Item: StarWind Virtual SAN
Rating: 10
Author: Tyler Condon

Overall Satisfaction with StarWind Virtual SAN

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use StarWinds vSAN as a highly available SAN in our private cloud to offer VMs to customers. We have two vSAN nodes in a highly available cluster and serve CSVs to a group of Hyper-V Clusters. We are able to use completely off the shelf hardware, which allows us to be flexible and reduce cost.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Highly reliable.
Off the shelf commodity components work well.
Premium support is very useful.

Cons

Deduplication inside of CSVs would be very useful.
Management/control of underlying storage instead of relying on RAID volumes/OS level disk volumes.
Web interface for management.
SNMP monitor

Return on Investment

Increased availability has helped with customer retention
Performance is limited by underlying hardware and not their software so we have increased density of our deployment.
Reduced cost has allowed us to improve margins and/or increased sales.

Support Rating

I often request support sessions during off-hours, holidays, weekends, etc and their team has ALWAYS agreed to any day/time I have proposed for a support session. The support engineers are also willing to basically configuration anything you would request from them and you have the confidence the work is being performed correctly.

Alternatives Considered

We have used Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct and found that solution to be highly unreliable and hard to manage, along with non-existent support from Microsoft. StarWind is the opposite of this and the product is built upon reliability. We have also used proprietary SANs before but limited expansion ability and high cost for every component is a major downside.

Likelihood to Recommend

Their solution works well for a wide variety of applications - especially situations in smaller environments that still require a highly available infrastructure but don't have the budgets for a proprietary SAN or want the increased flexibility of a software-defined storage system.

Comments

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Highly reliable and cost effective solution.