StarWind Software Inc. is a leading provider of software-based, hypervisor-centric virtual machine storage. I've been following the company since 2004 when I first launched VMblog; but the company has been around since 2003. StarWind's flagship product is an iSCSI SAN software that turns any industry-standard
Windows Server into a fault-tolerant, fail-safe iSCSI SAN. It's designed for use as networked storage and has been qualified to support
VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V environments.
To find out more, and to provide readers with a bit of insight into what the company is doing, I reached out to their product manager, Max
Kolomyeytsev.
VMblog: The industry buzz has been around virtualization and cloud computing for
some time now. One of the new industry terms making its rounds is
hyper-converged. What does this mean to StarWind, and how does your
solution fit in?
Max
Kolomyeytsev: Actually, it was our idea in the first place. We came up with
hyper-converged infrastructure for virtual shared storages and basically made
the first working sample. We see the hyper-converged as our main scenario, although
StarWind Virtual SAN also works in a lot of compute and storage separated
scenarios.
VMblog: You guys have been operating on both VMware and Hyper-V hypervisors for a
while now. Are you seeing advancements in the number of Hyper-V
deployments? Or is this still a VMware world?
Kolomyeytsev: As a matter of fact, Hyper-V and VMware have successfully shared the
virtualization market. While the first is positioned as a solution for SMBs,
the latter is designed for larger-scale deployments and suits the needs of
Enterprises. StarWind Virtual SAN comes in as a convenient adaptation tool, removing
most of the restrictions. It allows Enterprises (including ROBO scenarios) and
SMBs to deploy the virtual storage of the required scale on desired
platform.
VMblog: What type of disks does your solution work with or require? And how
much difference does the type of disk make with your solution?
Kolomyeytsev: Our solution is Hardware agnostic, meaning it can utilize any spindle disks
be it SAS or SATA. StarWind Virtual SAN also supports all types of SSDs
including PCIe, however, having them in the configuration is not mandatory as
it is in the case with vSphere. SAN performance directly depends on the speed
of underlying disks so it is logical that faster disks deliver better
performance of the system.
VMblog: Can you explain a few of the benefits to using a
Virtual SAN solution over that of a physical SAN or NAS device... beyond the
cost savings?
Kolomyeytsev: With StarWind Virtual SAN, data
is always written and read locally so there is no storage IO going through the
network links. This way StarWind delivers better performance compared to a
hardware SAN with a similar disk set.
Our solution is much more versatile compared to any hardware SAN or NAS. It
scales up by simply adding more RAM, CPU, internal or external storage, and
scales out seamlessly with zero downtime. Scale out nodes can have flexible hardware
configuration. Same applies to forklift upgrades - zero downtime and seamless
transition to the new hardware, which is still a lofty goal with a hardware
SAN.
VMblog: And how complicated is your solution to get up and running? Are special skills required?
Kolomyeytsev: Any system administrator can setup and manage StarWind Virtual SAN in a
matter of minutes. If you've got any experience with Microsoft Windows, you'll
find it very easy, because our solution is a native Windows application.
SAN/NAS, UNIX or other specialized skills are not required.
VMblog: I hope you don't mind, but I have to ask. I like to tell
Virtualization Administrators about free tools that should be added into their
tool belts, and you guys offer a free tool called V2V Converter. Can you
give us a few details about this tool?
Kolomyeytsev: StarWind V2V Converter is a convenient tool, which, well, converts VM disks
from format to format in order to transfer the VM between different hypervisors.
It switches the virtual machine disk between VHD(X), VMDK and IMG formats, by "cloning"
the source VM disk file without any risk of damaging it. Quite a useful tool in
multiple occasions, because hypervisors usually let you convert VMs to their native
format only.
VMblog: Finally, what's coming up on the horizon for StarWind? Where do you
go from here?
Kolomyeytsev: Mostly, it's our dark secret. We're pioneers, so what we're about to do is
often a new step in the development of storage virtualization. As for the
trivial things - we're going to make LSFS even more efficient in terms of
coping with the workload of virtualized environment, thus getting the
performance even higher. Maybe we'll also tinker with asynchronous replication
to ease its implementation and make it even more discrete. As for major goals
on the horizon - you'll hear about them in time, we guarantee it.
##
Once again, a special thank you to Max
Kolomyeytsev, Product Manager at StarWind Software Inc.
