 | |
| Company type | Commercial |
|---|---|
| Industry | Computer software, Storage virtualization, Software-defined storage |
| Founded | 2008 |
| Headquarters | , |
Key people | Anton Kolomyeytsev (CEO) |
| Website | www |
StarWind Software, Inc. is a privately held Beverly, Massachusetts-based [1] computer software and hardware appliance company specializing in storage virtualization and software-defined storage.
StarWind Software began in 2008 as a spin-off from Rocket Division Software, Ltd. (founded in 2003)[ citation needed ], with a round A[ citation needed ] of investment from venture capital firm ABRT. [2] It started providing early adopters with initially free software defined storage offerings in 2009, including its V2V (virtual-to-virtual) image converter and iSCSI SAN software. [3] [4] [5] [6]
In 2013, hard drive manufacturer Western Digital began integrating StarWind's iSCSI engine with some of the company's Network Attached Storage (NAS) appliances. [7]
In April 2016, StarWind was selected by research firm Gartner as one of its 2016 "Cool Vendors for Compute Platforms". [8]
In February 2020, StarWind's Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) software StarWind VSAN set performance benchmarks for off the shelf commodity hardware. [9] In December, StarWind was named to Gartner's Magic Quadrant for HCI software. [1]
In March 2022, the Wall Street Journal reported how the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine was affecting technology firms with a significant presence in Ukraine, including StarWind. [10] Once the invasion was imminent, the company helped its employees move out of the country, including relocating 60 of the 180 workers from its Kyiv, Ukraine office to Wroclaw, Poland. [10] The company also reportedly doubled the salaries of employees who enlisted in the Ukrainian army. [10]
StarWind develops "standards-based storage virtualization and management software that will run on any x86 platform". [11] Its software defined storage software supports building iSCSI, [12] iSER, NVM Express over Fabrics (NVMe-oF), [13] and NFSv3/v4 and SMB3 NAS using commodity hardware.[ citation needed ]
Network-attached storage (NAS) is a file-level computer data storage server connected to a computer network providing data access to a heterogeneous group of clients. The term "NAS" can refer to both the technology and systems involved, or a specialized device built for such functionality.
Quantum Corporation is a data storage, management, and protection company that provides technology to store, manage, archive, and protect video and unstructured data throughout the data life cycle. Their products are used by enterprises, media and entertainment companies, government agencies, big data companies, and life science organizations. Quantum is headquartered in San Jose, California and has offices around the world, supporting customers globally in addition to working with a network of distributors, VARs, DMRs, OEMs and other suppliers.
NetApp, Inc. is an American data infrastructure company that provides unified data storage, integrated data services, and cloud operations (CloudOps) solutions to enterprise customers. The company is based in Cork City, Ireland. It has ranked in the Fortune 500 from 2012 to 2021. Founded in 1992 with an initial public offering in 1995, NetApp offers cloud data services for management of applications and data both online and physically.
A virtual storage area network is a logical representation of a physical storage area network (SAN). A VSAN abstracts the storage-related operations from the physical storage layer, and provides shared storage access to the applications and virtual machines by combining the servers' local storage over a network into a single or multiple storage pools.
TrueNAS is a family of network-attached storage (NAS) products produced by iXsystems, incorporating both FOSS, as well as commercial offerings. Based on the OpenZFS file system, TrueNAS runs on FreeBSD as well as Linux and is available under the BSD License It is compatible with x86-64 hardware and is also available as turnkey appliances from iXsystems.
A computer appliance is a computer system with a combination of hardware, software, or firmware that is specifically designed to provide a particular computing resource. Such devices became known as appliances because of the similarity in role or management to a home appliance, which are generally closed and sealed, and are not serviceable by the user or owner. The hardware and software are delivered as an integrated product and may even be pre-configured before delivery to a customer, to provide a turn-key solution for a particular application. Unlike general purpose computers, appliances are generally not designed to allow the customers to change the software and the underlying operating system, or to flexibly reconfigure the hardware.
oVirt is a free, open-source virtualization management platform. It was founded by Red Hat as a community project on which Red Hat Virtualization is based. It allows centralized management of virtual machines, compute, storage and networking resources, from an easy-to-use web-based front-end with platform independent access. KVM on x86-64, PowerPC64 and s390x architecture are the only hypervisors supported, but there is an ongoing effort to support ARM architecture in a future releases.
Sun Open Storage was an open source computer data storage platform developed by Sun Microsystems. Sun Open Storage was advertised as avoiding vendor lock-in.
