Is StarWind right for me?

[warock56]

Hello, I am new to the community, I am a very experienced with computers, but I am also very new to the server world, so bear with me as I try to explain myself as best as I can.

I am part of a small business, we deal with property preservation work and take thousands of photos every day. I have all of these photos to sync automatically with a program called dropbox and they download on all computers in the office, so since there are around 7 computers in the office, that means that a single photo must be downloaded 7 times, and this is not what bothers me, but the fact that when I remove old photos from dropbox so it does not fill up (we have 200GB of storage), lets say I remove 10,000 photos, those 10,000 photos have to sync on all of the computers again, very tedious.

Instead of doing this, I want to set up a pair of servers and just link all of the office computers to the server. A pair of servers for the reason that if one goes down, I want the other one to take over, then I can take the server that is down out of the rack, find out what's wrong, fix it, plug it back in and nobody in the office will have noticed it, and the files were always available!

After much... much searching online, it seems the only way to do this is to connect both of those servers to either an expensive SAN or... an expensive SAS JBOD, and what got me thinking was, that if I put a SAN or a JBOD, I would be adding a single point of failure to the system, along with a lot more cost, neither of which I want.

Then I came across StarWind late last night around 3:00AM, so I did not read much about it. Today, I have kept on reading and while not 100% sure it looks like this software could do what I need. The native SAN for Hyper-V program seems like it will do just what I want to do, and it seems the support in this forum is phenomenal.


I plan on building my own two servers with dual 1366 x5650 cpus to stay within the $1000 limit I have per server (used/new parts), and mount them in 4U cases so if basic parts fail finding a replacement wont be hard, and the servers will also go inside our small office so I can not have loud 1U case fans, instead bigger 120mm fans.


So, my main question is, will your software work for what I want? two local servers that continuously have the same data and if one fails the other takes over?

Thanks in advance! I will keep on reading...

[anton (staff)]

Yes, absolutely! You can use StarWind to create a fault-tolerant gateway for your DAS, SAN or NAS. It's not primary scenario (we prefer to feed shared VM storage to hypervisors) but doable. Everything however depends on $$$ so I would suggest you to check this with sales.

[707kevin]

I am a fan of starwind and currently run about 30TB of VMs on a 3 node setup. It's wonderful. The performance is amazing. But I have to wonder if this is the correct solution to you're problem.

If you are using a windows domain, I would set up the two servers using domain based DFS. You will be able to have the shared files replicated between the two servers and the users would simply access them from a single SMB path. If one goes down, the files are still available via that path. All using built in windows server features.

If I was to use starwind for a file server, I would set up a THIRD server to act as the file server front end (smb shares on this server) , with the two starwind nodes purely as the storage SAN for the fileserver connected via iscsi. I believe that the SAN nodes should be completely 'hands off' - no other services or desktop activity should happen on these.

[Anatoly (staff)]

I am a fan of starwind and currently run about 30TB of VMs on a 3 node setup. It's wonderful. The performance is amazing. But I have to wonder if this is the correct solution to you're problem.

If you are using a windows domain, I would set up the two servers using domain based DFS. You will be able to have the shared files replicated between the two servers and the users would simply access them from a single SMB path. If one goes down, the files are still available via that path. All using built in windows server features.

If I was to use starwind for a file server, I would set up a THIRD server to act as the file server front end (smb shares on this server) , with the two starwind nodes purely as the storage SAN for the fileserver connected via iscsi. I believe that the SAN nodes should be completely 'hands off' - no other services or desktop activity should happen on these.

Thank you for a wonderful feedback - we really appreciate it and from now on I owe you a beer

As about your recommendation - they are pretty good, but could be implementable only if we will be sure that this is what customer actually need.