Scale Computing Platform vs. StarWind Virtual SAN

Scale is best suited to environments that do not have excessive external or proprietary peripherals. Integrating with tape drive backups or robot tape libraries can be problematic. The most effective use of Scale systems is for companies running multiple instances of the same operating system. The hypervisor's code/file-sharing nature does an excellent job managing new instances while keeping the increase in storage to a minimum.

For companies that have 4-5 or more servers, StarWind is a great solution to provide high availability for a low price. It can scale up very nicely for larger implementations to more like 15-20 servers with ease. Although we haven't used it for even larger environments, it's doable. What its not appropriate are really small locations that have 1-2 servers. Unfortunately no one seems to have a good HCC solution in this space.

Incentivized

• Simplicity - I do not have to create storage buckets or micromanage anything.
• Efficiency - Lower power use since moving to a hyperconverged environment.
• Scalability - Adding additional hardware is easy, and increasing things like the amount of RAM or number of cores is easy.

Incentivized

• the StarWind Virtual SAN allows us to use Starwind Management Console to confirm health of the sync
• The High Available nature of the deployment means we can fail over VMs without end users noticing any downtime
• Their support is proactive alerting when firmware updates are needed (including iDRAC firmware) or when there are any warnings in the event logs, and schedule a time to remediate the issue with you.

Incentivized

• Display the IP address of the node on which the VM is running on the Devices (gear icon) tab. This would allow me to manage my Microsoft license easier.
• During the on-boarding I missed the step to install the Scale Computing Platform tools, and we didn't notice this until I had issues with backups. It would be helpful if some kind of alert notification would display on a VM card if the tools were not installed.
• Add a new health or diagnostics tab that would display alerts, diagnostic tools, performance concerns or pattern anomalies.
• Some kind of email/alert when a disk reaches near capacity

Incentivized

• Integration with Other Platforms: Some users have reported difficulty in integrating StarWind Virtual SAN with other platforms, such as cloud environments or other storage arrays, making it less flexible for some use cases.
• Lack of Advanced Features: Some users have reported that StarWind Virtual SAN lacks some advanced features, such as the ability to perform in-depth storage analysis and reporting, or the ability to manage storage tiering and data migration.
• User-Friendliness: While StarWind Virtual SAN features a user-friendly interface, some users have reported that certain features are still hard to use, especially for those without a background in storage technology.

Incentivized

I'm on the fence about renewing the support contract. The reliability of the HC3 makes it difficult to spend the cost of the renewal which is higher than the costs prior to Scale. I'm convinced if we were a larger district that the savings would be tremendous and I wouldn't hesitate to renew. In our specific situation, it may be more feasible to pay per incident.

Incentivized

This review is my baseline experience with StarWind Virtual SAN, should something significantly change in my experience over a longer period, then I will update this review but since the feature-set of StarWind Virtual SAN has been researched to meet our on-premise needs (and StarWind fulfills them), it should be relatively steady.

Incentivized

Everything you need to do is point-and-click easy. If you are the kind of admin who wants to edit every config file and endlessly customize your environment, then Scale may not be for you. On the other hand, if you just want it to work really well, and do what they told you it will do, then Scale is the ideal system.

Incentivized

It was a little complex to get my head around the initial configuration and operation of StarWind Virtual SAN but after following the guides and some assistance from support once the initial setup is complete the day to day management is very straightforward.

Never had an outage or an error. Once a hard drive failed, but Scale kept on working flawlessly without interruption.

Incentivized

The solution has been tested under constant usage for 5 years now and there (knock on wood) has yet be an outage. There were instances if human error during the operation and the StarWind reliably intervened, either through a synchronization or reporting of a degredation of interfaces, e.g. the heartbeat interface.

Incentivized

Performance has been just as outstanding as reliability. I have never experienced delays in any aspect of usage.

Incentivized

The software delivered exceptional performance until now with very fast write and speed rates, around 900MB/s through a 10GBit connection on a virtualized fileserver. It meets our demands without any problems whatsoever and we are a very media heavy environment with TBs of raw data.

Incentivized

We had one need for support post-setup, and the person who answered the phone was the support person I needed. No transfer, no level one, and our accents were similar enough that we understood each other easily. The problem was actually in my switch, not with Scale, but the support person still assisted me and got the entire cluster up and running again in under 30 minutes. They are truly a partner not just a vendor.

Incentivized

Having dealt with a bit of subpar support in my career, I can say that the support team at StarWind never drifted lower than middle-of-the-pack. They met my expectations of support from contemporary tech companies, at least, and surpassed my expectations more often than not. Nothing makes a Monday morning scramble easier than knowing that support won't add more stress than it relieves.

Incentivized

I did not do in-person training.

Incentivized

Because Scale is so simple, the training is just as quick and easy.

Incentivized

The implementation was very easy. We had Scale support on standby and they were ready and eager to help if needed. The process went so fast the employees in the organization did not even know it was done.

Incentivized

Overall the setup was easy, we did require some help from the technical support team but other than that, we followed all of StarWinds prerequisites and everything else just fell nicely into place with hardly any downtime. The downtime was only due to moving VMs from our previous cluster over to the new StarWind storage cluster.

Incentivized

As mentioned previously, not having to worry about the compatibility between your hardware, hypervisor, and VM OS is a great help. On the downside, there is less ability to get deep in the weeds with your own system. Much of the Scale HyperCore OS is locked down intentionally, which prevents technical users from having much insight on broad error messages without support intervention.

While they may have more robust enterprise grade features like duplication, the price point of Nimble and DD makes it a very tough sell in a cost concious environment. Starwind provides us with great reliability and enough features to make it an easy sell.

HC3 is one of the best products I have purchased for our district. It is unbelievably reliable to the point that they shoot themselves in the foot on support contracts.

Incentivized

The software is very scalable storage wise. The storage is provisioned through config files, which are created either through PowerShell scripts or the Management Console on the paid version. After that the storage is provisioned through iSCSI. In our case, in case of expansion, we would have to run the PowerShell scripts and do another full synchronization to update any remaining backup nodes, but the procedure is clear and even easier via Management Console, just expand the RAID array, punch the new capacity into the console and start the synchronization!

Incentivized

• With the high cost of the leading competitor the savings starts day one and saves every year after.
• Scale can be administered by a tier one technician so cost of labor is reduced.
• If there is a problem like a cyber attack, the savings kick in with the least amount of downtime.

Incentivized

• StarWind Virtual SAN has helped many organizations reduce their total cost of ownership (TCO) for storage. This has been achieved through cost savings in areas such as hardware, power, cooling, and maintenance
• Provides high-performance, low-latency storage that is optimized for virtualization, which can help improve the speed and responsiveness of applications
• Provides synchronous replication, automated failover, and real-time replication monitoring, which helps ensure that data is always available and accessible