This week StarWind Software announced that they were named as a finalist in the “Storage Software Product of the Year” category at the 2012 Storage, Virtualization, and Cloud Computing (SVC) Awards. These highly prestigious awards recognize the products, projects, and services as well as honor companies and teams operating in the cloud, virtualization, and storage fields.

StarWind was nominated for its highly available storage software, StarWind iSCSI SAN & NAS, which Sander reviewed last month.

“We’re pleased and honored to be selected as a finalist in the 2012 Storage, Virtualization, and Cloud Computing Awards,” said Artem Berman, Chief Executive Officer of StarWind Software. “We strive to deliver a high performance, reliable, and cost-effective storage solution that guarantees ultimate data protection, which is why this reward is a testament to StarWind’s achievements and commitment to innovation in the storage software field.”

The winners of the SCV Awards 2012 will be announced on November 22, 2012 at the Pullman St. Pancras (previously Novotel) in London.

Take a second to check out all of the categories and nominations and take your time to vote.

For some time now StarWind software is working on a new release of their iSCSI SAN which will be version 6. Currently the software is in it’s beta phase, but StarWind released some release notes containing some new features and improvements.

First of is the change made to High Availability (HA) clusters. In the current release you can create a HA cluster containing two nodes. With the release of version 6 you will be able to create three node HA clusters.

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Thursday 12th there was a press release by StarWind stating “StarWind completely eliminates the need for shared storage when implementing Windows Server 2012 Scale-out file servers”. At first, while reading the title, I was a bit confused. Starwind itself offers shared storage solutions with it’s software. But after reading the article, it´s clear that the intention is to eliminate the implementation of hardware-based storage solutions.

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Starwind is an innovative company and one of the first to offer an iSCSI initiator on the Microsoft Windows platform without a lot of hassle. The company offers Not For Resale (NFR) licenses to some specific groups of IT professionals.

If you hold or are one of the following:

• VMware vExpert
• VMware Certified Instructor (VCI)
• Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP)
• Microsoft Certified Trainer (MCT)
• Citrix Technology Professional (CTP)
• Citrix Certified Instructor (CCI).

you can get a free NFR license for its best-of-breed High Availability SAN solutions software to fuel your Lab. What do you need to do?

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Yesterday shortly after we posted the review about the StarWind iSCSI SAN software there was a press release by Starwind. The press release announced that they had passed the VMware Certification Program for VMware ESX 4.1 server. The press release can be found here.

In short this means that the Starwind iSCSI SAN software has passed the test labs from VMware and will now be included in the VMware compatibility guide.

Recently Starwind contacted us and asked if we would be interested in doing a review on their iSCSI SAN software solution. The enthusiasts that we are, we quickly replied that we would take the challenge. After some e-mails back and forth and setting up a small test lab we where ready to go.

So what is the Starwind iSCSI SAN solution? The solution enables you to change a Windows server into a iSCSI SAN. With this solution Starwind is mainly aiming for SMB organizations. As far that I could see the Starwind solution offers the same (basic) functionality as you would expect from the hardware counterparts.

Some of the key features mentioned by Starwind are:

• Synchronous Data Replication: Real-time data replication across a 2 node storage cluster.
• High Availability / Automatic Failover: Fault tolerant active-active technology eliminates a single point of failure.
• Remote Replication across a WAN: replicates data to a remote location allowing multi-site disaster recovery in the event of a disaster at the primary site.
• CDP & Snapshots: captures instant, point-in-time volume images, allowing a user to rollback and recover an entire volume or individual files and folders.
• High Speed Caching: accelerates storage I/O by using the server’s memory.
• Server clustering: supports Windows Server 2008, Hyper-V, VMware ESX and vSphere 4.0 and other applications.
• Central Management Console / User Interface: allows IT professionals to easily manage all storage from a central management console built on the same tree structure used in Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware vSphere.

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