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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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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 59)
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Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
In an environment where flexible storage usage is important, StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is the optimal solution. With the right planning, the system can be expanded flexibly. Personally, I find the integration into VMware class successful. This makes it easy to scale shared storage, which is almost always scarce. Thanks to the node principle, the reliability is high and the hypervisor can be maintained or replaced during operation without restrictions.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
As a nonprofit, we needed a virtualization platform that was reliable, cost effective, and simple to administer. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance checked all the boxes for us. We went with their refurbished models to lower the cost, and they've been rock solid. We were able to simplify our environment and the platform has been so reliable that I really don't have to think about it. This has been great for me as the sole sysadmin. There are a lot of pieces to manage, and StarWind HyperConverged Appliance have allowed me to focus less on the platform and more on the VM's themselves and the other pieces of our network environment. I think as long as you get the "right size" of StarWind HyperConverged Appliance that this platform could work well for many organizations.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
The StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is well suited for environments needing redundancy and high performance. I feel comfortable running virtualized critical servers on the StarWind setup due to the benefits provided by the two-node system. Cost is more along the low-end of pricing compared to other brand-name hyperconverged solutions, so the return on investment is high.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It is well suited for an SMB. SMB's don't always have a large budget. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA) gives you high performance hardware setup with minimal cost. SMB's also don't always have an IT team so the fact that it's all supported hardware and services is great. The fact that you can migrate easily is a plus.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
When upgrading servers and software it is so easy to to switch the active server over to another node. The cluster manager makes it easy to work on managing servers and upgrades. Our server is not overly complex so it meets our needs in every way. updates can be done during the day instead of waiting till the middle of the night to do upgrades.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
The server went down at a weekend, support was on hand to quickly get the server back up and running before the next working day. Availability of hardware when we purchased was slim, and we wished we had waited for another vendor but the servers we were provided weren't bad just better vendors out there we would have waited for.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Well suited for a company like ours where growth has outpaced IT support.
A low entry point for the quality of hardware and services received.
A key point for us was plenty of room for growth. I didn't want us to get caught behind the growth curve again.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA) offers a solution that is comparable to a storage system because it has all the advantages and is less expensive. It is ideal for small and medium-sized businesses that need to be more cost-efficient and are therefore more limited in choice, but this does not mean that StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA) is not the right choice if a higher budget is available. The comparison should be made with StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA) versus other manufacturers.
Justin Graves | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
HCA is well suited for the SMB space. Schools, non-profits, and budget-conscious orgs that want to virtualize their environment. HCA is hypervisor agnostic. My experience is with HyperV, and it works great! HCA is well suited for two or more hosts. The team works with you to spec what you need and is very responsive along the way.
Mikel Reber | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
I love my HCA for a 2 Hyper-V cluster, not sure how well it scales past 2. I know they have a solution for it, but it seems like it could be a bit cumbersome. Physical setup was easy, software required some hand holding with support, however they are very knowledgable and were able to get us setup without any major issues.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
StarWind HCA is ideal for small and medium sized businesses who want to run their servers on-site and desire high-availability on a budget. Their support handles the initial software setup/configuration and leave you with a hypervisor that is ready to be loaded with VMs and utilized. Once setup it is easy to manage and reliable, and if you do encounter issues support is responsive and effective. Probably not the ideal solution for large enterprises or fast-growing companies since I imagine it's more difficult to scale than some other solutions - but if you have a somewhat consistent performance/storage needs, want the benefits of a HA cluster, and want to host things yourself, it is an excellent solution.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I would highly recommend StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA) for small to medium-sized businesses. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA) can easily be scaled with the additional hosts to support businesses small and large. We currently have two hosts and can easily add more hosts in the future if need be. It is also a very budget-friendly solution.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Starwind HCA is a great option for anyone who wants a simple, stable, ready to go solution out of the box. The solution is well suited for a modest internal environment all the way up to a full MSP hosting dozens of client environments.
Dan Reynolds | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Our use case is in a VMware Horizon View cluster. It works extremely well. The SSD gives outstanding performance and I suspect that the "appliance" does a better job of managing the VSAN than the application running on top of Windows did. We have not had a single hiccup with the changeover. It was so easy to implement and easy to migrate VM's over to it. It was simple. I really can't speak to other scenarios. But if the performance here was an indicator - then it should be good as general storage or another virtualization platform.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA) is well suited in scenarios where you required a fully replicated, fast storage solution for cluster hypervisor host platforms whilst being directly attached without the need for any network-attached storage or additional hardware, allowing for seamless Virtual Machine migrations along with additional data security and lower power consumption to boot.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It is well suited for Virtualized Environment The central management, redundancy and 24x7 alert system via managed service provider is a key component that we were looking for. The HyperV Servers comes Preconfigured and the product sales specialist recommends Hardware specs as needed for your environment. In case of updates for the firmware and StarWind Softwares the Starwind support contacts us since it is managed service and remotely does the upgrade which is great.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
StarWind provides fantastic replication across the nodes. We haven't had any real world failures but in simulated tests, data is always replicated and compute is switched almost immediately.

It also allows us to quickly and confidently perform maintenance on the VMWare environment as we know we can take down a node and no one even notice in the production environment.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I can only speak to our own use. We run a Hyper-V failover cluster on 2 StarWind nodes (Dell R730dx) and I never have any issues with the StarWind software or hardware. If there is ever an issue it tends to be with the VM, and StarWind proactive monitoring picks up on this 24/7 before I know about it, the support is excellent.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Really, it can be suited for any environment, not just large enterprises. Our office is less than 50 users so it can really scale from Small business environments to Large environments I'm sure they are able to offer a solution for anything in between.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is well suited for SMB companies that need a simple, reliable, and fully redundant solution. Small IT teams can't afford to spend a large portion of their day managing a complex system. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance helps with this problem with its vSAN system. Pricing for StarWind is very competitive as well. We got several other quotes and StarWind came in much lower. We've had zero issues with downtime in 5 years, all smooth.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I had to upgrade the StarWind SAN software and at the same time, upgrade the firmware of the hardware of the virtual host and I was able to move all our VMs over to the other host and perform the upgrades on the one host all while keeping all the VMs up and running during the upgrades. In the past, I would have to shutdown all the VMs to upgrade the firmware of the storage server and then power back on the VMs after the upgrade on the storage server.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
It really is suited to anyone that needs to run their own server environment. Combining the performance and scalability of the HCA with the unparalleled support offered by StarWind, there is no better solution out there. If you are living in the past and still run physical devices for every server, it's time to talk to StarWind about how this appliance can help you.
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