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StarWind Virtual SAN, more storage for less money.
July 24, 2019

StarWind Virtual SAN, more storage for less money.

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with StarWind Virtual SAN

StarWind Virtual SAN is being used as our SAN in a VMware cluster with six nodes. Production systems are using StarWind for storage. Our StarWind san has three nodes spread across sites to mitigate outages. All users are dependent on the SAN for critical systems like e-mail, database, and network storage.
  • Support is very good. Everyone is responsive and knowledgeable.
  • Being a virtual SAN, StarWind has the ability to drop nodes or sites in our case, and there is no downtime.
  • The costs are very reasonable.
  • The new Linux appliance does not have all the features that the Windows version does.
  • Monitoring with products like Nagios requires extra setup, and no plugins were available from the vendor.
  • We have moved some storage from a single NAS to a SAN that is spread across sites to mitigate downtime.
  • StarWind does not charge based on storage capacity, so we were able to grow our storage more than double what our previous SAN was capable of.
Our old SAN was an HP VSA. We liked the license model of StarWind because we could get more storage space for less money. The server load was also less. The old SAN used six servers, and the new SAN has only three. The StarWind SAN has been just as reliable, but we lose some features like snapshots and remote snapshots.
Some of the best use cases are when you need something low cost, but are able to put some work into the product, like setting up your own hardware. It's also useful if you need high uptime because whole nodes or shelves can go offline without downtime. You might want to look at other products if you want things like san-side snapshots and need to use the Linux version.

Using StarWind Virtual SAN

500 - All functions from students to teachers to administrators use it. Of course, the IT staff also uses the SAN.
2 - You need to be able to support and troubleshoot hardware, as in our case we supplied the servers. You also need to be able to understand and support whatever hypervisor you're using, as the appliance is a VM. You can also buy a fully configured hardware appliance, but the price goes up significantly.
  • Storage consolidation, like getting rid of several NAS devices we used because the old SAN was full.
  • Maintenance with zero downtime. We can update or reboot a node without service interruption.
  • Disaster recovery, with a site or even two down, we don't lose data.
  • Load balancing. We can add more servers if the load increases, and are using multi-path iscsi to spread the load out.
  • We plan to expand the system to provide storage for backups.
So far the cost, support, and reliability of the product have been great.