Budget friendly hyper-converged appliance that works
February 22, 2019
Budget friendly hyper-converged appliance that works
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA)
We used to have 4 Dell PowerEdge hosts running various version of Microsoft Hyper-V with no redundancy.
We are also running out of storage space and have been dealing with the increasing complexity of Windows server licensing. We investigated and received proposals from three vendors (Dell, Scale Computing and StarWind). Ultimately the main decision point was cost. StarWind is the only vendor that only needs two nodes to set up the cluster. Not only did we save on the extra node, we also did not have to license another Windows Server Datacenter edition. Our StarWind HCA has been in production for over 12 months, and we have had no issue or a single instance of downtime so far. And it has achieved our goals of centralizing storage management because of the StarWind Virtual SAN, added fault tolerance, and simplified Microsoft server licensing by using the Data Center edition.
We are also running out of storage space and have been dealing with the increasing complexity of Windows server licensing. We investigated and received proposals from three vendors (Dell, Scale Computing and StarWind). Ultimately the main decision point was cost. StarWind is the only vendor that only needs two nodes to set up the cluster. Not only did we save on the extra node, we also did not have to license another Windows Server Datacenter edition. Our StarWind HCA has been in production for over 12 months, and we have had no issue or a single instance of downtime so far. And it has achieved our goals of centralizing storage management because of the StarWind Virtual SAN, added fault tolerance, and simplified Microsoft server licensing by using the Data Center edition.
- 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.
- Reduce the manpower on managing storage.
- Added Fault tolerance makes everybody sleep better at night knowing that we could lose an entire node without affecting production in our current 2 node system.
- The simplified Microsoft server licensing makes software audits much easier.
We really like Scale HC3, but it's over our budget.