Overall Satisfaction with StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA)
We are an IT service provider. A new area that we wanted to branch out into is hosting services/data for our customers. Starwind HyperConverged appliances helped us do just that. With two clusters, we are now hosting critical servers for our customers and are also able to give our customers offsite data backup for their onsite servers with disaster recovery into our private cloud.
- 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.
- Starwind has given us the ability to offer services that we were having to outsource in the past. This increases our offering, thus increasing our value to our customers.
- Because Starwind is very affordably priced we are able to offer services to our customers while maintaining healthy margins.
- The proactive support has allowed our technicians to focus on our customer instead of on our own internal hardware.
We chose Starwind over Nutanix and Scale because of price and hypervisor. Both Nutanix and Scale use a customer hypervisor and we wanted to use a hypervisor we were already well versed in. Starwind won over Simplivity because of cost and support. During our talks with HP we got the impression that Simplivity was not their main focus and we didn't want to buy in to a dying product.
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA) Support
Pros | Cons |
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Quick Resolution Good followup Knowledgeable team No escalation required Immediate help available Support cares about my success Quick Initial Response | Not kept informed Need to explain problems multiple times |
Yes - I chose Starwind Proactive support because I want the extra peace of mind of knowing that I have an extra set of eyes on my hyper-converged clusters.
At one point shortly after installation, we were receiving an error that was actually impacting performance in any way. The solution was a driver update. The technician performed this driver update on all of my nodes and even on a separate cluster that wasn't having this issue. This was at 11 pm. He went above and beyond during off-hours even though this was not a production impacting issue.