Efficiency, Performance And Piece Of Mind With Minimal Cost
We had a two physical host, two SAN VMware setup on aging hardware. The SAN's setup as a pool, therefore not redundant. We wanted to …
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.
Read moreRecent Reviews
How StarWind HCA Differs From Its Competitors
Awards
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Top Rated
2022
Best Software
2022
Best Software
2022
Best Software
2022
Best of
2022
Best of
2022
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 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…
Product Demos
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA)
01:06
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.
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StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA)
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StarWind HCA Technical Details
| Deployment Types | On-premise |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems | Windows, Linux |
| Mobile Application | No |
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 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) and the Retail industry.
Comparisons
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Reviews and Ratings
(58)
Reviews
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September 26, 2022
Efficiency, Performance And Piece Of Mind With Minimal Cost
- Simplifies infrastructure
- Knowledgeable support
- High performance
- Easy migration
- Better support portal
- UPS shutdown setup
- A webinar or training session on how it works.
September 08, 2022
Affordable and Reliable Hyper-V cluster
- Low maintenace
- Affordable
- Reliable
September 07, 2022
Solid Product and Great Service!
- Coping date every second in real time
- instant failover
- the ability to upgrade software in background without affecting users during business hours
- I can't say I know of specific areas of improvement. I like the way the systems work. Sometimes I have hard time understanding the support team on the phone but it's not bad.
September 05, 2022
Affordability and Redundancy made easy
- Reduced Hardware Costs
- Support
- Simplified set up
- Control centre needs email notifications
- CSV creation could be easier
September 01, 2022
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance makes even me look good!
- Redundancy
- Load balancing
- Technical Support
- Firmware updates - Though this is more of a server Manufacturer issue. Support does help when there are any questions.
- I would like to see easier to access dashboards and notification areas (This may exist currently, I just don't know about it)
August 31, 2022
Top product and good price policy
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- Good price policy
- best support compared to other
- the product itself
- More choice in server components
- Better set up guide
August 30, 2022
StarWind Goes above and beyond.
- Virtual san.
- Virtualization
- Budget
- Management Console.
August 29, 2022
Great Product, Amazing Service, Perfect Performance
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- Network Speed
- Storage Management
- Failover
- UI could be updated
- Some safety checks would be nice
- Make a "entry level admin" security level for some tasks
- cost
- ease of use
- ongoing support
August 17, 2022
Very happy with the product and the support!
- A single off-the-shelf solution for a high-availability system (usually entails a mix of solutions)
- Support is excellent. Responses are prompt and reps are knowledgeable.
- Relatively low cost
- Command Center (web portal) management is slow and clunky. I find it easier to manage directly from the node OS.
- Scalability could be problematic for larger/faster-growing companies
August 12, 2022
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA) - It just works
- Scalability
- Service and Support
- Reliability
- 24/7 monitoring
- Reporting & Monitoring
- Hardware upgrades can be costly after implementation
- No product update notifications
August 12, 2022
Set It And Forget It - A Great Experience
- Stable
- Easy to manage
- Great support
- Storage expandability, but that might just be due to how the nodes were purchased (prior to my hiring)
June 09, 2022
CEO
- Support
- Ease of setup
- Perfomance is great
- Documentation
- Implementing updates
- It is extremely easy to set up, it comes with most options pre-configured for you. But the support group will walk through your entire setup and migration.
- It is monitored by StarWind 24x7. Instead of issues being reactive with the monitoring I'm hoping things will be more proactive.
- The performance has been outstanding. I think disk was our main limiting factor with our hold hardware.
- I prefer HP hardware to Dell hardware but that's just me.
- The documentation is a bit sparse.
- Storage Sharing
- Perfect for cluster hypervisor solutions
- 24x7 monitored system
- n/a
- n/a
- n/a
- Virtualization
- Hardware redundancy
- The central management
- in the past due to time zone differences to get to phone support later in the afternoon sometimes we could not get a hold of second level technical support on the same day. however we feel that this has been improved in the past year. Normally we can get to first level support immediately and then if an escalation needed, we schedule a time with second level support later
- Customer portal to schedule a time
- Discounts on Upgrades
May 05, 2022
Absolutely the correct decision
- Replication
- Redundancy
- Provide storage
- Product update notifications
May 05, 2022
Excellent product, even better support
- Very stable.
- Takes up very little physical space.
- Excellent support.
- Easy to implement and use.
- Nothing to be improved.
May 05, 2022
Great Product and Support!
- Easy Implementation
- Easy GUI
- Excellent Customer Support
- User Training
May 05, 2022
Reliability and simplicity is good!
- Simplicity and ease of management were great. Much easier to maintain than other complex redundant solutions.
- Proactive support is great and available 24/7.
- Reliability have been solid (no downtime at all) for 5 years.
- Support team has slight accent but is not too difficult to understand.
- Emphasis on security can be improved. Things like default passwords were not changed initially until requested.
- Can't really think of much else...If I had to split hairs...on reboots sometimes it took a while to sync with the other node. Max was 30 minutes, but 99% of the time it's 3-4 minutes.
April 25, 2022
StarWind HCAs Help Me Sleep at Night
- Reliability.
- Redundancy.
- Ease of use.
- Ease of installation/setup.
- Our use case is very simple and I can't think of anything that needs room for improvement.
- For our use, it's mainly set it and forget it and it does everything we need it to do out of the box.
April 25, 2022
Amazing product, Amazing support
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- The appliance scale very well. If need be, we can add new appliances to the pool with ease.
- The appliance runs maintenance-free. We rarely have to touch the StarWind software or the appliances beyond routine VM maintenance
- It load balances extremely well.
- Price. It is a little expensive for small businesses to buy into - however it is on point with other solutions in this market space.
April 21, 2022
Excellent service and reliable hardware
- Easy to use and deploy
- Great service and support
- Failover and live migration are quick
- We haven't run into any issues with the product in the time we've used it
April 20, 2022
Fantastic product for a SMB
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- Ease of deployment
- No need to create a storage network with their Virtual SAN
- Great ProActive Support
- Virtual SAN setup requires more storage than traditional
- Steps need to do maintenance can be a little confusing
- Had to use Windows Server licenses at time of deployment
April 19, 2022
Great SMB Hyper-Convergence Solution
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- Onboarding is well supported and simple. We were able to migrate all our VMs within a week of receiving the appliances.
- StarWind's Virtual SAN software gives the reliability of a failover cluster with the performance of local storage.
- ProActive Support ensures errors are detected and contact initiated automatically.
- I no longer have to troubleshoot three disparate systems when something goes wrong.
- Since Hyper-V Failover Clusters require Cluster Shared Volumes, the appliances have to be configured to access their local storage through an iSCSI connection. It adds a small amount of overhead, but is still much faster than an actual SAN.
- ProActive Support is sometimes a little too much. We were having issues with our Backup/DR software that was generating errors in the appliances' event logs, and we had a new series of emails from StarWind every morning until they were sorted out.
- Lead time on receiving the appliances was pretty long. Dell provides the hardware, so their delays are StarWind's delays as well.
- Each appliance has to be able to be able to support all of the VMs' storage/compute needs, so enough disk space needs to be purchased to house all the storage needs on each appliance. If you require 10TB of storage before taking a RAID into account, you would need to purchase 20TB of storage.