StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

Starwind Virtual San
Hybrid Cloud^NEW

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.

StarWind ProActive Support^NEW

StarWind ProActive Support provides your business with an unprecedented level of services availability and data security by preventing failures proactively instead of dealing with consequences. In the case of a problem, StarWind engineer gets an alert and reaches out to you to resolve it, saving your valuable time and efforts.

StarWind 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.

SMB3 support

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 support

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.

SMI-S support

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.

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.

StarWind Web-based Management

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

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.

StarWind HyperConverged Appliance includes space reduction technologies for increased performance and capacity utilization. Deduplication and compression reduce the actual amount of data to be transferred, written, read or processed, therefore removing the unnecessary workload from HDD, flash and interconnect.

StarWind HyperConverged Appliance scales according to business needs, allowing both scale-out and scale-up architectures. Ready HCA nodes or individual flash and disks can be added to handle the growing workload without “overkill” over-provisioning and over-spend.

StarWind HCA is versatile due to the help of multiprotocol StarWind Virtual SAN. It deploys industry-standard protocols allowing users to create virtually any architecture. StarWind HCA supports: SMB3, including SMB Direct and SMB Multichannel, NFS and iSCSI, VVols, NVMf and iSER. Initially designed to create virtualization infrastructure from the ground-up, StarWind HCA can still become a part of existing architecture.

StarWind 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.

StarWind HyperConverged Appliance achieves fault-tolerance and high availability with a minimalistic two-node setup. It utilizes StarWind Virtual SAN, MS S2D or VMware vSAN to “mirror” storage and caches between the nodes. As a result, the appliance can withstand failures of individual disks, memory modules or even an entire node without compromising uptime.

StarWind HCA adopts a hyperconverged architecture, combining compute and storage resources into one scalable layer. It is easy to manage and extremely cost-efficient, reducing all virtualization expenses, including energy consumption. For these reasons, Hyper-convergence is suited for organizations with limited budgets and understaffed IT teams.

StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is, obviously, hyperconverged. However, it can integrate with with an existing “compute and storage separated” architecture, serving storage outside the appliance. It uses industry-standard uplink protocols: SMB3, NFS, iSCSI, NVMe over Fabrics, iSER, and SMB Direct.

StarWind HCA utilizes multi-tiered RAM and flash caching for exceptional performance, reducing I/O latency to an absolute minimum. Utilizing StarWind VSAN, it achieves high performance with conventional SATA SSD, RAM and MLC flash. Cache is distributed between the nodes, achieving fast and reliable write-back policy without employing costly proprietary hardware.

StarWind HyperConverged Appliance takes advantage of commercial off-the-shelf hardware enabling unrivaled cost-efficiency. By avoiding the necessity for proprietary hardware, end-to-end solutions can be architected for much lower cost.

StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is pre-integrated with an industry-leading backup solution – Veeam Backup and Replication. It will ensure the safety of mission-critical data and minimize the risk of data corruption even in case of disasters without impacting performance and data integrity. Optional public cloud integration for disaster recovery can be provided.

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.

Virtual Tape Library (VTL) is an optional included feature that eliminates the need for physical tape by retaining all data on inexpensive, fast and high-capacity drives. In StarWind HCA, it is available in a software-only form as part of StarWind VSAN functionality.

StarWind HyperConverged Appliance employs StarWind VSAN Log-structuring feature to handle virtualization workload. It battles issues causing performance degradation such as “I/O blender” scenarios. As a result, log-structuring makes the minimalistic resources sufficient for even enterprise routines in addition to everyday tasks.

Starwind 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.

StarWind iSER

StarWind iSER completely eliminates the problem of network bottleneck by supplying higher bandwidth for block storage transfers. Further, it ensures the highest performance in the clustered systems by avoiding latency issues. Therefore, with StarWind iSER, VM migration, data and VM replication become faster and easier to perform.