StarWind VSAN eliminates any need in physical shared storage by simply mirroring internal hard disks and flash between hypervisor servers. It reduces virtualization expenses (both capital and operational) by utilizing hardware resources for the same workload. StarWind VSAN maintainshigh performanceand data high availability on minimalistic resources thanks to unique StarWind developed technologies. StarWind Virtual SAN delivers performance and reliability using commercial off-the-shelf hardware, removing the need for costly proprietary components.
StarWind Virtual SAN is designed for those who already have servers, or are bound to a particular vendor list to buy from. Alternatively, deployment can be simplified through utilizing StarWind HyperConverged Appliance. This is a turnkey solution complete with hardware and software, powered by StarWind Virtual SAN. Those who need to build and maintain virtualization infrastructure at little to no expense, may be interested inStarWind Virtual SAN Free.
Differentiation
StarWind Virtual SAN is simple, inexpensive and offers higher performance and more features than any alternativeSoftware-Defined Storageplatform. StarWind VSAN has a simple base configuration of just two nodes without the need for voting or quorum facilities and is exceptionally easy to operate. It reduces cost requiring less hardware: no switches, no mandatory flash, no 10GbE and fewer servers. StarWind VSAN needs only two licensed nodes to handle an infrastructure of as many nodes as needed. The basic configuration supports many features unavailable in similar solutions, such as asynchronous replication, in-line and offline deduplication, Log-Structuring, multi-tiered RAM and flash cache.
StarWind VSAN supports converged scenario and can also go hyperconverged on top of existing hypervisor servers. It runs on inexpensive commercial off-the-shelf hardware, causing no hardware lock-in. Licenses are perpetual, so they will never expire and cause additional expenses for renewal. Unlike single-purpose, open-source free software,StarWind VSANutilizes in-house developed code, well proven worldwide and is a native Windows application, without any custom Linux/FreeBSD fork-outs. StarWind VSAN is supported by StarWind and is additionally eligible for Microsoft and VMware support services. Full differentiation of StarWind Virtual SAN against competitors can be foundhere.
Benefits
EXCEPTIONAL SIMPLICITY
StarWind Virtual SANruns as a native hypervisor component or in VM, and it does not require any deep storage and network administration or UNIX management skills. A typical system administrator with minimal experience in Hyper-V, VMware or Windows can install, configure and maintain VSAN operations.
COST EFFICIENCY
StarWind Virtual SAN cuts the costs at least in half, meaning both Operational and Capital Expenditure. It eliminates the actual physical shared storage, corresponding infrastructure, associated deployment and maintenance activities.StarWind VSANworks on commodity hardware, so there’s not only less hardware to purchase and maintain, but also the required hardware is inexpensive.
PERFORMANCE AND FEATURES
Performance is uncompromised by the minimalistic hardware footprint, reduced deployment and management costs. StarWind Virtual SAN brings to the table server-side flash and memorycaches, log-structuring and an absolutely minimalistic I/O path. The resulting performance is unmatched by either typical virtual appliances or physical shared storage.
Features
HARDWARE AGNOSTIC AND COMMODITY HARDWARE
StarWind Virtual SAN utilizes inexpensive commodity hardware. Our unique in-house developed software makes the most performance out of general-purpose x64 servers, MLC flash, spinning disks and Ethernet. VSAN also takes care of high-performance SAS, SLC and 3D NAND flash, as well as 10 and 25/50/100 GbE networking.
Virtual SAN ensures that the mission-critical business data is replicated to a disaster recovery site, following the "3-2-1 backup rule". Replication is implemented to be asynchronous, background, deduplication, and compression-aware, as well as snapshot-based. Additionally, StarWind VSAN supports asynchronous replication to private and public cloud such as Azure.
StarWind Virtual SAN implements inter-node tiering technology to offload cold data such assnapshotsfrom fast and expensive primary storage to slower but inexpensive secondary storage. The combined result allows the use of a much smaller amount of flash as primary tier with cheap spindles as a secondary tier.
Special version ofStarWind Virtual SAN, promptly deployed from a pre-configured VMware and Hyper-V compatible VM appliance installs on existing hardware shared with hypervisor automatically without any manual adjustments, requiring no specialized knowledge from the on-site IT team. This version is testing-ready, but being VM-based it will need some tinkering from StarWind engineers for a clearer performance evaluation.
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, therefore dramatically reducing backup windows.
Virtual SAN provisions and manages storage with VM workloads in mind. General-purpose storage arrays are invariably the most appropriate candidates to serve hypervisors. VSAN usesLog-Structured File Systemand sophisticated caching in order to avoid random I/O to the full, but still without requiring cost all-flash storage.
StarWind Swordfish Pluginallows 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 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.
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.
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 Virtual SAN implements VM and flash-friendly space reduction technologies such as in-linededuplicationand compression. The result increases usable capacity of all-flash configurations, boosts I/O performance as more data can be pinpointed to virtually "bigger" de-duplicated caches. Also, it prolongs flash life reducing the amount of write operations.
