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Ensuring Results
How It Works

Features

StarWind provides services and offers solutions strictly based on the principle of transparency. We endeavor to inform our customers about what they are spending their money on and how the purchase will resolve their issues exactly. Below, you will find the features pertinent to our software products that explain how they ensure their marketed benefits.

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WHAT WE OFFER

Management (Command Center)

Operate your hyper-converged infrastructure components from one web tab. StarWind Command Center is a single-pane-of-glass web-based UI for HCI management and monitoring that allows you to significantly simplify your daily routine by controlling hardware resources (storage, networking) and software resources (workload, VMs, backups) from a single place.

Free Migration Assistance

Migration assistance is included in all HCA licenses. Our engineers will help (free of charge) with your existing production migration so that it can be further run by StarWind. Both virtual and physical migration is covered by the offer.

NOTE: Migration assistance assumes the assistance with only VMs V2V (any OS, supported by the hypervisor) and P2V (Windows bare-metal only) migration/move from existing infrastructure to a StarWind appliance.

NVMe
over Fabrics (NVMe-oF)

StarWind’s NVMe-oF protocol implementation allows maximum PCIe SSD utilization in Hyper-V environments. With this protocol in place, the difference between a locally connected NVMe drive and one presented over the network vanishes.

ZFS

StarWind integration with ZFS provides companies with high levels of local redundancy and reliable data integrity. Build enterprise-grade storage systems at SMB cost and be ready for any business growth with unlimited scalability options without any hardware restrictions anytime, anywhere.

Data Locality

The “data locality” approach effectively maximizes the performance of the IT infrastructure by keeping compute and storage resources for every virtual machine on its physical node. This allows processing most of the I/O locally, eliminating the problem of slow data transfer through interconnect fabrics and providing lower latency.

VSA

You can choose to deploy VSAN as VSA (Virtual Storage Appliance). In this scenario, Virtual SAN from StarWind is run as a pre-packaged Linux-based VM (virtual machine) on top of your chosen industry-standard hypervisor. As a result, you gain the benefits of Linux OS being open-source, innovative, having no HCLs, and updates being introduced into your system effortlessly and swiftly as soon as they come out.

Web-
based Management

StarWind Web-based Management provides system administrators with the ability to access and manage their StarWind storage infrastructure via HTML5 web console from any location. This functionality delivers full control over storage-related operations from PC, Android, iOS or Windows mobile devices.

Fault Tolerance and
High Availability

Virtual SAN simply "mirrors" the actual storage and caches between the given numbers of hosts creating a fault-tolerant storage pool. It is completely up to the system administrator as to how many replicas of a particular VM or LUN are kept alive and how many active storage controllers a cluster should use.


Witness

Experience minimum to zero downtime and forget about the possibility of split-brain thanks to StarWind’s Witness feature. Your clustered StarWind environment with an even number of nodes will go on during an outage even if half the nodes fail. StarWind Node Majority Mechanism takes advantage of cloud, too, so no need to buy an additional physical Witness node if you don't want it — we’ll just set up a Witness instance for you in the cloud.


Journal Synchronization

StarWind allows storing synchronization journals on separate storage. This way, when the down node goes up, StarWind will synchronize changes written to storage only while that one node was out of sync. It minimizes the time needed for synchronization and enhances data availability.


vCenter Plugin

StarWind SAN & NAS simplifies integration with your VMware vSphere environment thanks to vCenter Plugin. The feature is easy to install and enables unified management and monitoring of your StarWind-based infrastructure using vSphere Web Client, removing the need for multiple UIs.


Swordfish provider

StarWind Swordfish Plugin allows to easily manage, allocate and scale infrastructures based on StarWind Virtual SAN as well as setups with StarWind VSAN being part of a bigger storage infrastructure. Swordfish API comes as a part of VSAN installation, making StarWind deployment extra simple and eliminating the need to install additional software to manage the infrastructure.

SMI-S

SMI-S (Storage Management Initiative Specification) provides a simple and unified way to orchestrate the entire storage infrastructure. StarWind SMI-S provider, in its turn, delivers system and storage administrators the single “pane of glass” management over SCVMM and OpenStack. Thanks to SMI-S support, most operations can be performed from console and automated.

Scale-Up and
Scale-Out

StarWind VTL allows both scale-up and scale-out architectures. Capacity is transparently increased by local object storage and public cloud storage. Adding more VTL instances scales the performance and shrinks the backup window by running multiple parallel backup operations.

