IT teams are under pressure to deliver reliable infrastructure in environments where budgets, staff, and space are limited. Traditional SANs and siloed architectures are too complex and costly to make sense at the edge, in branch offices, or for small and midsize businesses.
StarWind Virtual SAN is a software-defined storage solution that creates highly available storage by mirroring internal disks and flash between servers. It allows building a fully redundant HCI cluster using the internal drives of standard x86 servers, ensuring applications stay available without expensive external storage systems. With always-on availability and a lightweight architecture that scales as you grow, StarWind Virtual SAN delivers enterprise-class resilience in a simple, affordable form factor.
- Uninterrupted access and stable performance for VMs, apps, and services
- Software-only, no proprietary hardware required, runs on commodity x86 servers
- Purpose-built for Edge and ROBO: HA in just 2 nodes, fast deployment, easy management
- Supports iSCSI for broad compatibility and NVMe-oF for top performance
- Capacity-based licensing: pay only for what you protect
- Backed by 24/7 ProActive support, maintenance tasks offloaded to our engineers
Anwendungsfälle
Edge computing environments requiring resilient HCI in compact form factors
Remote and branch offices needing enterprise-class uptime with minimal IT staff
Small and mid-size businesses consolidating compute, storage, and virtualization
Replace costly, complex SAN-based architectures with simple and affordable HCI
Transition from VMware to a hypervisor-independent HCI stack, cutting down licensing costs
Run VM workloads, databases, file servers, VDI, and more with always-on availability
Funktionen
- Two-node high-availability clustering with synchronous mirroring (no third node, witness, or quorum device needed)
- Automatic failover, failback with self-healing auto-rebuild in the event of an outage
- Option to configure three-way mirroring for extra redundancy
- Multi-protocol connectivity, including iSCSI and NVMe-oF
- Supports serving HCI storage to both HCI-hosted and external applications
- Lightweight storage engine with minimal CPU and memory requirements
- Hardware flexibility: runs on any x86 servers and components of your choice
- Hypervisor independence: works with vSphere, Hyper-V, Proxmox VE, and others
- Allows for granular, independent scaling of compute and storage resources
- Intuitive web-based UI for management and administration
Easy-to-use web UI: Monitor uptime, resource usage, and performance at a glance
Manage LUNs, volumes, storage pools, and physical disks from a single interface
Easily provision storage with iSCSI and NVMe-oF support for diverse workloads
Vorteile
- Lower total cost of ownership by removing the need for external SANs and expensive licensing
- Faster time-to-value with simple deployment and minimal IT overhead
- Enterprise-class availability for critical applications in space- and budget-constrained sites
- Avoid vendor lock-in by combining StarWind Virtual SAN with your choice of x86 servers and hypervisor
- Extend the life of existing hardware investments instead of forcing costly refresh cycles
- Future-ready design that scales easily as business requirements grow
- Simplified operations that reduce dependency on specialized IT skills
Architektur
Deployment
StarWind Virtual SAN is deployed as lightweight software on x86 servers, turning internal disks and flash into a shared storage pool for hyperconverged infrastructure. Most customers start with a simple two-node cluster delivering full high availability, and scale easily by adding capacity or nodes as requirements grow. Deployment is fast through a modern web interface and supports full freedom of choice for servers, storage, networking, and hypervisors. For those preferring a turnkey solution, StarWind Virtual SAN is also available as a fully packaged HCI Appliance (hardware + software) or as a Virtual HCI Appliance (pre-configured and ready-to-deploy software).
Lizenzoptionen
StarWind Virtual SAN uses a straightforward, capacity-based licensing model. Customers only pay for the storage that is synchronously mirrored between nodes for high availability, not for the raw storage installed. Each participating node requires a license for its share of this protected capacity, and additional expansion packs can be added as requirements grow.
Every license includes software updates and support, with options to upgrade support coverage as needed. This ensures costs stay predictable while the environment scales.
Proactive Premium Support for StarWind HCI
DataCore offers three levels of technical support for StarWind HCI solutions to match different operational requirements.
- Standard Support provides business-hours coverage with response times of up to eight hours.
- Premium Support extends coverage to 24/7 availability with faster response targets, including just one hour for critical issues.
- For the most demanding environments, ProActive Premium Support goes further by continuously monitoring system health through telemetry and call-home tools, automatically detecting and resolving the majority of issues before they impact operations.