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StarWind HCA

StarWind HCA

Overview

What is StarWind HCA?

The StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA) is a hyper-converged infrastructure solution designed to reduce application downtime on a reasonable budget.

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Recent Reviews

Top product and good price policy

8 out of 10
August 31, 2022
We would like to have a cheaper solution compared to a storage system but with all the advantages and not the disadvantages. Here only …
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Awards

Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards

Reviewer Pros & Cons

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Pricing

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What is StarWind HCA?

The StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA) is a hyper-converged infrastructure solution designed to reduce application downtime on a reasonable budget.

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee
For the latest information on pricing, visithttps://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwi…

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services

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Alternatives Pricing

What is Scale Computing Platform?

Scale Computing offers edge computing, virtualization, and hyperconverged solutions for customers around the globe. Scale Computing HyperCore software promises to eliminate traditional virtualization software, disaster recovery software, servers, and shared storage, replacing these with a fully…

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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.

StarWind HCA Video

StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA)

StarWind HCA Technical Details

Deployment TypesOn-premise
Operating SystemsWindows, Linux
Mobile ApplicationNo

Frequently Asked Questions

The StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA) is a hyper-converged infrastructure solution designed to reduce application downtime on a reasonable budget.

Scale Computing Platform and Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure are common alternatives for StarWind HCA.

Reviewers rate Availability and Support Rating highest, with a score of 9.7.

The most common users of StarWind HCA are from Mid-sized Companies (51-1,000 employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(63)

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-25 of 38)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Thanks to the finished hardware concept, the HCA is quickly ready for use and requires less configuration effort.The high speed and low failure rate are unbeatable in comparison to the virtual SAN.After a detailed examination, the costs balance each other out. In my opinion, the ROI is shorter with the HCA.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Scale seemed like a good solution also. The problem from my side was how different the end result would be from our current environment. Scale uses it's own proprietary hypervisor, so no VMware. This would save on licenses but would require a new set of skills and possibly a harder migration. Scale didn't allow VM level backups, so an agent would be needed for each VM. That also means that they had a separate backup product that was part of the proposed setup. Again something new that we have never used before. Two switches were also part of the Scale setup. This was part of the old setup that I didn't like, having to run all the cables and data through the network. I get that his is standard but I've replaced a few bad cables before. I like the idea of having the servers directly attached. All this lead to the cost of Scale to being more than double StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA).
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We looked at Scale Computing as another option that was more expensive. There may have been a couple more bells and whistles but for our organization and pricepoint, Starwind fit the bill. With Scale your needed three nodes and with StarWind only 2. Also, StarWind offered refurbished servers with a strong protection plan that brought costs to a more reasonable place for our organization.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
  • Veeam Backup & Replication
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA) offers a product that is comparable to other high-quality systems but at a much more attractive price. Other providers are not so transparent and want to sell hardware for an expensive service. You have to be active yourself and make comparisons because otherwise, you will be spending a lot of money.
Mikel Reber | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Honestly using Starwind was our first jump into Clusterd services. We utilized standalone business grade hardware/software prior to moving to them. It was a great migration. Everything wen't smooth, support was great, the hardware is great, and performance is perfect. If you're hesitant, don't be. If you have worries, drop them. It'll be fine :)
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA) is a complete different beast to storage solution such as Dell EqualLogic PS Series equipment as it allows for all storage to be housed locally to the processing server, having less kit to have to maintain in turn using less power and less cooling, whilst keeping costs lower
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Scale was a proprietary SAN software/hardware and outrageously high priced. The StarWind HyperConverged Appliance was just Dell servers with VMWare ESXi Hypervisor installed running two Windows Servers virtual machines where the StarWind SAN software is installed on. The only thing that was proprietary for StarWind was the StarWind SAN software.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Main reason for swapping away from VMware was cost. Our servers at the point of swapping away from VMware were already old so performance wasn't a consideration. We wanted to have something that Microsoft already provided so being able to leverage HyperV was a solid sell for us.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Not exactly an apples-to-apples comparison, as one is used as a general NAS type array, but we have had multiple drives out in our EMC product over the same course of life as the StawWind HCAs, which have had zero failures.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance was the only option that offered the performance, reliability, and high availability that we were looking for. It's also the solution that is tailored for small organizations and removes a lot of the complexities and extra components needed to make HCI work. The competitors each offer a solution that probably would have worked but none offered a solution that was within our budget.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We evaluated both of these systems and obtained quotes for comparison. Unfortunately both were way out of budget. StarWind however was well within budget! I have also used Nutanix, and the complexity of the management and the setup of the nodes is way more difficult to set up and manage than StarWind.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
In our simple two-host environment, StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA) won out hands down in cost, and while I had no prior experience with the technology, I have been extremely pleased with the result. I wouldn't hesitate to go with them again in the future, although our current hosts will likely still be going strong for at least another 5-7 years.
December 10, 2021

Affordable and Rock Solid

Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I've never used a Scale appliance, but I've researched them and talked to their sales team and engineers. I decided to go with StarWind vs Scale largely because of price, but I also wanted to use Hyper-V and didn't really want to go with a proprietary hypervisor, which is what Scale has.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Starwind is much easier to use and manage than traditional SANs while maintaining our known Hyper V Hypervisor. Starwind is a much simpler product which is perfect for what we need. Traditional SANs may be able to do more than Starwind, but we haven't found any examples yet that we miss and we love the stability and ease of use of Starwind
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