VVols

The integration of VMware VVols support in StarWind products makes vSphere storage management highly efficient, simple and automated. StarWind VVols allows providing VMs with fine-tuned storage policies based on pre-defined storage configurations with required performance and resiliency characteristics.

HyperConverged

As an extension of the hypervisor, provides both outstanding performance and unified administration using hypervisor-specific management tools. VSAN simply integrates and operates with all major virtualization platforms running on Hyper-V and Windows as a native application together with vSphere or Xen nested inside a VM. Non-virtualized clusters are also fully supported.

Converged

StarWind Virtual SAN also runs on a dedicated set of hosts in order to create a separated storage layer. The differentiation of compute and storage layers is optimum if there is need to grow by capacity only. Typical use cases are shared storage for huge clustered SQL Server, Oracle, SAP, NoSQL deployments and an inexpensive block back-end for Scale-Out File Servers.

Server-Side Cache

Virtual SAN reduces I/O latency and eliminates network traffic to an absolute minimum by utilizing distributed RAM and flash-based caches. As a result, it improves performance and reliability without unnecessary cost. Caches are kept coherent between multiple hosts in order that a lightning-fast write-back policy is safe and achievable with commodity hardware.

Hybrid Cloud

StarWind Virtual SAN extends existing workloads to Azure public cloud, transforming the existing infrastructure into Hybrid Cloud. StarWind distributes highly available shared storage between the clouds, providing Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery for optimal RTPO. The Hyper-V ecosystem is managed by such familiar and convenient orchestrators as StarWind Manager, Hyper-V, and SCVMM.

Stretched Clustering

StarWind Stretched Clustering provides organizations with constant applications uptime and uninterrupted business continuity. The Stretched Clustering support allows avoiding the production downtime due to Live Migration between the geographical locations. Moreover, the IT infrastructure resources are utilized by 100% thanks to active-active shared storage replication.

Unified Storage
(Multiprotocol)

StarWind Virtual SAN uses industry-standard uplink protocols, integrating with almost all virtual environments and technologies. It exposes: SMB3 with dialect features such as SMB Direct and SMB Multichannel, NFSv4.1 and iSCSI, VVols iSCSI, NVMe over Fabrics and iSER. As a result, StarWind VSAN can merge with any virtual environments.

iSCSI

StarWind leverages all the benefits of iSCSI without any hardware restrictions and delivers unrivaled high availability for all industry-standard applications and hypervisors. All you need is a simple Ethernet connection and you're good to start enjoying close-to underlying storage performance with StarWind iSCSI.

Fibre Channel

Combining StarWind replication with Fibre Channel protocol fully resolves the single point of failure issue in Fibre Channel storage infrastructure. Achieve High Availability on existing FC-based infrastructure without buying new hardware and enjoy unrestricted scalability thanks to StarWind being multiprotocol on top.

iSER

StarWind flawlessly uses iSER in its functionality, fully eliminating network bottleneck by ensuring higher bandwidth for block storage transfers. iSER, a.k.a. iSCSI Extensions for RDMA, serves to remove the TCP/IP processing overhead and allow the workload to bypass the target system’s CPU. As a result, StarWind enables the building of high-performing yet cost-effective HCI and brings the full power of fast flash and NVMe, offering the best ROI possible.

SMB3

SMB3, an evolved version of SMB (Server Message Block) protocol, provides file-based access to applications data. Being designed to max out hardware utilization efficiency, StarWind implementation of SMB3 decreases CAPEX and simplifies Scale-Out File servers deployment.

NFS

NFS (Network File System) is a distributed system protocol providing users with the remote access to data over a shared network just if it was kept locally. StarWind implementation of NFS eliminates the need for dedicated shared storage, so CAPEX and OPEX become significantly lower. Also, it merges the storage and compute layers allowing the cluster to go well with only two nodes.

Grid Architecture

The grid architecture allows building a highly fault-tolerant cluster by connecting a number of nodes together into a single grid. Such cluster topology provides a high rate of resiliency, allowing the cluster to stay operational even after multiple nodes failure while maintaining the principle of “data locality” for ultimate performance.

Deduplication and
Compression

StarWind Virtual SAN implements VM and flash-friendly space reduction technologies such as in-line deduplication and compression. The result increases usable capacity of all-flash configurations, boosts I/O performance as more data can be pinpointed to virtually "bigger" de-duplicated caches. Also, it prolongs flash life reducing the amount of write operations.

