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Efficiency, Performance And Piece Of Mind With Minimal Cost
September 26, 2022

Efficiency, Performance And Piece Of Mind With Minimal Cost

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA)

We had a two physical host, two SAN VMware setup on aging hardware. The SAN's setup as a pool, therefore not redundant. We wanted to simplify this setup, improve performance, reduce the single point of failure, all while dealing with a SMB budget. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA) allowed us to simply migrate our VM's over to a new set of HCA hardware. All setup and support is included and within an hour or two overall we were all setup.
  • Simplifies infrastructure
  • Knowledgeable support
  • High performance
  • Easy migration
  • Better support portal
  • UPS shutdown setup
  • A webinar or training session on how it works.
  • This setup saved us $30,000 over replacing with traditional SAN setup.
  • Alternative would have cost twice as much.
  • vMotion is now done in seconds rather than minutes.
I have not needed or used this proactive support yet so I'm not sure what rating to give or what to say.
I have not experienced any downtime since being up and running with StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA).
Scale seemed like a good solution also. The problem from my side was how different the end result would be from our current environment. Scale uses it's own proprietary hypervisor, so no VMware. This would save on licenses but would require a new set of skills and possibly a harder migration. Scale didn't allow VM level backups, so an agent would be needed for each VM. That also means that they had a separate backup product that was part of the proposed setup. Again something new that we have never used before. Two switches were also part of the Scale setup. This was part of the old setup that I didn't like, having to run all the cables and data through the network. I get that his is standard but I've replaced a few bad cables before. I like the idea of having the servers directly attached. All this lead to the cost of Scale to being more than double StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA).

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

It is well suited for an SMB. SMB's don't always have a large budget. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA) gives you high performance hardware setup with minimal cost. SMB's also don't always have an IT team so the fact that it's all supported hardware and services is great. The fact that you can migrate easily is a plus.