October 19, 2021
Cost effective and stable for small environments
- Great performance of hardware
- Cost effective
- Great support
- Facelift management console
- Management console better guides
- More complete documentation
Ratings and Reviews(1-18 of 18)
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August 19, 2021
StarWind is the best of the best
- Support
- Reliability
- Speed
- I haven't noticed any yet.
October 30, 2021
Great HCA product at a great price with outstanding support
- Speed
- Flexibility
- Support
- GPU
December 01, 2021
Great Solution, easy transition
- Pre-configured System
- Knowledgeable Support Staff
- Great Price point
- Nothing
October 07, 2021
StarWind HCA vSAN Post-Purchase Review
- High performance storage
- Great customer service and support
- Simple to deploy
- Reduced single points of failure
- Documentation
May 24, 2021
Great solution for SMB infrastructure
- Stable, we have yet to have any downtime due to StarWind HyperConverged Appliance software
- Simple and easy to manage
- Proactive support contacts us if issues are detected
- Could have been better communication during implementation
- Single pane of glass management console for cluster, VM, and backup operations has been slow to develop.
- If you want to set up Starwind vSAN in a lab to test, setup can be tedious. However, with the HCA itself StarWind HyperConverged Appliance handles all of that.
May 29, 2021
StarWind: The perfect fit for your company
- StarWind HCA just flat out works. It is a simple solution for a business on a budget!
- Support Support Support. Their support is second to none. I never have to worry about contacting their support because I know they will take care of us.
- The all-flash solution brought us to a new level of speed and under budget!
- Their pre-install questionnaire could be a little more clear on what they are asking.
- When ordering the servers, I would have liked the option to include the not-included cable management arms.
January 22, 2021
StarWind is great
- failover
- redundancy
- performance
- shipping from Canada
November 06, 2020
Reliable and Affordable VSAN Solution
- Low cost reliable hyper convergence
- Dependable hardware
- Outstanding support services
- StarWind could do a better job displaying their hardware models on their website with pricing.
- Adding a product shipping tracker to their website would be helpful.
November 30, 2020
Fantastic and cost-effective upgrade to our old mess!
- Well within budget.
- Easy management.
- High availability.
- Needed to work with sales to get any sort of pricing.
July 19, 2020
SMB wanting the virtual high availability that large enterprises have? Look no further than StarWind HCA.
- 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.
March 13, 2020
Great mix of functionality and cost
- Easy clustering and high availability
- Pricing is attractive for the features
- Uses standard server hardware that I was already familiar with
- Easier integrations with things like external UPS power systems
February 28, 2020
Outstanding Products & Support
- Price point for the HyperConverged Appliances is unbeatable and needs to be looked at if your considering a HCA solution.
- The pro-active system monitoring service that is available with the HyperConverged Appliances is exceptional.
- The product fully meets our needs and there are no areas needing improvement from our perspective.
May 31, 2019
NPO Review of StarWind HCA
- High availability.
- Affordability.
- Expertise.
- Consolidated infrastructure.
- Options for direct hardware purchasing from StarWind.
February 22, 2019
Budget friendly hyper-converged appliance that works
- Centralize Storage management via the StarWind Virtual SAN.
- The HCA provides fault tolerance so that we can lose up to one node in our two node system.
- Simplify Windows licensing by going with Windows Server Data Center edition.
- It could potentially be less reliable due to the Hypervisor and cluster relying on Microsoft Windows Server. However, we have not had any issue since putting them in production 12 months ago.
- The premium support may be a bit expensive, but they have quick responses to tech support tickets, and they also proactively monitor the appliances, so I feel it's worth it.
May 30, 2019
StarWind HyperConverged HCA is a great solution
- Redundant 2 node Hyper-converged High Availability cluster solution
- The most cost effective
- Easy setup, migration, adoption
- Great support
- Veeam backup and 5nine software were both on the quote and PO listed at zero quantity and price but were not included in the purchase. Items not included should not be listed on on quotes or PO's.
March 27, 2019
StarWind HCA delivered us a complete solution
- Fast implementation time.
- ProActive support included.
- HCA comes preconfigured.
- There is not a free tool for comprehensive monitoring.
- Well, for us the main factor behind our choice wasn't pricing. We chose their solution because of the support they provide. We have a fairly small team, and having someone else look at the clusters and notify us when an issue occurs was a selling point.
- Then, obviously, came the second most important factor. Cost. This is simply the cheapest Hyperconverged solution we could find. Yet it offers features comparable to the very expensive solutions.
- The solution is perfect for our use case, so it's rather hard to mention a point to improve on. The only thing I'd like to see is the use of a web console instead of having to maintain an installed client on the admin workstations or servers.
StarWind HCA Scorecard Summary
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 Downloadables
StarWind HCA Competitors
- Scale Computing HC3
- Nutanix AOS
- NetApp HCI
StarWind HCA Pricing
StarWind HCA Technical Details
| Deployment Types | On-premise |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems | Windows, Linux |
| Mobile Application | No |
Frequently Asked Questions
What is StarWind HCA?
The StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA) is a hyper-converged infrastructure solution designed to reduce application downtime on a reasonable budget.
What are StarWind HCA's top competitors?
What is StarWind HCA's best feature?
Reviewers rate Support Rating highest, with a score of 9.
Who uses StarWind HCA?
The most common users of StarWind HCA are from Mid-size Companies and the Financial Services industry.