I just wanted to provide a few comments on how Starwind might be able to improve its placement in the Enterprise Environment. Specifically what I'd like to see is ...
Site Recovery Manager support: Specifically, Starwind needs to provide a SRM plug-in so array based replication is possible.
Metrics: The current product really does not provide sufficient information to fully monitor performance and functionality. Based on other products I have used, there are insufficient counters available through the UI. And that is actually OK if there are additional counters available for import in to the Windows Performance Monitor. Aside from an administrator using performance counters to tune a server, these metrics are needed by upper management. Management thrives on metrics and they are used to determine budgets, purchases, growth, etc.
Customization: By this, I mean the UI has to be adjustable so that end users can determine file names, intermediate names, etc. This might be just an issue with the current beta, bur the current beta will not let you choose the name of the Imagefile. In the current beta, this has actually caused LUN creation to fail when I tried to use a L2 cache for a LSFS LUN and use the same directory as a Think providioned L2 cache (it wanted to use the same name for the cache and therefore failed to create it). Personally, we (at the office) use naming conventions for our LUNs so other know what purpose they server and it would be nice to be able to do this for Starwind as well.
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