StarWind Virtual SAN allows both Scale-Up andScale-Out architectures. Capacity can be increased by simply throwing more capacity into the existing storage cluster node. Adding a new host with its own CPU, RAM and internal storage can scale storage capacity, I/O performance and VMs.
StarWind Virtual SAN uses industry-standarduplink protocols, integrating with almost all virtual environments and technologies. It exposes: SMB3 with dialect features such as SMB Direct and SMB Multichannel, NFSv4.1 and iSCSI, VVols iSCSI, NVMe over Fabrics and iSER. As a result, StarWind VSAN can merge with any virtual environments.
Virtual SAN simply "mirrors" the actual storage and caches between the given numbers of hosts creating afault-tolerantstorage pool. It is completely up to the system administrator as to how many replicas of a particular VM or LUN are kept alive and how many active storage controllers a cluster should use.
As an extension of the hypervisor, provides both outstanding performance and unified administration using hypervisor-specific management tools. VSAN simply integrates and operates with all major virtualization platforms running on Hyper-V and Windows as a native application together with vSphere orXennested inside a VM. Non-virtualized clusters are also fully supported.
StarWind Virtual SAN also runs on a dedicated set of hosts in order to create a separated storage layer. The differentiation of compute and storage layers is optimum if there is need to grow by capacity only. Typical use cases are shared storage for huge clusteredSQL Server, Oracle, SAP, NoSQL deployments and an inexpensive block back-end for Scale-Out File Servers.
Virtual SAN reduces I/O latency and eliminates network traffic to an absolute minimum by utilizing distributed RAM and flash-based caches. As a result, it improves performance and reliability without unnecessary cost. Caches are kept coherent between multiple hosts in order that a lightning-fast write-back policy is safe and achievable with commodity hardware.
StarWind Virtual SAN utilizes inexpensive commodity hardware. Our unique in-house developed software makes the most performance out of general-purpose x64 servers, MLC flash, spinning disks and Ethernet. VSAN also takes care of high-performance SAS, SLC and 3D NAND flash, as well as 10 and 25/50/100 GbE networking.
Virtual SAN ensures that the mission-critical business data is replicated to a disaster recovery site, following the "3-2-1 backup rule". Replication is implemented to be asynchronous, background, deduplication, and compression-aware, as well as snapshot-based. Additionally, StarWind VSAN supports asynchronous replication to private and public cloud such as Azure.
StarWind Virtual SAN implements inter-node tiering technology to offload cold data such assnapshotsfrom fast and expensive primary storage to slower but inexpensive secondary storage. The combined result allows the use of a much smaller amount of flash as primary tier with cheap spindles as a secondary tier.
Special version ofStarWind Virtual SAN, promptly deployed from a pre-configured VMware and Hyper-V compatible VM appliance installs on existing hardware shared with hypervisor automatically without any manual adjustments, requiring no specialized knowledge from the on-site IT team. This version is testing-ready, but being VM-based it will need some tinkering from StarWind engineers for a clearer performance evaluation.
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, therefore dramatically reducing backup windows.
Virtual SAN provisions and manages storage with VM workloads in mind. General-purpose storage arrays are invariably the most appropriate candidates to serve hypervisors. VSAN usesLog-Structured File Systemand sophisticated caching in order to avoid random I/O to the full, but still without requiring cost all-flash storage.
StarWind Swordfish Pluginallows 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 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.
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.
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 Virtual SAN implements VM and flash-friendly space reduction technologies such as in-linededuplicationand compression. The result increases usable capacity of all-flash configurations, boosts I/O performance as more data can be pinpointed to virtually "bigger" de-duplicated caches. Also, it prolongs flash life reducing the amount of write operations.
StarWind Virtual SAN allows both Scale-Up andScale-Out architectures. Capacity can be increased by simply throwing more capacity into the existing storage cluster node. Adding a new host with its own CPU, RAM and internal storage can scale storage capacity, I/O performance and VMs.
StarWind Virtual SAN uses industry-standarduplink protocols, integrating with almost all virtual environments and technologies. It exposes: SMB3 with dialect features such as SMB Direct and SMB Multichannel, NFSv4.1 and iSCSI, VVols iSCSI, NVMe over Fabrics and iSER. As a result, StarWind VSAN can merge with any virtual environments.
Virtual SAN simply "mirrors" the actual storage and caches between the given numbers of hosts creating afault-tolerantstorage pool. It is completely up to the system administrator as to how many replicas of a particular VM or LUN are kept alive and how many active storage controllers a cluster should use.
Designed for SMB and ROBO scenarios, creates up to 4 TB of synchronously replicated volumes (HA), or single targets (Non-HA) with an unlimited capacity. The license is not upgradable beyond basic capacity.
ENTERPRISE
It starts with two licensed nodes and scales-out to an unlimited number of nodes. There are no storage capacity limitations. https://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwind-virtual-san#downloadThe license includes asynchronous replication to a dedicated Disaster Recovery (DR) or Passive Node (as an option for extra cost).
