Item: StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA)
Rating: 10
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

StarWind HCA is our backbone for our Hyper V environment which runs nearly all processes for our college. We run many different virtual servers on the hardware to serve all needs It was selected due to the value a virtual environment brings over traditional physical hardware. Our old hardware was extremely expensive to support and complicated to manage. StarWind solved both those problems.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Great performance of hardware.
Cost effective.
Great support.

Cons

Facelift management console.
Management console better guides.
More complete documentation.

Return on Investment

Cost savings from ongoing support of legacy solution.
High performance from all flash storage.
24-hour proactive support monitoring.

Support Rating

Support works well to identify problems before we even know about them. They can detect when someone has bumped a network cable which won't show downtime as it is redundant but support can detect the issue and we can fix it without downtime. Overall we haven't had many issues to fix as it is very stable.

Reliability and Availability

We had an issue with planned maintenance where nodes were still syncing when the server was rebooted. This should not happen according to support who are investigating the issue as this review is written to find how it happened and what can be done in the future to prevent it from happening again.

Alternatives Considered

NetApp FAS series and Dell EqualLogic PS Series

Starwind is much easier to use and manage than traditional SANs while maintaining our known Hyper V Hypervisor. Starwind is a much simpler product which is perfect for what we need. Traditional SANs may be able to do more than Starwind, but we haven't found any examples yet that we miss and we love the stability and ease of use of Starwind

Key Insights

Do you think StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA) delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA)'s feature set?

Yes

Did StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA) live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA) go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA) again?

Yes

Likelihood to Recommend

StarWind works great in our small environment. It was very easy to implement and continue to manage. It increased our performance many times over our old equipment I would guess at some point a large environment would make sense to have a separate host and network and storage with a bigger team to manage it all but for small environments it is great.

Comments

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Cost-effective and stable for small environments