutes, but 99% of the time it's 3-4 minutes.
StarWind HCAs Help Me Sleep at Night
- Reliability.
- Redundancy.
- Ease of use.
- Ease of installation/setup.
- Our use case is very simple and I can't think of anything that needs room for improvement.
- For our use, it's mainly set it and forget it and it does everything we need it to do out of the box.
Amazing product, Amazing support
- The appliance scale very well. If need be, we can add new appliances to the pool with ease.
- The appliance runs maintenance-free. We rarely have to touch the StarWind software or the appliances beyond routine VM maintenance
- It load balances extremely well.
- Price. It is a little expensive for small businesses to buy into - however it is on point with other solutions in this market space.
Excellent service and reliable hardware
- Easy to use and deploy
- Great service and support
- Failover and live migration are quick
- We haven't run into any issues with the product in the time we've used it
Fantastic product for a SMB
- Ease of deployment
- No need to create a storage network with their Virtual SAN
- Great ProActive Support
- Virtual SAN setup requires more storage than traditional
- Steps need to do maintenance can be a little confusing
- Had to use Windows Server licenses at time of deployment
Great SMB Hyper-Convergence Solution
The appliances are providing nearly all the network, compute, and storage resources for our server needs.
- Onboarding is well supported and simple. We were able to migrate all our VMs within a week of receiving the appliances.
- StarWind's Virtual SAN software gives the reliability of a failover cluster with the performance of local storage.
- ProActive Support ensures errors are detected and contact initiated automatically.
- I no longer have to troubleshoot three disparate systems when something goes wrong.
- Since Hyper-V Failover Clusters require Cluster Shared Volumes, the appliances have to be configured to access their local storage through an iSCSI connection. It adds a small amount of overhead, but is still much faster than an actual SAN.
- ProActive Support is sometimes a little too much. We were having issues with our Backup/DR software that was generating errors in the appliances' event logs, and we had a new series of emails from StarWind every morning until they were sorted out.
- Lead time on receiving the appliances was pretty long. Dell provides the hardware, so their delays are StarWind's delays as well.
- Each appliance has to be able to be able to support all of the VMs' storage/compute needs, so enough disk space needs to be purchased to house all the storage needs on each appliance. If you require 10TB of storage before taking a RAID into account, you would need to purchase 20TB of storage.
Amazing product, better support
- Failover
- Clustering
- Customer Support
- The interface can be confusing to a novice, but their support is awesome at making sure you understand the capabilities.
StarWind a very good solution
- reliability
- flexibility
- medium
- Trust
- Hyperconvergency
- Sincronization
- Proactive support
Great Solution
- Great support
- Failover is reliable
- Makes maintenance task easier
- Works for us as intended
4 Years Running Strong with 2 Node HCA Appliance
- StarWind HyperConverged Appliance allows you to run hyper-converged infrastructure for a fraction of the cost of other solutions.
- They offer proactive support to quickly identify problems in your environment.
- StarWind HyperConverged Appliance virtual san software works as advertised and does so efficiently and effectively.
- I would like to see some better power management/additional sync settings during an unplanned power outage.
Incredibly Experience with StarWind
- Manage Virtual Servers.
- Decrease server downtime.
- Provide high server availability.
- Hard to name anything specific that could be improved, the solution delivers on its promises.
Simple To Set Up And Manage, A Dream To Work With
- Provides a stable platform for Hyper-V.
- Provides fast migrations between Failover Clustering nodes.
- Provides powerful branded servers in a simple solution.
- Provides a fantastic management interface.
- Easy to configure and simple to manage.
- Initial configuration could do with more documentation.
- A fully supported trial version.
- A minimal GUI version for the Free version after license expiry.
Amazing Product, Even Better Support!
- The migration of hosts between nodes is extremely fast and we are yet to see an error when doing so.
- Creating new hosts from templates or from fresh is very fast.
- Synchronisation is fast and provides good HA
- Difficult to manage capacity and usage on CSVs
- Reporting and visibility of resource allocation not brilliant
Affordable and easy
- Easy to use
- Nice support
- Affordable
- Bether web manage GUI
Servers without the down time
- Robust
- Excellent Software
- Scaleability
- Excellent Customer service
- Wouldn't change a thing
Starwind HyperConverged Appliance Is One Of The Best Solution
- Strong customer focus (great support)
- Overall cost
- Proactive support / advice
- A bit hard to implement at the beginning but worked with the help of the support
- I would have purchased a 3 node instead of a 2 node to start. The 3 node is better since we can have 2 servers down and still be running.
- Since the 3 nodes are plugged together, the cabling management is a bit of a mess behind the server but not so bad either.
A rock-solid and affordable alternative to VMWare native vSAN
- Fully redundant shared storage (vSAN)
- Proactive monitoring of all of the hardware
- 24/7 support
High Availability at an Affordable Price.
- Cost Effective
- Great Support
- Great Hyper-V Solution
- Easy To Work With
- Flexible Solution
- More documentation -- particularly in regards to Starwinds VSAN
- Management Console Could Use [Improvements].
- More detail into what data is reported to Starwind ongoing.
StarWind HCA is The Perfect Solution for SMB IT Departments
- Great support.
- Lowers single point of failure.
- Competitive cost compare to other solutions.
- Documentation.
- Easier to understand adding cache or advanced options.
Affordable and Rock Solid
- The VSAN software is extremely stable and easy to use.
- The hardware setup was extremely easy because most of it was pre-configured before it was shipped.
- The ability to use any hypervisor that you prefer is a great feature.
- The support level is fantastic.
- Honestly, they don't need to improve from my experience, the whole experience has been perfect.