1) HA. StarWind vSAN is an HA solution so there's a) local redundancy (typically 2 disks in a pool can fail with RAID6) and b) inter-node redundancy (typically one node can die with 2-way replication or 2 with 3-way replication). Node, disk failures - we keep going. QNAP has no HA so if it dies - all the cluster goes kaboom.
2) Support. StarWind is supported solution with pro-actively monitored environment. We prevent failures from happening and if the things will go AWOL our engineers will jump in to help. QNAP w/out Microsoft Enterprise Agreement is a self-supported solution so if the cluster will go South you'll have to fix it yourself or buy per-ticket support from Microsoft. + watch out for compatibility, StarWind VSNA in on Hyper-V HCL and only few QNAP models are (check for "iSCSI Interface", so it's not even 5 models from 200+ QNAP sells supported, there's less). If storage is unsupported you won't get any help from anybody if you'll experience issues.
https://www.windowsservercatalog.com/it ... CatID=1282
https://www.windowsservercatalog.com/re ... R=5&PGS=25
3) Performance. StarWind is much faster as we do mostly local low-latency reads and replicate only writes over RDMA network to the partner, QNAP will do all the reads and writes over TCP network so it's SLOW. Especially when it comes to the low latency / high bandwidth NVMe storage.
4) Scalability. HCI StarWind scales with your cluster and with QNAP you won't support more then 4 nodes in a cluster reasonably, StarWind has no limits here thanks to "grid" architecture where traffic is isolated between "partner" nodes only.
https://www.starwindsoftware.com/iscsi- ... he-enabled
(ask QNAP to get somewhere even close to these numbers)
bormikstel5 wrote:I have a fairly sizeable Hyper-V test environment with several (ageing) Dell servers that currently use local storage. A colleague is in favour of using something like Starwind vSAN. I'd like to only have a couple disks in RAID1 for the OS on the hosts and use a NAS instead.
While budget is a factor, a NAS from Qnap can be had for a reasonable price and you get the benefit of hardware debupe. Are there any good arguments in favour of the vSAN approach apart from maybe cost? Any recommendations from people who have been in the same situation would be appreciated.
