I/O makes or breaks the system, so storage performance is always a big deal, especially in virtualized environments, where VMs are hungry for IOPS. It’s wasteful to constantly buy physical storage elements to ensure resiliency and solid performance. Thanks to a set of dexterous features, StarWind assures the safety of your budget and that you can achieve potent redundancy and HA with your existing hardware.
Hardware failure is more of an issue for virtualized environment than it was for all-physical one, because one failing physical machine will bring down all the VMs it hosted. Every VM plays the role of an entire server, so such a failure would mean catastrophic service discontinuation. It becomes even more disastrous in case VDI and thin clients, because one hypervisor box going down would mean stopping a noticeable part of the company’s operations.
It’s essential to build hypervisor clusters to be fault-tolerant and fully redundant. Shared storage is an essential part of virtualization infrastructure, since it stores VMs of the given virtual environment, thus it must not in any case be the single point of failure.
To achieve fault-tolerance for storage subsystem, duplication or even triplication of all the critical components is used. In converged deployment scenarios, StarWind runs virtual storage on multiple hypervisor nodes. In non-converged scenarios, storage runs on many dedicated commodity servers. The shared Logical Unit is basically “mirrored” between the hosts, maintaining data integrity and continuous operation even if one or more nodes fail. Every active host acts as a storage controller and every Logical Unit has duplicated or triplicated data back-end.
Multi-Path nature makes sure that even if some I/O fail, the work will just continue instantly with zero downtime. This way 99.99% uptime is achieved with 2-way replica and 99.9999% with 3-way replica. Going beyond triplication is considered pointless for most cases, unless it’s a life-critical system, like a nuclear power plant reactor control or cruise missile guidance operations.
StarWind Virtual SAN eliminates the single point of failure for storage in virtualized infrastructure by using duplication and triplication of data, caches and I/O controllers, basically “mirroring” them all between independent physically different hosts. This way, the virtual shared storage becomes fault-tolerant and provides high availability to higher performance and low-cost.
StarWind included as Niche Player for the fourth consecutive time in 2021 Magic Quadrant™ for HCI Software
We are satisfied with StarWind. The support is really fantastic. Whenever any issue arises, the response is very prompt, and solution is immediate.
We were able to build 2-node storage clusters based on virtualization in 19 hypermarkets without any problems and with high cost-efficiency.
By being able to virtualize our environment with StarWind, we were able to retire some old hardware, get our services highly available, reduce power consumption and heat in our server closet.
StarWind got us off the clustered environment, which was a big help. So, I could regain control of my storage and reclaim and redistribute the space we desperately needed.
Price + Simplicity. StarWind vSAN offers great pricing and allows us to get work done without expensive custom hardware. It also makes getting back online quick and easy after an outage or hardware failure.
We chose StarWind Mainly because of the cost compared to other vendors. Simplicity of setup was also a major factor and I like the fact that you don’t need a vendor certified engineer to perform the installation.
Because of recommendations of older colleagues, with StarWind, we got a reliable storage with no additional hardware. There was a need to increase IT infrastructure performance and we saw StarWind as the most cost-effective solution.
StarWind is the best storage product I have ever used! It satisfies and exceeds requirements.
Our products are now available at flexible subscription payments simply as part of your OpEx.