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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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Learn from top reviewers

StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA): A Budget-Friendly Hyperconverged Powerhouse for Education

Rating: 10 out of 10
June 20, 2024
IncentivizedVetted ReviewVerified User
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA) efficiently hosts our school district's production server environment, ensuring reliable performance and uptime for critical applicatio...
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Josh Bowen
Engineer - Information Technology
IT Enterprise Engineer
Flagler County Schools
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA)1 year of experience

My impressions with the StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

Rating: 9 out of 10
May 4, 2023
IncentivizedVetted ReviewVerified User
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is used as shared storage in a 4 host cluster. The connection is via LAN (10Gb) and runs with good performance. In this way we can virtualize...
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Thomas Weil
Engineer - Information Technology
Network System Administrator
weiconet GmbH
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA)5 years of experience

StarWind HyperConverged Appliance's have been stellar for our nonprofit organization!

Rating: 10 out of 10
January 26, 2023
IncentivizedVetted ReviewVerified User
I am the sole sysadmin at a small nonprofit. We replaced our old VMware hosts/SAN storage with a pair of StarWind HyperConverged Appliance's and have since converted numerous ...
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Ryan Butler
Employee - Information Technology
Senior System Administrator
Inflexion
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA)3 years of experience

High performance and redundancy, with 24/7 support, at a surprisingly reasonable cost.

Rating: 10 out of 10
December 1, 2022
IncentivizedVetted ReviewVerified User
The StarWind HCA solution is used for our VMWare virtualization environment in a two host high-availability cluster to support critical business operations running over 20 vir...
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Verified user
Director
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA)1 year of experience

Efficiency, Performance And Piece Of Mind With Minimal Cost

Rating: 10 out of 10
September 26, 2022
IncentivizedVetted ReviewVerified User
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 simplify this setup, improve performance, ...
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Verified user
Representative
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA)1 year of experience

Affordable and Reliable Hyper-V cluster

Rating: 9 out of 10
September 8, 2022
IncentivizedVetted ReviewVerified User
We've been using a StarWind HyperConverged Appliance pair as our Hyper-V solution for 5 years now. Their support remotely configured the initial environment and it just works....
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Verified user
Engineer
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA)5 years of experience

Solid Product and Great Service!

Rating: 10 out of 10
September 7, 2022
IncentivizedVetted ReviewVerified User
Being a facility that hosts horse shows and restaurants we need servers in a HA solution to ensure that shows are not delayed and we didn't have any major downtime. The StarWi...
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Daniel Chapman
Director - Information Technology
Information Technology Director
Tryon International Equestrian Center
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA)2 years of experience

Affordability and Redundancy made easy

Rating: 9 out of 10
September 5, 2022
IncentivizedVetted ReviewVerified User
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA) is our primary server setup. The setup has allowed us to have a redundant server solution with lower hardware costs. The support the so...
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Christopher Forster
Engineer - Information Technology
IT Engineer
H W Martin Group Of Companies
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA)3 years of experience

StarWind HyperConverged Appliance makes even me look good!

Rating: 10 out of 10
September 1, 2022
IncentivizedVetted ReviewVerified User
We use them as our main servers. Load balancing between the two nodes to offer faster performance to our end users and allow me to bring once outsourced applications back on-p...
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Daniel Edwards
Professional - Information Technology
Director IT
Kelly Aero
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA)2 years of experience

Top product and good price policy

Rating: 8 out of 10
August 31, 2022
Vetted ReviewVerified User
We would like to have a cheaper solution compared to a storage system but with all the advantages and not the disadvantages. Here only StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA) ...
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Verified user
Administrator
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA)1 year of experience

StarWind Goes above and beyond.

