StarWind Software Take Two

A few days ago in a post, Star Wind Software claims "Zero to SAN in 30 Minutes", I did a quick review of the marketing messages of StarWind Software prior to a conversation with the company's CEO, Zorian Rotenberg. I was rather skeptical of some of the claims being made by the company. In the post, I promised to speak with the company and learn if they could offer support for their promises. In short, they did.

What StarWind had to say

Here are a few bullets summarizing my conversation with Zorian Rotenberg:

Leader in Storage Virtualization and iSCSI storage since 2003

• Technology pioneer in iSCSI storage – iSCSI product commercialized in 2003
• Nearly 65,000 product downloads (includes free copies)
• Nearly 2,000 paid customers in over 50 countries
• SAN Software designed to turn standard Intel servers into shared storage
• Works with virtualization technologies including VMware, Hyper-V
• Spinout in Q4 of 2008 from RDS Software to form a new entity

StarWind Storage Management and iSCSI SAN Software Advantage

• Rock-solid reliability, Easy to use, Fast performance
• Windows Server 2008 R2 Failover Clustering and 64-bit support
• Enterprise-Class Features: Mirroring with Auto Failover, Remote Replication, CDP/Snapshots, and Thin Provisioning
• The most affordable High Availability SAN for Virtual IT environments

StarWind's SAN uses standard IP networks (including existing Ethernet networks) and works with any off-the-shelf X86 or X64 system.

Snapshot analysis

Within a few hours of the post going live here on Virtually Speaking, Email from those using this company's products started coming in. At first I thought this demonstration of support was orchestrated by the company. I was wrong. These people reached out because they use StarWind's SAN and have found value in using StarWind's SAN. It is not clear, by the way, if these readers were using the commercial or free versions of the software.

If I take both the company's and the user's comments into account, this technology lives up to the company's promises and appears to be a very simple addition to the IT environment. As organizations encapsulate functions or, perhaps, whole workloads, it is important for them to also consider how to make the storage system that holds applications and data equally agile and reliable. StarWind's approach appears to be useful for those in the midmarket needing availability and disaster recovery without also requiring them to have a diverse mix of staff expertise. While not as scalable as some competitors products,  StarWind is honoring rule number 1 of the golden rules of it, "don't touch it you'll break it", and rule number 4, "good enough is good enough" (for all of the rules, see Reprise of the Golden Rules of IT).