StarWind Software, Inc. is a privately held

Beverly, Massachusetts Beverly is a city in Essex County, Massachusetts, and a suburb of Boston. The population was 42,670 at the time of the 2020 United States Census. A resort, residential, and manufacturing community on the Massachusetts North Shore, Beverly incl ...

-based computer software and hardware appliance company specializing in storage virtualization and software-defined storage.

History

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. 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. In 2013, hard drive manufacturer Western Digital began integrating StarWind's iSCSI engine with some of the company's Network Attached Storage (NAS) appliances. In mid-April 2014, StarWind Software closed a round B of investment from Almaz Capital and AVentures Capital. In August 2015, StarWind announced a combined software-hardware product called HyperConverged Appliance. In April 2016, StarWind was selected by research firm Gartner as one of its 2016 "Cool Vendors for Compute Platforms". In February 2020, StarWind's Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) software StarWind VSAN set performance benchmarks for off the shelf commodity hardware. In December, StarWind was named to Gartner's Magic Quadrant for HCI software. In March 2022, the Wall Street Journal reported how the

2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine On 24 February 2022, in a major escalation of the Russo-Ukrainian War, which began in 2014. The invasion has resulted in tens of thousands of deaths on both sides. It has caused Europe's largest refugee crisis since World War II. An ...

was affecting technology firms with a significant presence in Ukraine, including StarWind. 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. The company also reportedly doubled the salaries of employees who enlisted in the Ukrainian army.

Products

StarWind develops standards-based storage virtualization and management software that will run on any x86 platform. Its software defined storage software supports building iSCSI,

iSER Iser or ISER may refer to: * iSCSI Extensions for RDMA, a computer network storage protocol * Institute for Social and Economic Research">Jizera (river) * Institute for Social and Economic Research, an institute at the University of Essex People ...

, NVM Express over Fabrics (

NVMe-oF NVM Express (NVMe) or Non-Volatile Memory Host Controller Interface Specification (NVMHCIS) is an open, logical-device interface specification for accessing a computer's non-volatile storage media usually attached via PCI Express (PCIe) bus. The ...

), and NFSv3/v4 and SMB3 NAS using commodity hardware. 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. Open source NVMe SPDK for Windows Server is used to support the NVMe-oF uplink protocol, together with iSCSI and iSER. * Free NAS & SAN - software for converting commodity servers into iSCSI and NFS/SMB3 targets. *V2V Converter - a free converter allowing back and forth conversion of virtual storage files between VMware's open format

Virtual Machine Disk VMDK (short for Virtual Machine Disk) is a file format that describes containers for virtual hard disk drives to be used in virtual machines like VMware Workstation or VirtualBox. Initially developed by VMware for its proprietary virtual applian ...

(VMDK) and

Virtual Hard Disk VHD (Virtual Hard Disk) and its successor VHDX are file formats representing a virtual hard disk drive (HDD). They may contain what is found on a physical HDD, such as disk partitions and a file system, which in turn can contain files and f ...

(VHD), the format for Microsoft's hypervisor ( virtual machine system), Hyper-V. *P2V Migrator - a free tool for converting physical servers to various virtual machine formats. *StarWind VTL - a virtual tape library that can be used to replace tape drives with less expensive

Serial ATA SATA (Serial AT Attachment) is a computer bus interface that connects host bus adapters to mass storage devices such as hard disk drives, optical drives, and solid-state drives. Serial ATA succeeded the earlier Parallel ATA (PATA) standard t ...

(SATA) drives, and offloading storage to public cloud, for long term storage. *StarWind iSCSI Accelerator – a driver that improves CPU utilization with multi-core CPUs, when used with Microsoft iSCSCI Initiator. *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.

Operations

StarWind is headquartered in Beverly, Massachusetts.

References

External links

*{{official website, http://www.starwindsoftware.com/ Software companies based in Massachusetts Software companies established in 2008 American companies established in 2008 2008 establishments in the United States 2008 establishments in Massachusetts Companies based in Essex County, Massachusetts Beverly, Massachusetts Privately held companies based in Massachusetts Software companies of the United States