Rating: 10 out of 10
August 30, 2022
IncentivizedVetted ReviewVerified User
Starwind HyperConverged Appliance is used in a two-node cluster running HyperV. HCA has allowed for easily entering the hyper-converged market, kept costs down, and added much...
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Justin Graves
Manager - Information Technology
HIPAA Security Officer
Area Agency on Aging Region 9, Inc
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA)6 years of experience

Great Product, Amazing Service, Perfect Performance

Rating: 10 out of 10
August 29, 2022
Vetted ReviewVerified User
We utilize StarWind as a clustered Hyper-V platform in our organization. We upgraded from a stand alone Hyper-V server to StarWind in 2019 and its been absolutely amazing to u...
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Mikel Reber
Manager - Corporate
IT Manager
WESTERN IDAHO CABINETS INC
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA)3 years of experience

Before purchasing a vsan check out StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA)!

Rating: 10 out of 10
August 25, 2022
IncentivizedVetted ReviewVerified User
I run StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA) on 2 ESX clusters each with over 100vm's for the past 5 years. I came from a traditional 3-tier architecture and Starwind simplif...
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Nick Casagrande
Director - Information Technology
Director of Information Technology
Southern Waste Systems
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA)5 years of experience

Very happy with the product and the support!

Rating: 9 out of 10
August 17, 2022
IncentivizedVetted ReviewVerified User
We are a company with about 50 employees and StarWind HCA is the backbone of our on-prem IT infrastructure. It runs 4 Windows Server VMs in a high-availability cluster + 2 Dom...
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Greg Gazeley
Manager - Information Technology
IT Manager
Blocka Construction Inc
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA)3 years of experience

StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA) - It just works

Rating: 10 out of 10
August 12, 2022
IncentivizedVetted ReviewVerified User
We needed a solution to our ever-growing server racks. We previously had a small implementation of ESXi on a single host and many physical servers. We were looking for a solut...
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Verified user
Employee
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA)4 years of experience
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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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Josh Bowen
IT Enterprise Engineer
Flagler County Schools (Education Management, 1001-5000 employees)
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Pricing

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StarWind HCA

StarWind HCA

N/A
Unavailable

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

Scale Computing Platform

Scale Computing Platform

$3,300
per node
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 Competitors

StarWind HCA Technical Details

Deployment TypesOn-premise
Operating SystemsWindows, Linux
Mobile ApplicationNo

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 and Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure are common alternatives for StarWind HCA.

Reviewers rate Availability 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

(64)

Reviews

(1-25 of 54)
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My impressions with the StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

Rating: 9 out of 10
Incentivized
May 04, 2023
TW
Thomas Weil
Network System Administrator
weiconet GmbH (Information Technology & Services, 11-50 employees)
Vetted Review
Verified User
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA)
5 years of experience
Support Rating
1
We have heard a lot about AI and have already used it as an alternative. This is not used in the HCA and therefore we cannot make any statements about it at the moment. In the future, the AI may replace the colleagues, but the proactive, human monitoring in connection with checkmk, etc. is more familiar and safer at the moment.

StarWind HyperConverged Appliance's have been stellar for our nonprofit organization!

Rating: 10 out of 10
Incentivized
January 26, 2023
RB
Ryan Butler
Senior System Administrator
Inflexion (Education Management, 11-50 employees)
Vetted Review
Verified User
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA)
3 years of experience
Support Rating
10
We had a couple minor issues with our cluster, both issues were caught by StarWind HyperConverged Appliance's proactive monitoring and we were quickly alerted to these issues by StarWind HyperConverged Appliance support. Their support helped us fix both issues with plenty of guidance. In one case we needed to replace a server part, which was fairly simple (move VM's to one host and shutdown the other). The other was rebuilding one of the vSAN storages, which was also painless and involved zero downtime.

High performance and redundancy, with 24/7 support, at a surprisingly reasonable cost.

Rating: 10 out of 10
Incentivized
December 01, 2022
Verified User
Vetted Review
Verified User
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA)
1 year of experience
Support Rating
10
I've been contacted a few times already when the proactive support team could not detect our servers. One time it was mainly due to a firewall issue which we quickly resolved. The other two times were due to the fact that we had to shutdown our systems due to two hurricanes within a month. StarWind was quick to notify my that they lost monitoring capability when we shutdown for the storms.

