Fast and Simple HCI Great Value Solution with Superb Support
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We have a 3 host Dell hardware/Starwind HCI Solution used to replace an ageing SMB HCI Solution. While we could have also migrated to a different Hypervisor, we still had a valid VMWare license so stuck with that.
Our old system was out of Compute and close to maxed on storage. It was slow and starting to cause issues from general managemenet to random shift downs of the Virtual Machines or those servers requiring regular restarts. Since migrating we have had neither and the system is a rocket ship speed wise.
Pros
- Storage Management out of the box is a simple process
- Superb support and pre sales
- Full SSD solution is a rocket ship without the additional overhead of NVMe so I am really pleased as Compute is as import to me as iOPS
Cons
- No native snapshots, these have to be done at the hypervisor
- No Deduplication so requires additional capacity plannimng depending on your requirements
Likelihood to Recommend
This is a perfect solution for in-house or private cloud scenarios for the Small>medium sized business were speed and agility is important. We can deploy VM's and resize storage on the fly with almost zero impact on the system. We have 10 Vm's including to very large and bust database servers (SQl and Oracle) and even at full load there is zero slow down. Even better is there are no additional networking requirements so its a great solution for when you are on a tight budget.