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StarWind HCA

Score9.2 out of 10

65 Reviews and Ratings

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What is StarWind HCA?

The StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA) is a hyper-converged infrastructure solution designed to reduce application downtime on a reasonable budget.

Categories & Use Cases

Reviews

What users are saying about StarWind HCA.
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Fast and Simple HCI Great Value Solution with Superb Support

Dominic Bolger
Head of IT in Information Technology at C C Young & Co Ltd (51-200 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We have a 3 host Dell hardware/Starwind HCI Solution used to replace an ageing SMB HCI Solution. While we could have also migrated to a different Hypervisor, we still had a valid VMWare license so stuck with that.

Our old system was out of Compute and close to maxed on storage. It was slow and starting to cause issues from general managemenet to random shift downs of the Virtual Machines or those servers requiring regular restarts. Since migrating we have had neither and the system is a rocket ship speed wise.

Pros

  • Storage Management out of the box is a simple process
  • Superb support and pre sales
  • Full SSD solution is a rocket ship without the additional overhead of NVMe so I am really pleased as Compute is as import to me as iOPS

Cons

  • No native snapshots, these have to be done at the hypervisor
  • No Deduplication so requires additional capacity plannimng depending on your requirements

Return on Investment

  • Reduction in management overhead by over 85% meaning we can concentrate on other areas of the business rather thanputiing out fires everywhere. most of our VM's havent been touched or changed since migration proving that the old hardware was the issue.
  • Already had proactive upgrades from support to resolve an issue we encountered during migration. The issue hasnt returned but the new build stops the issue happening for Migration which was impressive from finding to fix deployment in less than 2 weeks
  • 100% uptime with zero issues since implementation
  • No DeDuplication which might be an issue for some, also no native Snapshots (which we had on our old solution)

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure, HPE SimpliVity and Azure Stack HCI

VMware to Hyper-V with StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA)

Incentivized
Verified User
Manager in Information Technology (51-200 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We migrated away from VMware after the Broadcom takeover made it especially difficult and expensive to renew support. We we're looking to move to another Hypervisor and since we're primarily a Microsoft shop we landed on Hyper-V. We previously ran 3 servers with a SAN which was adequate for the most part. On looking into other options we found StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA) which fit the bill perfectly.

Pros

  • Proactive Support is great, StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA) have even noticed things before we did
  • Performance has been great, full NVME is a huge upgrade over our old SAN
  • Setup was handled pretty much by StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA) and maintenance has been simple

Cons

  • We weren't informed that StarWind's Windows based appliance doesn't work with NVMe storage currently, would have been good information to have before making the decisions. The Linux based appliance has performed fine though.
  • Small bug in the Linux Appliance after a host reboot where we've seen it lose some network connectivity. Proactive support was in touch before we noticed and immediately connected to assist with the issue.

Return on Investment

  • Moving from HDD to NVMe has seen a huge increase in speed for our applications databases.
  • Simplified IT updates since we've reduced the number of devices requiring firmware updates

Usability

Alternatives Considered

VMware ESXi, VMware vSphere and Proxmox VE

StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA): A Budget-Friendly Hyperconverged Powerhouse for Education

Incentivized
Josh Bowen
IT Enterprise Engineer in Information Technology at Flagler County Schools (1001-5000 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA) efficiently hosts our school district's production server environment, ensuring reliable performance and uptime for critical applications like student information systems, email, file sharing, and learning management systems, all within our limited budget and IT resources, making it an ideal solution for our needs. Basically, it covers our production environment.

Pros

  • High Performance
  • Reliability
  • Stellar Support

Cons

  • Slight learning curve
  • Slight graphical interface improvements

Return on Investment

  • Compared to our former solution, we were able to save enough money with StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA) to vastly improve our security posture
  • Saved 20% compared to previous solution
  • Product is much more set it and forget it freeing up our time to work on other projects

Alternatives Considered

Nutanix AHV and EMC VNX (Discontinued)

Other Software Used

Linewize, CrowdStrike Falcon, Jamf Pro

StarWind HyperConverged Appliance's have been stellar for our nonprofit organization!

Incentivized
Ryan Butler
Senior System Administrator in Information Technology at Inflexion (11-50 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I am the sole sysadmin at a small nonprofit. We replaced our old VMware hosts/SAN storage with a pair of StarWind HyperConverged Appliance's and have since converted numerous physical servers to VM's and have been smoothly running about 50 VM's on our StarWind HyperConverged Appliance's ever since then. The StarWind HyperConverged Appliance's have been instrumental in helping us to simplify our server and network environment and provide the capacity, performance, and stability we need to virtualize more of our infrastructure.

Pros

  • Proactive monitoring of our StarWind HyperConverged Appliances - We've only had a couple minor issues, and all have been identified early.
  • Fantastic support - Support is knowledgeable and can fix things in a remote session or provide guidance.
  • Very reliable - We've never had VM downtime on our cluster in our almost 3 years.
  • Super easy onboarding process - Sales was knowledgeable and very helpful in helping us to pick the "right size" StarWind HyperConverged Appliance's.

Cons

  • I honestly don't have anything to complain about. Nothing is perfect, but the only issues we had were promptly identified and resolved with minimal effort on my part, and were caught early and did not cause downtime. We've basically had almost 3 years of smooth sailing and 100% uptime.

Return on Investment

  • Simplification of our server and network environment - Has freed up my time and focus to the services provided by our VM's.
  • No longer purchasing individual servers - Our virtualization needs are well met by the StarWind HyperConverged Appliance's.
  • Reduced server maintenance costs - Not having to pay maintenance on new servers, just our few remaining physical servers and our StarWind HyperConverged Appliance's.

Other Software Used

vSphere, VMware vCenter Server, CentOS Linux

My impressions with the StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

Incentivized
Thomas Weil
Network System Administrator in Information Technology at weiconet GmbH (11-50 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is used as shared storage in a 4 host cluster. The connection is via LAN (10Gb) and runs with good performance. In this way we can virtualize an area of IT and thus relieve the hardware costs. In addition, data security is increased, although there is a stable backup and restore concept.

Pros

  • turnkey hyperconverged appliance
  • uninterrupted application delivery and data security

Cons

  • improving the graphical interface with pnp functions
  • Extension of the display to performance parameters via latency, access, etc.

Return on Investment

  • I don't think the relatively high purchase compared to the pure hardware solution is that good
  • the reduced maintenance and flexible expansion is good

Alternatives Considered

StarWind Virtual SAN

Other Software Used

VMware vSphere Data Protection Advanced (discontinued), Veeam ONE, Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365

Usability

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