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StarWind HyperConverged Appliance's have been stellar for our nonprofit organization!
January 26, 2023

StarWind HyperConverged Appliance's have been stellar for our nonprofit organization!

Ryan Butler | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA)

I am the sole sysadmin at a small nonprofit. We replaced our old VMware hosts/SAN storage with a pair of StarWind HyperConverged Appliance's and have since converted numerous physical servers to VM's and have been smoothly running about 50 VM's on our StarWind HyperConverged Appliance's ever since then. The StarWind HyperConverged Appliance's have been instrumental in helping us to simplify our server and network environment and provide the capacity, performance, and stability we need to virtualize more of our infrastructure.
  • Proactive monitoring of our StarWind HyperConverged Appliances - We've only had a couple minor issues, and all have been identified early.
  • Fantastic support - Support is knowledgeable and can fix things in a remote session or provide guidance.
  • Very reliable - We've never had VM downtime on our cluster in our almost 3 years.
  • Super easy onboarding process - Sales was knowledgeable and very helpful in helping us to pick the "right size" StarWind HyperConverged Appliance's.
  • I honestly don't have anything to complain about. Nothing is perfect, but the only issues we had were promptly identified and resolved with minimal effort on my part, and were caught early and did not cause downtime. We've basically had almost 3 years of smooth sailing and 100% uptime.
  • Simplification of our server and network environment - Has freed up my time and focus to the services provided by our VM's.
  • No longer purchasing individual servers - Our virtualization needs are well met by the StarWind HyperConverged Appliance's.
  • Reduced server maintenance costs - Not having to pay maintenance on new servers, just our few remaining physical servers and our StarWind HyperConverged Appliance's.
We had a couple minor issues with our cluster, both issues were caught by StarWind HyperConverged Appliance's proactive monitoring and we were quickly alerted to these issues by StarWind HyperConverged Appliance support. Their support helped us fix both issues with plenty of guidance. In one case we needed to replace a server part, which was fairly simple (move VM's to one host and shutdown the other). The other was rebuilding one of the vSAN storages, which was also painless and involved zero downtime.
In our almost three years of running StarWind HyperConverged Appliance's, we have experienced zero downtime for our 50 VM's due to StarWind HyperConverged Appliance issues. Everything has been rock solid and I hardly think about our StarWind HyperConverged Appliance's.

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

As a nonprofit, we needed a virtualization platform that was reliable, cost effective, and simple to administer. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance checked all the boxes for us. We went with their refurbished models to lower the cost, and they've been rock solid. We were able to simplify our environment and the platform has been so reliable that I really don't have to think about it. This has been great for me as the sole sysadmin. There are a lot of pieces to manage, and StarWind HyperConverged Appliance have allowed me to focus less on the platform and more on the VM's themselves and the other pieces of our network environment. I think as long as you get the "right size" of StarWind HyperConverged Appliance that this platform could work well for many organizations.