1. Home
  2. Hyper-Converged Infrastructure Systems
  3. StarWind HCA Reviews
  4. User Review of StarWind HCA
Fantastic and cost-effective upgrade to our old mess!
November 30, 2020

Fantastic and cost-effective upgrade to our old mess!

Mark Valpreda | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA)

We had a hodge-podge of Hyper-V servers of various ages, capacity, and speed - some being upwards of 10 years old. Finally got budget to upgrade and made the most of the money by going HCA opposed to traditional host + SAN. Going HCA allowed us to not have a huge expenditure on networking.
  • Well within budget.
  • Easy management.
  • High availability.
  • Needed to work with sales to get any sort of pricing.
  • Uptime is nearly 100%.
  • Faster access to production systems.
  • Faster backups.
We had one issue with a drive that went bad. StarWind informed us before we knew. Few emails later and a tech was scheduled, few days later everything was replaced. Was a painless process.
We have done maintenance in the middle of the day - Windows and Dell updates. No impact to production - users had no idea. This is all built on proven Windows Server technology.
I can imagine this would be a nice solution for similar situations to ours - hardware refresh with additional redundancy. We have ~100 VMs using ~480GB RAM and 50TB. These are VMs with similar CPU needs, so it worked out well. If there are one-off VMs with higher CPU needs, I would look at maybe a separate cluster. Trying to do too much would have been much more expensive.