Value Proposition

StarWind Free NAS & SAN

For Enterprise ROBO, SMB & Edge looking to transform their standalone hypervisor server or groups/clusters of servers into shared storage without buying any expensive proprietary components — we offer StarWind Free NAS & SAN. Repurpose your existing servers into a hardware-compatibility list (HCL) certified high-performance storage appliance, network-attached storage (NAS), storage area network (SAN), and/or backup target fully compatible with either VMware vSphere Hypervisor ESXi or Microsoft Hyper-V while using inexpensive commodity hardware

StarWind Free NAS & SAN is shipped as a ready-to-go Linux-based virtual machine (VM) deployed onto your chosen industry-grade hypervisor, Microsoft Hyper-V or VMware vSphere. The solution shares the same software-defined storage (SDS) features as StarWind VSAN, which allows it to fully unleash to power of ZFS as well as expose standard protocols like iSCSI, SMB, NFS, and others. Coming as a lightweight piece of software, StarWind Free NAS & NAS is not only easy to install and use thanks to a user-friendly Installation Wizard and an elaborate web-based user interface (UI) for storage management, but it also increases your return on investment (ROI) by allowing to repurpose your aging servers on top of being cost-free.

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Why Free NAS & SAN from StarWind?

StarWind Free NAS & SAN is a fully HCL-certified software-defined shared storage for VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V. The solution also enables you to repurpose your servers into certified backup targets if you’re using Veeam. StarWind Free NAS & SAN, as a Linux-based VM, leverages all the features of ZFS to ensure optimal storage use, data safety and integrity. While it comes free of charge, it is easy to transition to a paid version if you require High Availability (HA), fault tolerance, and/or commercial support to make sure your production environment enjoys all the benefits a full-featured SDS solution can provide.

STARWIND FREE NAS & SAN FEATURES

StarWind Free NAS & SAN Highlights

Architecture

Free network-attached storage and storage area network from StarWind is built on three essential, years-proven building blocks: Linux, ZFS, and StarWind Virtual SAN. It’s easily deployed in the form of a VM on top of your hypervisor of choice, VMware ESXi or Microsoft Hyper-V.

File and Block Storage

Free NAS & SAN supports all industry-standard block and file protocols, like SMB3, NFSv3, NFSv4, NFSv4.1, and iSCSI (including VVols on iSCSI, NVMe-over-Fabrics, and iSER). This way, the solution unlocks the entire potential of all of your available underlying storage capacity.

Certified and Ready-to-Work

Unlike other SDS offers on the market, StarWind Free NAS & SAN is officially certified to work with vSphere or Hyper-V. The solution is easy to install and configure and you won’t experience any incompatibility issues when you run it on your chosen hypervisor.

Redundancy Options

Users can choose their preferred redundancy configuration for their local disks among ZFS, Hardware RAID, or Linux MD/RAID. The paid version will unlock “mirroring” of disks and flash between two hypervisor servers to achieve HA. Shape the redundancy of your hardware platform as you see fit.

FREE NAS & SAN BENEFITS

Simplicity

Installing and operating StarWind Free NAS & SAN is no different from your everyday system administrator routines. The deployment process is as simple as dropping a VM on your existing hypervisor. Monitoring and management are executed through a broad choice of tools you are free to choose from.

Performance

Free NAS & SAN from StarWind is a performance leader. Building on industry-fastest SDS, StarWind VSAN, allows the solution to process close to 100% of IOPS engaging the entirety of your underlying storage potential. This was proven by extensive tests made by StarWind in collaboration with its technical partners.

Cost-Efficiency

Free NAS & SAN does not only entail the benefits of being cost-free. It also grants the ability to keep your aging servers running as backup targets or high-performing storage appliances thereby greatly improving your company’s ROI. Instead of throwing your outdated hardware out, you can repurpose it to serve you better and longer.

Success Stories

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

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

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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