Item: StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA)
Rating: 10
Author: Mark Valpreda

Overall Satisfaction with StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Well within budget.
Easy management.
High availability.

Cons

Needed to work with sales to get any sort of pricing.

Return on Investment

Uptime is nearly 100%.
Faster access to production systems.
Faster backups.

Support Rating

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.

Reliability and Availability

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

Comments

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Fantastic and cost-effective upgrade to our old mess!