Item: StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA)
Rating: 10
Author: Dan Reynolds

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I recently did a hardware refresh and I moved from StarWind VSAN (I have reviewed previously) to StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA). Since this was during a hardware refresh it was obviously to replace old hardware. I chose StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA) because of the good performance and support I had gotten when running StarWind VSAN on our own hardware. I went from a three-node cluster running VMware Horizon View to a two-node cluster with StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA). One of the key upgrades with the HCA was moving to all SSD.

Pros and Cons

It is extremely easy to set up, it comes with most options pre-configured for you. But the support group will walk through your entire setup and migration.
It is monitored by StarWind 24x7. Instead of issues being reactive with the monitoring I'm hoping things will be more proactive.
The performance has been outstanding. I think disk was our main limiting factor with our hold hardware.

I prefer HP hardware to Dell hardware but that's just me.
The documentation is a bit sparse.

Return on Investment

Performance has been very positive. Of course this was a hardware change so a lot of that was to be expected.
I don't track ROI - but I do like that this was a complete package, hardware, software, support and monitoring. I think it was a huge cost savings to almost any other solution.

Support Rating

We haven't had any breaks or issues. But part of the reason for purchasing was to have the proactive support. I am an IT department of one and provide all the support. So having this as part of the package is worth a lot to me and the company. It provides us an extra set of eyes to monitor a key resource.

Reliability and Availability

From past experience with StarWind VSAN software, I have seen little to no downtime. At times of disk rebuilding, there were some performance issues but again that was with spinning disks. This is all SSD. With Since this was during a hardware refresh it was obviously to replace old hardware. I chose StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA) we have not had any issues or problems whatsoever. I will say that StarWind's support is excellent and very responsive.

Alternatives Considered

Because I was using StarWind VSAN previously I had no intention at looking at other products.

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

Our use case is in a VMware Horizon View cluster. It works extremely well. The SSD gives outstanding performance and I suspect that the "appliance" does a better job of managing the VSAN than the application running on top of Windows did. We have not had a single hiccup with the changeover. It was so easy to implement and easy to migrate VM's over to it. It was simple. I really can't speak to other scenarios. But if the performance here was an indicator - then it should be good as general storage or another virtualization platform.

StarWind HCA Customer Support Pros and Cons

Pros	Cons
Quick Resolution Good followup Knowledgeable team Problems get solved Kept well informed No escalation required Immediate help available Support understands my problem Support cares about my success Quick Initial Response	None

Premium Support

Yes, we purchased the premium proactive support. But honestly I don't know why you wouldn't choose that. It's very cost effective.

StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA): What's in the BOX?

Overall Satisfaction with StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA)