Storage is an essential part of any IT infrastructure. Applications, virtual machines (VMs), and services require fast and secure access to storage systems for stable performance. On top of that, infrastructure uptime figures are critical for business continuity. With that said, a lot of companies have already implemented Fibre Channel-based SANs in their infrastructure. However, a single SAN becomes a single point of failure, putting all the applications running on it at risk.
Storage with a Fibre Channel backend is a part of a lot of infrastructures these days. In order to make storage highly available, companies need to buy new FC-based hardware or to invest in a new infrastructure that will be able to cope with modern protocols such as iSCSI, NVMe-oF, or iSER.
In addition, most applications and VMs need to run 24/7/365, resulting in the ever-growing demand for high availability. Therefore, shared storage must be able to handle failures to still provide connectivity to applications and VMs.
Moreover, every environment requires scaling storage and compute resources or at least, to be ready for this. New compute nodes must have Fibre Channel HBAs and the ability to connect to the existing infrastructure via Fibre Channel switches, which adds additional costs when scaling.
StarWind VSAN can utilize the existing Fibre Channel infrastructure to bring in the required High Availability, using StarWind active-active storage replication. This way, the existing Fibre Channel-based infrastructure remains intact, providing shared storage for clients, while StarWind handles synchronous replication. As a result, there is no need to invest in new hardware and reconstruct the exciting infrastructure to implement alternative storage protocols.
Your VMs and applications can now meet the 24/7/365 uptime requirements thanks to the combination of StarWind replication and Fibre Channel protocol. Hence, storage can easily handle failures, while still providing connectivity to VMs and applications.
Infrastructure scaling becomes much more flexible since StarWind can "talk" not only Fibre Channel but also such modern storage protocols like iSCSI and NVMe-oF. Subsequently, you are not restricted to scaling only using Fibre Channel-compatible hardware.
StarWind VSAN uses Fibre Channel for sharing Highly Available storage for applications and VMs. By using the Fibre Channel protocol, StarWind brings the ease of making storage highly available without paying unnecessary costs and introducing higher flexibility to your existing infrastructure by means of piling up unwanted hardware.
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.