Businesses today are achieving new levels of success by integrating technological solutions into various operations. The possibility of optimization is now only limited by the imagination. There are numerous technological solutions emerging from around the world to effectively deal with dynamic business challenges and needs.
However, while adopting various technological solutions, an organization must plan its IT infrastructure mindfully so that its operations become simple, flexible, minimal, and efficient. Modern companies are prominently shifting towards storage virtualization and hyper-convergence appliances to optimize their operations and minimize hardware requirements.
One such company that is a pioneer and a real innovator in developing and integrating IT infrastructure production optimization solutions years before virtualization hit the mainstream market is StarWind Inc.
StarWind is a one-stop virtualization shop for all the “building blocks” required to construct a full-stack data center infrastructure. The company is most certain that the way it combines scalability with simplicity allows its customers to build and scale their environments according to their needs and not according to a limited set of options they’re typically offered.
We had an opportunity to interview Artem Berman, the COO of StarWind, where he discussed the journey of the company in creating exciting IT infrastructure solutions provided by the company.
The following are the insights from the interview:
Please brief our audience about your company, its USPs, and how it is currently positioned as a trusted IT infrastructure management company.
StarWind is a pioneer of hyperconvergence and storage virtualization and the single all-flash-only hyperconvergence vendor on the market. We provide a unique blend of simplicity, performance, and affordability, yet with the ultimate in flexibility. Our focus is to help companies create sustainable and effective IT infrastructures with minimum effort.
Shed some light on your offerings and how they impact the IT industry and your clients?
StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN) is a software that eliminates any need for physical shared storage by simply “mirroring” internal hard discs and flash between hypervisor servers. It’s compatible with the hypervisor of your choice, be it Microsoft Hyper-V, VMware vSphere/ESXi, Linux KVM, or Xen. StarWind VSAN is tailored for Enterprise remote offices and branch offices (ROBO), small and medium businesses (SMB), and Edge: true two-node scenario, transparent licensing, and next-gen proactive.
The StarWind Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) Appliance is a true-turnkey hyperconverged platform that combines network, storage, compute, and software into a small 2-node footprint. It evidently decreases IT infrastructure TCO, increases ROI, and allows users to experience maximum performance and flawless resiliency with a single HCI solution that has it all. The StarWind HCI Appliance will be the perfect fit for organizations looking to ensure ultimate performance for their mission-critical applications without spending a fortune on hardware and IT staff.
What are the core values upon which your company is built?
Completely customer-focused: Our products aim to ensure business continuity for our customers, as we do all the work for them. Our software is hardware-agnostic. We customize the solution, migrate the customer’s existing infrastructure, and configure the new one to be fire-and-forget.
We’re passionate about technology and its progress as the amount of data and the modern world evolve. In our products, we use the very best NVMe protocols and all-flash-only configurations. Ransomware resiliency (data protection) is our core focus, alongside immediate data recovery.
Being an experienced leader, share your opinion on how the adoption of modern technologies has impacted the IT industry and how is your company riding the technology wave?
Technology has integrated irrevocably deeply into the fabric of humanity, and by extension, into business, activity, and existence. The adoption of modern technologies, like AI, Big Data Analytics, Virtualization, Cloud, HCI, and others, fundamentally reshapes how businesses act: it has made the consumer experience and consumption of any services or goods unprecedented, and the consumer always wants more.
Therefore, new technologies that make services accessible and swiftly deliverable to consumers anytime and anywhere without any compromise to their personal data security or their satisfaction that cause companies to compete for the customers’ ever-growing levels of comfort. The trick is not to fall too deep and not to cause harm, to the consumer, to the employee, to the partner, or to the environment.
StarWind has always been a market disruptor. We don’t believe in canons. We believe in the journey. So we take the newest in IT infrastructure technology – which is usually priced and catered to the elite – and look for ways to make it affordable and useful for everyone, if that’s something that really makes the life of a business better: fewer footprints, fewer disasters, fewer expenses, more efficiency, more simplicity, more use out of less, but without harm to anyone or anything along the process of developing, selling, using, and supporting the solution.
What would be your advice to budding entrepreneurs who aspire to venture into the IT sector?
Have a vision. Go for something that inspires you, and makes you excited and joyful. But make that something that has a purpose and that introduces a positive change to the table, on any scale.
