Listen to this articleStarWind is the pioneer of hyperconvergence and storage virtualization. Below is our recent interview with Artem Berman, COO and Co-Founder of StarWind:
Q: For those who haven’t heard of it, what is the best way to describe StarWind?
A: We were the ones who trumpeted about conventional on-premises IT infrastructures being under-utilized and that there was a better way to tap into the hidden potential of your OS, computing, and storage through virtualization way back in the early 2000s. People thought the idea to be crazy at the time, and now look at us: 15 years of success, loud and proud.
But to make the long story short, StarWind is a company that offers software and turnkey (hardware + software) solutions that allow businesses to dramatically increase the performance of their IT environment, avoid hiring an IT management mega-squad to operate it, cut OpEx and CapEx, and maintain data security at all times, on all stages — et voilà!
Q: You’ve recently presented the first free solution that brings NVMe over Fabrics to Windows; could you tell us something more?
A: In the contemporary IT world, NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) technology has already become a household name as more and more enterprises readily adopt flash in their environments. Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are no exception. They all actively use NVMe-oF and NVMe-oF software targets to effectively present PCIe SSDs over the network.
But the problem is that the efficiency of using the NVMe-oF initiator can only be achieved in a Unix/Linux environment. There was no native NVMe-oF initiator for Windows. StarWind NVMe-oF Initiator is the first free all-software solution that brings NVMe-oF to Windows. We designed it based on the same principle as with our other products — “getting more for less.”
Bringing StarWind NVMe-oF Initiator to a Windows Server environment, there is no cutting PCIe SSD performance as in the instances of using common protocols (iSCSI, iSER, NFS, and SMB3), and SMEs applications receive the number of IOPS that they require. As per usual, StarWind is on a mission of revolutionizing the way businesses perceive their IT resources.
Recommended: Q: What makes hyperconverged IT infrastructure superior compared to a traditional IT infrastructure?
A: Traditional IT infrastructures are complex intersections of loads of hardware, loads of nodes, loads of applications, loads of hardware compatibility lists (HCLs), loads of people to maintain all of that, and loads of money to pay for it, continuously. If your business is lucky and experiences growth, then the traditional option will require adding more costs to that list as you expand.
The conventional infrastructure definitely uses some type of public cloud (Azure, Oracle Cloud, AWS, etc.) for offsite data replication — so you gotta pay for that. It also needs a data center and network of some type to create an IT environment and tie it together. That has its own limitations, i.e. how much workload it can handle if it’s used as prescribed by the manual.
To perform the intended business activity, you would require certain applications. They can be quite “demanding” in terms of how much strain they put on CPU and storage. Talking about storage, you’d have to buy a physical shared storage solution of some sort (which are not cheap) for that whole gondola to run on. You’ll buy more as the workload increases, and they are prone to crashing if they’re functionality is stretched too far.
You can cut a lot of the mentioned costs if you go the hyperconverged route. Hyperconvergence is the abstraction of all your compute, storage, and network. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA), for example, can create a fully abstracted platform with as little as two nodes, ensuring endless scaling possibilities and high availability.
Hyperconverged infrastructures (HCI) make sure that all the IT resources are used to their fullest. Storage and compute devices here are separated yet united. The abstracted network will unify cloud storage, backup, replication, SAN, or NAS into virtualized resource groups. You can rebalance, relocate, or divide them as needed.
Mirroring and deduplication ensure redundancy, which means that even if a crash occurs, your IT environment will not show even the slightest bit of malfunctioning. The abstraction of storage means higher amounts of storage thanks to virtualization. Applications can get all the extra power they need as per your allocation with the existing hardware.
You get so much more while using so much less, and you (and your customers) can rest assured that the data will always stay secure and available.
Q: Why StarWind? What makes you the best choice?
A: StarWind offers an exclusive combination of enterprise-grade features and outstanding support wrapped in foolproof packaging that costs less than a Tesla Model 3. Thanks to hyperconvergence, for an SMB price tag, we offer businesses of any size the possibility to enjoy the features that were previously available only to corporations with massive data centers.
StarWind HCA is a very resilient and flexible solution that can serve either as the foundation and core for an IT infrastructure, or it can be easily integrated into an existing one, boosting its performance by manifold. Our support and engineering will configure, deploy, and monitor your HCI 24/7, preventing issues from occurring or resolving them on the spot by themselves.
StarWind just works. What else is there to say?
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Q: What can we expect from StarWind in the future?
A: StarWind is all about innovation that creates routes for businesses of any scale to enjoy their IT environment instead of dreading it. You can definitely expect us to disrupt the HCI market ever further. Our founders strive to make our experience of the modern world seamless in places where success, safety, or lives depend on IT.
Our company constantly works on upgrading our existing solutions. We are also working on new products that will steal the show in the industry for sure. Expect StarWind to lead the businesses of the world further down the path of optimization and resiliency as globalization and markets continue to evolve.
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