StarWind HyperConverged Appliance's have been stellar for our nonprofit organization!
I am the sole sysadmin at a small nonprofit. We replaced our old VMware hosts/SAN storage with a pair of StarWind HyperConverged …
StarWind HCA
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StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (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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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.
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- No setup fee
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- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting / Integration Services
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What is Azure Stack HCI?
Microsoft offers hyperconverged infrastructure solutions via Azure Stack HCI. Azure Stack HCI provides a variety of preferred hardware solutions for building a hybrid cloud infrastructure, allowing the user to run virtual machines on hyperconverged systems and use Windows Admin Center to connect to…
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StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA)
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Product Details
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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 Competitors
StarWind HCA Technical Details
| Deployment Types | On-premise |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems | Windows, Linux |
| Mobile Application | No |
StarWind HCA Downloadables
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, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure, and NetApp HCI 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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Reviews and Ratings
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May 05, 2022
Excellent product, even better support
We were running MS Dynamics AX2012 on a HP LeftHand SAN solution, but it was just too slow. We moved to an all flash StarWind solution that performed much, much better and improved the user experience greatly, and only took up 4U of rack space rather than the full rack of SAN nodes and servers.
- Very stable.
- Takes up very little physical space.
- Excellent support.
- Easy to implement and use.
- Nothing to be improved.
- Increased speed.
- Reduced physical footprint.
- Reduced energy consumption.
- Improved user experience.
- HPE Nimble Storage, Nutanix AOS and HPE StoreVirtual VSA (Discontinued)
StarWind provided the best value for money against the other solutions we looked at, while providing all the functionality we needed.
5 years support was included in the very competitive price.
No
I wanted to add an additional set of SSD's and create a new, separate volume. I contacted StarWind about this and got an immediate response with knowledgeable staff who bent over backwards to help and provide all the info I needed to complete the upgrade.
December 27, 2021
A rock-solid and affordable alternative to VMWare native vSAN
We settled on StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA) as a less expensive alternative to VMWare's more expensive license for vSAN shared storage between our two VMWare hosts, providing full hardware redundancy of everything. The peace of mind knowing that all of our data and VMs are running on two fully redundant hosts is amazing.
- Fully redundant shared storage (vSAN)
- Proactive monitoring of all of the hardware
- 24/7 support
- Substantial cost savings over VMWare's vSAN license
- Massive increase in performance/IOPS compared to our previous hosts
We ordered the new Dell hosts through StarWind, and they preconfigured everything, then shipped them to us. Implementation was as simple as racking them, connecting the cables as directed, and turning everything on. Once this was done, I added the new hosts to my existing vCenter server/environment, migrated all of the VMs over to the new hosts, then decommissioned the old hosts. It was extremely painless, and while I didn't need much help with that part, StarWind was right there with me in case anything went wrong.
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.
1
I'm the IT director and one-man IT support for the company.
1
Knowledge of networks/networking and VMWare vCenter server and host management. It is really quite simple for anyone with a decent general skillset.
- Full hardware redundancy for both VMWare hosts and all of our data
- There are none, but our needs are extremely limited, and StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA) is doing exactly what we need.
- Possibly integrating with one of the clouds for backups and/or VM migrations
Yes, for the peace of mind, and I don't regret it.
No
One weekend we had a fiber module fail in our ISPs internet router. StarWind support notified me they'd lost connectivity, so I came in and figured out what the problem was and was able to get Cogent out in time to fix it before everyone came in for work on Monday, so there was no downtime that affected business operations.
October 07, 2021
StarWind HCA vSAN Post-Purchase Review
We use StarWind vSAN to support the IT needs across the entire company. It allows us to provide high-performance computing and storage to the business needs (i.e.: VMs, apps, desktops, etc.). It also reduces our IT complexity in hardware and maintenance.
- High performance storage.
- Great customer service and support.
- Simple to deploy.
- Reduced single points of failure.
- Documentation.
- Reduced IT maintenance.
- Increased infrastructure redundancy.
- Reduced hardware/rack wiring complexity.
We customized the hardware, but nothing drastic (change CPUs, memory, storage). It was very simple.
We compared against just general servers + SAN solution from Dell. StarWind had fewer single points of failure, reduced hardware, and better performance.
45
All.
1
General IT knowledge. General vSphere knowledge. General hardware knowledge.
- Compute
- Storage
- Reduced single points of failure
- General IT infrastructure needs
- Disaster Recovery, offsite
Yes
Dell VRTX all-in-one compute and storage, and prior to that a nodes, network, and SAN system. We replaced primarily because our warranties were expiring although we did want better performance and more resiliency as well.
- Price
- Product Usability
Ease of use with good support at a reasonable price.
Wouldn't change anything.
- Implemented in-house
No
- None
Yes. We purchased it to have an extra set of eyes on the infrastructure since we have a small staff and limited time to monitor the HCA/vSAN constantly.
No
Every time. Pre-purchase discussions, customizing the hardware, initial setup, and resolution of issues.
- Initial setup.
- Daily usage.
- Power loss graceful shutdown.
- Testing.
No
July 19, 2020
SMB wanting the virtual high availability that large enterprises have? Look no further than StarWind HCA.
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.
- Tech Support. Starwind proactive tech support reaches out to us when they detect an issue instead of us having to initiate the support call. Then their technician will stay with us through the entire process until a resolution is found.
- Affordability. Starwind HCA is very aggressively priced while still able to offer all of the needed features that you look for in an HCA solution.
- Simplicity. Starwind offers network-less 2 and 3 node clusters. This way you can have a stable failover cluster without needing to monitor and maintain a separate storage network stack.
- Multi cluster console. Currently, their management console is only able to attach to a single cluster at a time. I'm told that they have multi-cluster management high on their list of new features to be added so hopefully that is added soon.
- Tech support locations. Currently, their tech support is located in eastern Europe. While they are staffed 24/7 there can be a language barrier at times trying to listen through thick accents. They are always very patient and never complain, even when I ask them to repeat themselves multiple times.
- Starwind has given us the ability to offer services that we were having to outsource in the past. This increases our offering, thus increasing our value to our customers.
- Because Starwind is very affordably priced we are able to offer services to our customers while maintaining healthy margins.
- The proactive support has allowed our technicians to focus on our customer instead of on our own internal hardware.
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.
We chose Starwind over Nutanix and Scale because of price and hypervisor. Both Nutanix and Scale use a customer hypervisor and we wanted to use a hypervisor we were already well versed in. Starwind won over Simplivity because of cost and support. During our talks with HP we got the impression that Simplivity was not their main focus and we didn't want to buy in to a dying product.
Yes
I chose Starwind Proactive support because I want the extra peace of mind of knowing that I have an extra set of eyes on my hyper-converged clusters.
No
At one point shortly after installation, we were receiving an error that was actually impacting performance in any way. The solution was a driver update. The technician performed this driver update on all of my nodes and even on a separate cluster that wasn't having this issue. This was at 11 pm. He went above and beyond during off-hours even though this was not a production impacting issue.