Solid Product and Great Service!

Rating: 10 out of 10
Incentivized
September 07, 2022
DC
Daniel Chapman
Information Technology Director
Tryon International Equestrian Center (Hospitality, 201-500 employees)
Vetted Review
Verified User
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA)
2 years of experience
Support Rating
10
When our VSAN software needs to be updated the team reached out and guided us through the upgrades. We have not had other issues that I'm aware of that triggered and needed events. Overall the operation of servers has been solid so no real reasons for StarWind to reach out to us.

Affordability and Redundancy made easy

Rating: 9 out of 10
Incentivized
September 05, 2022
CF
Christopher Forster
IT Engineer
H W Martin Group Of Companies (Construction, 501-1000 employees)
Vetted Review
Verified User
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA)
3 years of experience
Support Rating
10
Always proactive to assist with issues, quick to respond, and help you get the servers back up and running in a short amount of time. Support is always knowledgeable, willing to help, and to look into anything you ask them when things are quite working as expected.

StarWind HyperConverged Appliance makes even me look good!

Rating: 10 out of 10
Incentivized
September 01, 2022
DE
Daniel Edwards
Director IT
Kelly Aero (Aviation & Aerospace, 11-50 employees)
Vetted Review
Verified User
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA)
2 years of experience
Support Rating
10
They know before I know... I like it; it has served us well over the last 18 months. There has only been one critical issue that was identified and handled before any data loss occurred. (Missed SSD firmware update) Support had us back right in no time.

Top product and good price policy

Rating: 8 out of 10
August 31, 2022
Verified User
Vetted Review
Verified User
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA)
1 year of experience
Support Rating
9
The system was implemented so that StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA) can proactively point out problems and hardware defects that are still hidden from our IT, and four eyes are always better than two. It also takes the burden off our IT which is much more efficient than monitoring everything in-house. An SLA agreement is also offered along with on-site support with technicians.

StarWind Goes above and beyond.

Rating: 10 out of 10
Incentivized
August 30, 2022
JG
Justin Graves
HIPAA Security Officer
Area Agency on Aging Region 9, Inc (Non-profit Organization Management, 51-200 employees)
Vetted Review
Verified User
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA)
6 years of experience
View profile
Support Rating
10
Support is second to none compared to other vendors I've worked with. These folks are on top of it at all times. No matter the time of day or year, if something is amiss, I get a notification from support, and they are eager to solve the problem. I would put Starwind support up against any other support out there.

Great Product, Amazing Service, Perfect Performance

Rating: 10 out of 10
August 29, 2022
MR
Mikel Reber
IT Manager
WESTERN IDAHO CABINETS INC (Construction, 51-200 employees)
Vetted Review
Verified User
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA)
3 years of experience
View profile
Support Rating
10
Literally, while writing this review, I just received an email from starwind saying my VSAN version was out of date due to a recent update coming out and they offered to help me install it. Its just amazing how "on top of it" support is. They'll monitor downtime, reboots, version issues, even the bios firmware on the Dell servers... I can't imagine using any other vendor, they just do it all, and they do it well.

Very happy with the product and the support!

Rating: 9 out of 10
Incentivized
August 17, 2022
GG
Greg Gazeley
IT Manager
Blocka Construction Inc (Construction, 51-200 employees)
Vetted Review
Verified User
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA)
3 years of experience
Support Rating
9
StarWind has been very proactive about reaching out when they detect even a potential issue on their end. In fact most of my support sessions have been initiated by them due to something they noticed in the logs on their end, not something we noticed. Not sure if any of these issues would have ever been critical for us, but its nice to know that they are being proactive about potential issues and keeping us up-to-date on firmware and updates.

StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA) - It just works

Rating: 10 out of 10
Incentivized
August 12, 2022
Verified User
Vetted Review
Verified User
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA)
4 years of experience
Support Rating
10
We had a drive failure on one of our hosts. StarWind support notified us almost immediately after the failure happened. After some basic troubleshooting with StarWind support over the phone, they worked directly with Dell to provide a replace drive NBD. Support has proactively reached out to us to install software updates to our hosts. This has been a simple and quick process.