There is a lot of gatekeeping and “standards” in business that can discourage you or make profit seem like the only goal for starting a business. These things don’t matter in the age of the Internet. If there is a strong vision, if it brings value, positive change, purpose, and tries to offset any harm along the entire chain of delivery, whatever it is and at whichever scale, you can make it happen in the modern world.
How do you envision scaling your organization’s operations and offerings in 2022 and beyond?
After going all-flash-only on our hardware appliance solutions (a decision frowned upon by some competitors and customers alike, yet a decision that worked out well after its implementation), we are taking it to the next level in terms of designing all-NVMe configurations as the next-step alternative.
This is only natural as StarWind is the author and owner of the only certified NVMe-oF Initiator for Windows on the market. StarWind also uses novel NVME-oF RAID partner technology in some of its solutions already and will continue weaving it into other configurations as well.
Flash took quite a long time (due to technology and price) to become the desired norm after HDDs. NVMe will take its place way sooner, so we are already laying the groundwork for customers to have an affordable, effective, and smooth transition to all-NVMe. It will become the standard for raw storage for modern business IT needs in the near future. To that end, we are constantly evolving our StarWind Virtual SAN to ensure the most relevant, tailored performance, data security, and omni-compatibility features.
For post-pandemic, we are opening new offices (the most recent one, in Poland), hiring new talent, and exploring new industry niches where businesses tend to neglect their IT for financial reasons and where StarWind storage virtualization, hyperconvergence, and unparalleled proactive support can bring good. The issues of sustainability and minimalism already transgress into the IT infrastructure market, and StarWind is well positioned to address them.
To Be Designed Separately
The Prime Movers
Artem Berman and Anton Kolomeytsev took up the development of software for data virtualization when such a term had not even been invented. They basically invented the wheel.
How did they come up with this groundbreaking idea? The life of Berman, an alumnus of the Institute of Market Economy, Social Politics and Law in Kherson, Ukraine, was tough at the end of the 1990s. Berman was partially paralyzed in an accident in 1992 when he dived into the Dniper River and broke his neck. Artem had a computer back then, so he started programming and put a lot of effort into his hobby.
For over six years, Berman wrote code for an American software vendor in healthcare. Later, he switched to project coordination. In 2002, he became the head of the CIS division of another American IT company, Pocket Technologies. There, he got acquainted with Anton Kolomeytsev. Anton, who by that time had graduated from Kyiv Polytechnic Institute and worked in the USA in the area of information security, was coding as a freelancer.
In 2003, Berman and Kolomeytsev established Rocket Division Software; a company focused on outsourcing all kinds of IT services. The Rocket Division collaborated with IBM’s partner on the deployment of physical SAN in their environment. Artem and Anton analyzed the problems their customers faced and came up with solutions to effectively address them.
As a result, after a spin-off from Rocket Division in 2008, Artem and Anton founded StarWind Software, which was focused on hyperconvergence and storage virtualization as a whole.
Awards and Recognitions
- Customers’ Choice 2022 in Gartner® Peer Insights “Voice of the Customer”: Hyperconverged Infrastructure Software
- Trust Radius Top Rated 2022 in Software-Defined Storage for StarWind VSAN
- Trust Radius Top Rated 2022 in Software-Defined Storage for StarWind HCI Appliance
Client testimonials for StarWind HCI Appliance:
- “The StarWind array has greatly improved our workflow internally as it is quite easy to use and provides robust features that allow us to provide anything our clients need quickly and efficiently.” – myCRECloud
- “It did not hurt that the price for the hardware and three years of support cost less than the disparate hardware the cluster used to run on.” – Winchester Utility System
- “The ease and cost of StarWind HCA deployment was a win-win situation for us streamlining our infrastructure deployment projects as well as being kind to our client’s pocketbooks” – Superior Support Resources
Client testimonials for StarWind VSAN:
- “StarWind provided a cost-effective High Availability solution that was highly flexible in its deployment and easy to set up and maintain. Saved us more than $80,000 in upfront costs.” – Ciena Healthcare
- “Easy to set up with great support and reasonable pricing. It has been extremely stable for the three years we’ve been running it.” – MBI
- “A great feature is that I basically set it and forget it, as everything is automatic.” – Daifuku America
