Item: StarWind Virtual SAN
Rating: 10
Author: Josh Benson

Overall Satisfaction with StarWind Virtual SAN

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Starwind VSAN in our main vsphere 7 cluster. It is the primary storage system for our organization and is used by every user in our organization. We selected Starwind VSAN to provide a boost to the speed of our VMware infrastructure and to provide better high availability to systems in our vsphere cluster.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Speed
High Availability
Price

Cons

Setup complexity

Return on Investment

Reduced the possibility of downtime tremendously.
Improved productivity due to access time on local database apps.

Support Rating

I have been consistently impressed with the quality of service I have gotten from the presales calls all the way through deployment. They have been very quick to respond to questions and have provided great advice during deployment on the best way to tune the system for our priorities, which were speed and high availability.

Alternatives Considered

VMware vSAN

The biggest difference in my opinion between these two is the level of integration that VMWare's solution provides. It's a purpose-built solution for their environment so it will enjoy tighter integration across their product stack. Because StarWind is platform-agnostic it's not going to be as tight as the vendor-specific solution. I went with Starwinds vsan because it provided similar performance for a better price.

Likelihood to Recommend

We have the virtual appliances and I think for small to medium-sized organizations that is the way to go for the best value, but if you are a larger organization, I could see the value in going with their dedicated hardware appliances. For me, it was incredibly attractive that we could get very good performance for our workload on four host servers at this price point.

Comments

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Great performance at a great price.