IT Manager in Information Technology at Wyatt Early Harris WHeeler LLP (Law Practice, 11-50 employees)
Chose StarWind Virtual SAN
Alternative solutions were twice the cost or more which eliminated them. I got input from several companies who used StarWind Virtual SAN and nothing bit good thinsg to say and it was the only option I found that seemed reputable at anywhere near the cost we paid.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Senior IT Specialist in Information Technology at Panoptic Services Inc. (Information Technology & Services, 1-10 employees)
Chose StarWind Virtual SAN
Better value compared to the competition. BYOD for hardware it runs on. Free to deploy version and can be scaled to the licensed version of the product. Full performance of the hardware it is running on. Amazing customer services and support. easy to deploy and can be run as a …
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Verified User
Chose StarWind Virtual SAN
The deployment and administrative management of StarWind are significantly more user-friendly compared to other solutions. It is essential for a solution to be intuitive, especially for individuals who are not highly technical or those managing multiple stacks of products …
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Verified User
Chose StarWind Virtual SAN
StarWind VSAN provided a cost-effective solution without compromising on essential features. The straightforward setup and management were crucial for our IT team’s efficiency. The excellent customer support and proactive monitoring were significant factors in our decision. Its …
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Verified User
Chose StarWind Virtual SAN
Better functionality, less complexity, cost effective
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Verified User
Chose StarWind Virtual SAN
StarWind Virtual SAN is easier to setup and use, and less expensive. It also has the flexibility of working with Hyper-V or vSphere. StarWind Virtual SAN as a company is also much easier to work with.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Senior Systems Officer in Information Technology at Domino Machine (Machinery, 51-200 employees)
Chose StarWind Virtual SAN
HPE and Dell solutions were just too expensive for our budget. HPE's solution lacked performance. Dell's solution is plagued by bad reviews which told stories of broken patching procedures and terrible support experiences. The only company who offered me a trial of their …
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Verified User
Chose StarWind Virtual SAN
StarWind Virtual SAN Applicance is available in a hyperconverged scenario, it means you can run it on existing virtual machines and it does the backup against each other by synchronizing the data store with each other. Vmware does not have this type of hyperconvergent approach. …
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Verified User
Chose StarWind Virtual SAN
Best value for money and less (or no) hardware restrictions.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Network & Systems Administrator in Information Technology at Clarion Forest VNA (Hospital & Health Care, 51-200 employees)
Chose StarWind Virtual SAN
VMware vSAN requires 3 physical hosts or 2 and a witness, and this was not practical for our situation as we are SMB. StarWind allows us to continue our 2-host virtualization setup and keep all our redundancy and performance.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Verified User
Chose StarWind Virtual SAN
Better offering from a service and hardware standpoint. Multiple purchase options allowed the flexibility needed to move forward with acquiring the hardware.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Director Business Services in Information Technology at Provision Infotech (Information Technology & Services, 11-50 employees)
Chose StarWind Virtual SAN
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Verified User
Chose StarWind Virtual SAN
Other solution so far we have evaluated is expensive whereas StarWind Virtual SAN is cost effective.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Verified User
Chose StarWind Virtual SAN
we did not evaluate any other vendors with virtual SANs
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Verified User
Chose StarWind Virtual SAN
We have found the solution surprisingly simple to use. The management
console allows us to monitor the solution and we have configured email
alerts to alert us about critical issues. These alerts have been proven
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Network System Administrator in Information Technology at UAB Rusnava (Computer Hardware, 11-50 employees)
Chose StarWind Virtual SAN
StarWind Virtual SAN is generally less expensive than VMware vSAN, especially when it comes to licensing costs. StarWind Virtual SAN is licensed per node, whereas VMware vSAN requires a license for each CPU core in each node. This can make VMware vSAN significantly more …
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Verified User
Chose StarWind Virtual SAN
We have not used VMware vSAN as much as StarWind but cost is better with StarWind and also support
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Verified User
Chose StarWind Virtual SAN
Virtual SAN (vSAN), a software-defined storage solution that enables users to build shared storage for virtual machines operating in a VMware vSphere environment, is a great HCI platform.It must be used for remote access, and specific duties must be delegated to internal …
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Senior Systems Engineer in Engineering at River Run (Information Technology & Services, 51-200 employees)
Chose StarWind Virtual SAN
We were initially utilizing HPE Lefthand OS as a virtual SAN which was then set to EOL. We evaluated a number of solutions including VMware vSAN and settled on StarWind. StarWind provided a better value, easier and more intuitive interface, and wasn't wizard driven.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. TR verified that a representative sample of customers was invited. More Info
New Business Manager in Sales at Dualbase Tecnologia Eletronica (Environmental Services, 11-50 employees)
Chose StarWind Virtual SAN
StarWind Virtual SAN is the most flexible and reliable system I tested. Although there are other good systems in the market this is the most flexible allowing integration with many Hypervisors
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Complexity: StarWind Virtual SAN can be complex to set up and manage, especially for organizations with limited IT resources
Limited protocol support: StarWind Virtual SAN supports a limited number of protocols, primarily iSCSI and SMB3
Limited scalability for storage-only deployments: In storage-only deployments, StarWind Virtual SAN has a limit of 32 nodes per cluster
Lack of reporting and analytics: StarWind Virtual SAN has limited reporting and analytics capabilities, which can make it difficult to monitor and troubleshoot performance issues
Limited backup and recovery options: While StarWind Virtual SAN provides some basic backup and recovery options, it lacks advanced features such as snapshot management, backup scheduling, and offsite replication
StarWind Virtual SAN is a great solution and is now an integral part of our network of servers. The product is superb and the support has been amazing. It's perfect for our organisation and we won't be looking to come away from it any time soon!
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Overall I like the usability of StarWind Virtual SAN because it is a "Set-up and forget" software. Once you correctly have set up the parameters, StarWind Virtual SAN pretty much rolls by itself. The biggest fact that one needs to keep in mind, though, is that the licensing for StarWind Management Console needs to be purchased separately, and while managing StarWind Virtual SAN through the paid Management Console is really easy and is well documented, going the free or - in other words - PowerShell Template route can be taxing if you are not that deep into the topic. You need to be especially careful with it if you switch from paid to free because using the templates incorrectly can cause issues, we had a similar occurence, where we needed to re-provision the SSD cache and the StarWind Support (Yaroslav) helped through remote support and a switch to the Free version afterwards.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Their support team is dedicated to providing top-notch customer service and is always available to help with any questions or issues that may arise. Their expertise and responsiveness have proven invaluable in ensuring the smooth operation of our virtualized environment. With such excellent support, we feel confident in our ability to utilize this product to its fullest potential, and we highly recommend it to others.
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
We have found the solution surprisingly simple to use. The management console allows us to monitor the solution and we have configured email alerts to alert us about critical issues. These alerts have been proven to work in an actual failure scenario, for example, when we had a memory issue with one of our servers that caused the entire server to crash. The management console also allows us to monitor the solution performance and provides us with access to system logs.
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!
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
