StarWind Software began in 2008 as a spin-off from Rocket Division Software, Ltd. (founded in 2003), with a round A of investment from venture capital firm ABRT.[2][3] It started providing early adopters with initially free software defined storage offerings in 2009, including its V2V (virtual-to-virtual) image converter and
iSCSISAN software.[4][5][6][7]
In mid-April 2014, StarWind Software closed a round B of investment from Almaz Capital and AVentures Capital.[9]
In August 2015, StarWind announced a combined software-hardware product called HyperConverged Appliance.[10]
In April 2016, StarWind was selected by research firm
Gartner as one of its 2016 "Cool Vendors for Compute Platforms".[11]
In February 2020, StarWind's
Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) software StarWind VSAN set performance benchmarks for off the shelf commodity hardware.[12] 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.[13] 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.[13] The company also reportedly doubled the salaries of employees who enlisted in the Ukrainian army.[13]
Products
StarWind develops standards-based storage virtualization and management software that will run on any x86 platform.[14] Its software defined storage software supports building
iSCSI,[15]iSER, NVM Express over Fabrics (
NVMe-oF),[16] and
NFSv3/v4 and
SMB3NAS using commodity hardware.[17]
Its products include:
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance - the company's HyperConverged Appliance bundles StarWind's VSAN software with third party server and storage hardware, along with storage management software and hypervisors such as from VMware or Hyper-V.
Virtual SAN (VSAN) software - HCI software which allows customers to set up and operate a storage area network supporting clustering and multi-host access on any standard 64-bit or 32-bit Windows server. The software acts as the storage back end for virtualized servers such as VMware vSphere server and Microsoft Hyper-V, and also supports standard server applications requiring network storage, such as Microsoft Exchange or SQL Server.[15] Open source NVMe SPDK for Windows Server is used to support the NVMe-oF uplink protocol, together with iSCSI and iSER.[18]
Free NAS & SAN - software for converting commodity servers into iSCSI and NFS/SMB3 targets.[19][20]
P2V Migrator - a free tool for converting physical servers to various virtual machine formats.[21]
StarWind VTL - a
virtual tape library that can be used to replace tape drives with less expensive
Serial ATA (SATA) drives, and offloading storage to public cloud, for long term storage.[22]
StarWind iSCSI Accelerator – a driver that improves CPU utilization with multi-core CPUs, when used with Microsoft iSCSCI Initiator.[23]
StarWind NVMe-oF Initiator – Windows software used to initiate the
NVM Express open logical-device specification. It maps the NVMe driver over an RDMA or TCP network to make remote NVMe drives appear to be attached to a physical server.[18]