StarWind Software approached Sallie about writing a review about their products and guess who got to play around with it instead? Yep, me, the guy known as Ur-Guru. Why? Oh, because I happen to have some servers sitting around that would make a good SAN. Before I continue I have to say that even though my home office comes close to what you might find in a small enterprise or rack server I have very little need for a SAN (Storage Area Network), because every single system is already loaded up with many terabytes of fast RAID storage. A SAN, regardless of the size, speed, and cost, would always be slower than the local storage of each system.

However, if I wanted to centralize the storage for the systems in the network, whereby the systems themselves were smaller, less top-heavy computers, I would certainly be looking at something like StarWind Server or StarWind Enterprise Server (probably the latter because I like the replication features). Also, if I were to overhaul the way my virtual machines are managed and stored throughout my network, and if I wanted to create a single cluster of systems to run that, StarWind would certainly get an even closer look.

So what is StarWind Server, you might ask. If you’ve familiarized yourself with the concept of a SAN, the short version of the story is that StarWind Server is a software product that turns a Windows 2003 or Windows 2008 server into a fully capable iSCSI SAN system.

Read the rest of this story over at Sallie’s blog.