Set It And Forget It - A Great Experience

Rating: 10 out of 10
Incentivized
August 12, 2022
Verified User
Vetted Review
Verified User
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA)
3 years of experience
Support Rating
5
The proactive support is nice, but didn't provide much value to us. Nearly all issues that triggered an alert from the proactive system were felt immediately by users and prompted a swift internal response while the alerts were often sent several hours later, either after the issue was resolved by internal technicians or the issue was transient and resolved itself. Our interactions with support were excellent outside of the proactive monitoring

StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA): What's in the BOX?

Rating: 10 out of 10
Incentivized
May 25, 2022
DR
Dan Reynolds
Senior System Administrator
BLDD Architects (Architecture & Planning, 51-200 employees)
Vetted Review
Verified User
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA)
1 year of experience
View profile
Support Rating
9
We haven't had any breaks or issues. But part of the reason for purchasing was to have the proactive support. I am an IT department of one and provide all the support. So having this as part of the package is worth a lot to me and the company. It provides us an extra set of eyes to monitor a key resource.

StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA) one of the best solutions

Rating: 10 out of 10
Incentivized
May 13, 2022
Verified User
Vetted Review
Verified User
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA)
1 year of experience
Support Rating
10
This has benefited me as I have less worry about the system having any downtime or have to worry about if my staff members see problems as StarWind will call my engineers directly to ensure everyone is made aware of any issue that may arise or has already happened and need someone to physically intervene.

Absolutely the correct decision

Rating: 10 out of 10
Incentivized
May 05, 2022
RP
Robert Peck
Practice Manager
Streeter Marshall LLP (Legal Services, 51-200 employees)
Vetted Review
Verified User
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA)
3 years of experience
Support Rating
10
We have had only a single instance of there being a problem, the StarWind support team knew before we did and called us right away.

Excellent product, even better support

Rating: 10 out of 10
Incentivized
May 05, 2022
Verified User
Vetted Review
Verified User
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA)
4 years of experience
Support Rating
10
The support is always helpful, prompt and useful. That's more than I can say for any other vendor I've worked with. The proactive has highlighted issues with some of VM's that I may not have otherwise spotted as quickly, which has prompted us to get the issues fixed before they become a larger issue.

Great Product and Support!

Rating: 10 out of 10
Incentivized
May 05, 2022
Verified User
Vetted Review
Verified User
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA)
5 years of experience
Support Rating
10
The service is actually really great. They install a simple monitoring tool that reports back to their home office. If they see something is off, they contact you right away!

Reliability and simplicity is good!

Rating: 10 out of 10
Incentivized
May 05, 2022
Verified User
Vetted Review
Verified User
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA)
5 years of experience
Support Rating
10
StarWind Virtual SAN has been a great product for us. The setup was easy to deploy, and management is simplified compared to a traditional SAN. Great redundancy is achieved at a fraction of the cost compared to other solutions. Full support and monitoring are available 24/7. We've had experience with other solutions such as NetApp and Dell SAN, but StarWind was by far a better solution for us. Overall, very satisfied.

StarWind HCAs Help Me Sleep at Night

Rating: 10 out of 10
Incentivized
April 25, 2022
Verified User
Vetted Review
Verified User
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA)
3 years of experience
Support Rating
10
StarWind's proactive support will notify us of any non-responsive issues that they may see on their end. Thankfully, no serious issues with the HCA's have occurred but several times network connectivity was lost to the HCAs and StarWind's proactive support notified us.

Amazing product, Amazing support

Rating: 10 out of 10
April 25, 2022
Verified User
Vetted Review
Verified User
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA)
2 years of experience
Support Rating
10
Every time we have a hiccup, StarWind support reaches out to me. Let me be clear though, this is rarely ever because of the appliance. It is most often network issues caused by our ISP making the environment appear to be offline. Whatever the cause though, they are on top of it immediately.
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