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StarWind vSAN in K-12 Education
April 25, 2021

StarWind vSAN in K-12 Education

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

Overall Satisfaction with StarWind Virtual SAN

We are running Dell PowerEdge Series as Hyper-V hosts with StarWind providing a virtual SAN infrastructure to allow for CSVs and data replication between the hosts without having to add dedicated storage hardware. This serves to allow us to have a fault tolerance of suffering not just a drive loss (RAID Configurations on each server allow for that) but it also allows for the loss of an entire server since we are running N+1. The servers are directly connected to one another using 10gb NICs allowing for fast connectivity and support for direct wiring allowed us to not have to invest in a dedicated 10gb SAN switch either.
  • Great Tech Support/Implementation Team
  • Easy to Use Management GUI
  • Lightweight but Powerful Software Performance
  • Automated Alerts
  • Cost Savings
  • Better Leveraging of Existing Hardware
  • Redundancy/Failover
  • Sudo Backup through replication
My implementation is with Hyper-V only. I do know the value of being able to have a solution like this from working in mixed environments previously and the value of one system like this being able to connect to both is a great benefit there and makes transitions much easier.
As a technical admin, the GUI is a nice bonus that allows sometimes faster actions rather than going into the CLI. A great benefit in my current solution is showing off GUI configurations and monitoring to our non-technical administration in the school and helping them understand implementations and values from that.
Every encounter I have had has been quickly responded to with both the right person and with providing the needed solution. I feel very confident that they are available and accessible if any issue arises that I need to get help addressing or just ensuring my configuration is best practices.
StarWind's real value comes to light in a smaller environment like mine. Resources (and budget allocation) are tight - so the ability to add disks to our PowerEdge severs for low cost and then bring them into the vSAN solution allows for us to achieve redundancy and failover without investments that would exceed typical annual investments in infrastructure.
The solution works very well for a smaller use case like ours. Coming from work in environments that are 10x the size of this one, dedicated hardware has great benefits there. But for smaller situations with lower server counts, this can be great.