Item: StarWind Virtual SAN
Rating: 10
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with StarWind Virtual SAN

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We wanted to move away from physical servers and virtualize our entire stack. We needed high uptimes and performance whilst being hardware agnostic. We initially reviewed many of the products/solutions that existed in the market. Each of them had a hardware dependency or requirement that just did not fit our requirements. StarWind Virtual SAN is now hosting our local storage for our virtualization environment supporting the entire country. StarWind has improved our uptime, significantly increased our performance, and more importantly, it has given us flexibility with the hardware we use to run our storage on.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Performance is very noticeable whether its through cache or from the nodes.
Scale. Simple tasks like expanding a volume, adding more storage, introducing new nodes are a breeze.
Administration and configuration [are] very easy, intuitive, and straightforward. Patching and maintenance windows run at any time and nodes can be placed into maintenance and all production systems are not affected.
StarWind Support is by far the best support team I have ever dealt with. Never turned back and never had a question not answered.

Cons

Shrinking volumes is something we would like to see however we also understand that this may leave things behind and is something we can do without. Other than that the product performs and fulfills our requirements.

Return on Investment

We saved on the initial implementation in comparison to what we were going to pay prior to implementing StarWind.
Has improved our performance across all virtual machines.
On several occasions, we have run out of storage, and adding new storage racks, or introducing new nodes to the cluster has saved us time and money.
We have met our internal SLA's every year for the last 6 years.

Support Rating

I have worked in the IT industry for over 22 years and I have never encountered a support team better or even just as good as the support team at StarWind. We have worked with a lot of their support team and we have never encountered one of them that is not intricately familiar with the product. The support team not only knows their product, but they understand the complete stack (operating system, networking, virtualization, clustering) regardless if it's Hyper-V or VMware. They have never let us down and never turned us back with unanswered questions. The time zone differences between us and StarWind have never affected their support and they have always been there for us when needed. Whether it's a design, configuration, support, or even just advice, they are always there for us.

Alternatives Considered

Nutanix AOS, Scale Computing HC3, HPE 3PAR StoreServ Storage and NetApp HCI

Cost is the first and most obvious factor when comparing to the competition. StarWind has a very simple pricing model and is very easy to understand and implement. The same amount of storage at a fraction of the cost whilst still delivering the same performance and capabilities is something that is a winner for us.

Key Insights

Do you think StarWind Virtual SAN delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with StarWind Virtual SAN's feature set?

Yes

Did StarWind Virtual SAN live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of StarWind Virtual SAN go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy StarWind Virtual SAN again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Hyper-V, Microsoft SQL Server, Windows Server Failover Clustering

Likelihood to Recommend

From our experience, StarWind Virtual SAN is suitable for any environment, big or small. From hosting just a few virtual machines to 100's. If you do not want to be locked into an environment, or a particular set or brand of hardware and you want to have control over your environment, then StarWind is an ideal fit. We can't think of any environment where StarWind would not be suitable. The fact that you can take any server and turn it into a virtual SAN with just a few clicks is a no-brainer. With a decent and well-configured network behind StarWind, and with the addition of many nodes to run StarWind, performance can be tremendously improved along with uptime.

Comments

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Great Product backed by Great Support