StarWind Software Inc., leading provider of software defined storage used by over 30,000 customers worldwide, has today made available for download the latest Release Candidate (RC) of StarWind V8. The RC offers three products that share a common engine: StarWind SAN (formerly StarWind iSCSI SAN&NAS), StarWind VSAN (formerly Native SAN) and StarWind VSA. The new StarWind V8 builds on best practice and long experience in delivering SAN software, and offers an advanced fault-tolerant and high-performance shared storage solution that is affordable and cuts set up costs. General availability is expected in Q2 2014.

StarWind SAN, the flagship product, runs on commodity servers’ hardware and converts them into high-performance, fault-tolerant SAN at a fraction of the cost and complexity associated with traditional SAN-based storage infrastructures. With its integrated VSA builder and scale-out architecture, StarWind SAN became the first solution running on Windows that creates clusters of multiple hypervisor hosts without separate physical shared storage (unlike SAS (JBOD), FC or iSCSI). With this release, StarWind supports the latest versions of both VMware and Microsoft platforms.

StarWind virtual SAN (VSAN) is a leading software defined storage for Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2 and Microsoft Hyper-V 3.0. The functionality and architecture of this software is similar to VMware VSAN. It runs inside parent partitions of hypervisor hosts and turns their directly attached storage (DAS) into fault-tolerant SAN. StarWind VSA follows the VMware VSA concept also, and operates inside a VM on the ESXi host, creating a fault-tolerant shared storage of the hypervisor resources.

StarWind V8 RC presents high-performance caching that allows affordable MLC SSDs to be used as level-2 flash cache and fast RAM to be used as level-1 cache. StarWind utilizes solid-state disks / flash cards as the primary storage with a dedicated flash-aware Log-Structured File System (LSFS).

Another major advantage over multiple virtual storage solutions is built-in asynchronous WAN-replication, which ensures effective disaster recovery. StarWind’s support of WAN-acceleration technologies also enables data replication over slow and cheap connections.

StarWind V8 RC includes a set of powerful experimental features including: LSFS, which eliminates the I/O blender effect; synchronous replication for clustered LSFS devices; and in-memory operation, which creates a HA cluster with one node running on RAM-disk.

“The storage market is developing rapidly and it’s very important for us to stay up-to-date to meet ever-changing business needs in storage and performance,” said Anton Kolomyeytsev, CTO and Chief Architect of StarWind Software, Inc. “With the release of StarWind V8, we are offering proven and efficient scale-out storage solutions that overcome the latest IT challenges.”

Sign up for our public beta-testing program and try new features of StarWind V8 RC, the true software defined storage today!