Hardware Agnostic and
Commodity Hardware

StarWind Virtual SAN utilizes inexpensive commodity hardware. Our unique in-house developed software makes the most performance out of general-purpose x64 servers, MLC flash, spinning disks and Ethernet. VSAN also takes care of high-performance SAS, SLC and 3D NAND flash, as well as 10 and 25/50/100 GbE networking.

Asynchronous
Replication

Virtual SAN ensures that the mission-critical business data is replicated to a disaster recovery site, following the "3-2-1 backup rule". Replication is implemented to be asynchronous, background, deduplication, and compression-aware, as well as snapshot-based. Additionally, StarWind VSAN supports asynchronous replication to private and public cloud such as Azure.

Automated Storage Tiering

StarWind Automated Storage Tiering eliminates the need in manual intervention when assigning storage to applications since the data flow between tiers is fully automated. Moreover, companies don’t have to go all-flash as Automated Storage Tiering effectively matches workload-intensive applications with a high performing storage, so that no overprovisioning occurs.

Cloud Storage

StarWind VTL transparently extends existing on-premises backup storage pools to Azure, AWS or other public cloud storage services. This serves two purposes. First, organizations can transparently scale up storage capacity without purchasing any extra hardware. Second, public cloud storage offers the most appealing $/GB rate for long-term data archival.

Object Storage

StarWind VTL allows both scale-up and scale-out architectures. Capacity is transparently increased by local object storage and public cloud storage. Adding more VTL instances scales the performance and shrinks the backup window by running multiple parallel backup operations.

Ransomware Protection

Ransomware can't encrypt tape libraries so virtual tape is a safer backup repository compared to NAS or SAN. Additional copies in Amazon S3 and Glacier deliver complete data security even if the entire on-premises infrastructure is compromised.

Log-Structured
File System (LSFS)

Virtual SAN provisions and manages storage with VM workloads in mind. General-purpose storage arrays are invariably the most appropriate candidates to serve hypervisors. VSAN uses Log-Structured File System and sophisticated caching in order to avoid random I/O to the full, but still without requiring cost all-flash storage.

Log-structured Write-
Back Cache (LSWBC)

Log-structured Write-Back Cache is a caching technology tailored for intense virtualized workloads. By effectively combining the fast memory like flash or RAM and a tiny portion of your storage, this feature optimizes the way data is written to the underlying storage. As a result, all your applications always get the resiliency and performance that they need.

4
What The World Says About Us

StarWind included as Niche Player for the fourth consecutive time in 2021 Magic Quadrant™ for HCI Software



StarWind
Hyperconverged Infrastructure Software
reviewed April 5, 2021
Industry: Finance
Company size: 3b – 10b usd
01 / 10 Read more
reviewed Sep 13, 2021
Industry: Construction
Company size: <50m usd
02 / 10 Read more
reviewed June 12, 2021
Industry: Manufacturing
Company size: 50m - 250m usd
03 / 10 Read more
reviewed October 14, 2020
Industry: Education
Company size: <5,000 emp
04 / 10 Read more
reviewed March 16, 2021
Industry: Manufacturing
Company size: 3b - 10b usd
05 / 10 Read more
reviewed February 28, 2020
Industry: Finance
Company size: 1b - 3b usd
07 / 10 Read more
reviewed November 14, 2019
Industry: Finance
Company size: 1b - 3b usd
08 / 10 Read more
reviewed October 20, 2016
Industry: Manufacturing
Company size: 3b - 10b usd
09 / 10 Read more
reviewed September 1, 2021
Industry: Services
Company size: <50m usd
10 / 10 Read more
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Success Stories

We are satisfied with StarWind. The support is really fantastic. Whenever any issue arises, the response is very prompt, and solution is immediate.

Srinivas Kouda, Company’s Representative

We were able to build 2-node storage clusters based on virtualization in 19 hypermarkets without any problems and with high cost-efficiency.

Vass Sandor, IT Infrastructure Leader

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.

David Gardner, Information Systems Manager

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.

Ryan Fulton, Company’s Representative

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.

Aaron Hayes, IT Manager

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.

John Harris, Windows System Administrator,
Department of Physics, University of Oxford

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.

Željko Medić, Director of IT Department

StarWind is the best storage product I have ever used! It satisfies and exceeds requirements.

Joe Gursky, Director of IT
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