A storage area network (SAN) or storage network is a computer network which provides access to consolidated, block-level data storage. SANs are primarily used to access data storage devices, such as disk arrays and tape libraries from servers so that the devices appear to the operating system as direct-attached storage. A SAN typically is a dedicated network of storage devices not accessible through the local area network (LAN).
iXsystems, Inc. is a privately owned American computer technology company based in San Jose, California that develops, sells and supports computing and storage products and services. Its principal products are customized open source FreeBSD distributions, including the discontinued desktop operating system TrueOS, the FreeBSD based file servers and network attached storage systems TrueNAS Core and TrueNAS Enterprise, and the Linux based TrueNAS SCALE. It also markets hardware platforms for these products, and develops enterprise-scale storage architectures and converged infrastructures. As part of its activities, the company has strong ties to the FreeBSD community, has repeatedly donated hardware and support to fledgling projects within the BSD community, and sponsors and develops development within FreeBSD, as well as being a sponsor and attendee of open-source community events.
A cloud storage gateway is a hybrid cloud storage device, implemented in hardware or software, which resides at the customer premises and translates cloud storage APIs such as SOAP or REST to block-based storage protocols such as iSCSI or Fibre Channel or file-based interfaces such as NFS or SMB.
StorSimple was a privately held company based in Santa Clara, California, marketing cloud storage. It was funded by venture capital from Index Ventures, Redpoint Ventures, Ignition Partners, and Mayfield Fund for a total of $31.5 million.
Dell Fluid File System, or FluidFS, is a shared-disk filesystem made by Dell that provides distributed file systems to clients. Customers buy an appliance: a combination of purpose-built network-attached storage (NAS) controllers with integrated primary and backup power supplies attached to block level storage via the iSCSI or Fiber Channel protocol. A single Dell FluidFS appliance consists of two controllers operating in concert connecting to the back-end storage area network (SAN). Depending on the storage capacity requirements and user preference, FluidFS version 4 NAS appliances can be used with Compellent or EqualLogic SAN arrays. The EqualLogic FS7600 and FS7610 connect to the client network and to Dell's EqualLogic arrays with either 1 Gbit/s (FS7600) or 10 Gbit/s (FS7610) iSCSI protocol. For Compellent, FluidFS is available with either 1 Gbit/s or 10 Gbit/s iSCSI connectivity to the client network and connection to the backend Compellent SAN can be either 8 Gbit/s Fibre Channel or 10 Gbit/s iSCSI.
VM-aware storage (VAS) is computer data storage designed specifically for managing storage for virtual machines (VMs) within a data center. The goal is to provide storage that is simpler to use with functionality better suited for VMs compared with general-purpose storage. VM-aware storage allows storage to be managed as an integrated part of managing VMs rather than as logical unit numbers (LUNs) or volumes that are separately configured and managed.
Software-defined storage (SDS) is a marketing term for computer data storage software for policy-based provisioning and management of data storage independent of the underlying hardware. Software-defined storage typically includes a form of storage virtualization to separate the storage hardware from the software that manages it. The software enabling a software-defined storage environment may also provide policy management for features such as data deduplication, replication, thin provisioning, snapshots and backup.
Zadara is a cloud computing company founded in 2011, with headquarters in Irvine, California. The company develops computer software that it markets as storage-as-a-service, which can be used for cloud or on-premises servers, a model sometimes called private cloud.
Nexenta by DDN, Inc., is a subsidiary of DataDirect Networks that sells computer data storage and backup software. It is headquartered in San Jose, California. Nexenta developed NexentaStor, NexentaCloud, NexentaFusion, and NexentaEdge. It was founded as Nexenta Systems, Inc., in 2005.
Dell Technologies PowerFlex, is a commercial software-defined storage product from Dell Technologies that creates a server-based storage area network (SAN) from local server storage using x86 servers. It converts this direct-attached storage into shared block storage that runs over an IP-based network.
Stratoscale was a software company offering software-defined data center technology, with hyper-converged infrastructure and cloud computing capabilities. Stratoscale combined compute, storage, and networking hardware with no additional third party software. Stratoscale has shut down with no details for the future of its products.
Hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) is a software-defined IT infrastructure that virtualizes all of the elements of conventional "hardware-defined" systems. HCI includes, at a minimum, virtualized computing, software-defined storage, and virtualized networking. HCI typically runs on commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) servers.