March 9,
2021
StarWind Is No.1 at IT Central Station’s Peer Awards for SDS 2021
1
Introduction
Features

Unified Storage (Multiprotocol)

People speak all kinds of languages and, most of the time, need some translating intermediary to communicate freely. Software works in the same way — “speaking different languages” called protocols. Dozens of solutions have been developed to the point of “industry-standard”, dividing the market. While some products are mutually compatible, most of them are not, undermining user convenience and requiring some special addition to make them work together.

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2
Problem

Problems of Protocol Intercompatibility

Every piece of software has a limited set of supported communication protocols. Even if an application supports multiple protocols, it “prefers” one of them to others in the list, typically having performance issues with using the least preferred. Getting a few different applications to work together may prove a real challenge. When it comes to virtualization, this happens a lot with storage and consumers. They use different, often mutually incompatible uplink protocols. For example, Microsoft Hyper-V "prefers" SMB3, iSCSI and doesn't working with NFS at all, while VMware vSphere works with NFS and iSCSI but not SMB3. That's why finding suitable storage for both environments simultaneously can be tricky.

Some software, like VMware vSAN, has its own proprietary protocol, making it even more of a challenge to achieve compatibility. Specialized solutions that allow multiprotocol communication, such as additional "gateway" layers, require skills and money while becoming a bottleneck in performance, because all data has to pass through them.

Products from different vendors support incompatible protocols

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Solution

Unified Storage (Multiprotocol) Solution

StarWind Virtual SAN exposes industry-standard uplink protocols. It uses SMB3 with all fuzzy dialect features, including RDMA-supporting SMB Direct and MPIO-utilizing SMB Multichannel, NFSv4.1, and iSCSI (VVols on iSCSI, NVMe over Fabrics, and iSER.) Basically, it can stick any consumers, such as virtualization environments, together with the storage into a working setup. The typical usage scenarios are virtually unlimited: bare-metal, converged ("compute and storage separated"), hyperconverged, Clustered Shared Volumes for SOFS, VVols on top of iSCSI, SMB3 file server, and many others. StarWind Virtual SAN can expose industry-standard protocols outside and feed the storage to any other deployment based on Hyper-V, vSphere, Xen, etc. In addition, to fulfill the highest performance demands — StarWind VSAN can share data via NVMe-oF protocol for both Hyper-V (by using StarWind NVMe-oF Initiator) and VMware.

StarWind Virtual SAN supports all industry-standard protocols

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Conclusion

Use All Industry-Standard Uplink Protocols with Unified Storage from StarWind

StarWind Virtual SAN becomes the universal “gateway” for all industry-standard uplink protocols: iSCSI, NFS, SMB3, NVMe-oF, and many others. In a way, it works like a polyglot that doesn’t need any third party to communicate with people in many different languages. It allows multiple virtualization environments to interact with storage and form a working setup, providing virtually unlimited deployment scenarios.

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What The World Says About Us

StarWind included as Niche Player for the third consecutive time in 2020 Magic Quadrant for HCI

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6
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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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StarWind is the best storage product I have ever used! It satisfies and exceeds requirements.

Joe Gursky, Director of IT
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