Baker Tilly ensures continuous availability of business critical applications by building a software-defined HCI platform with StarWind HCI Appliance (HCA)

CHALLENGE

Before deploying StarWind HCI Appliance (HCA), Baker Tilly relied on a Cisco HyperFlex and VMwarebased HCI infrastructure that had become increasingly expensive to maintain as VMware licensing costs continued to rise. At the same time, the underlying hardware reached end of life, requiring a platform refresh. Replacing the existing environment with a similar solution would have meant investing in new proprietary hardware while remaining tied to costly licensing and vendor-specific technologies.

The organization needed a cost-effective alternative that would preserve high availability (HA), simplify infrastructure management, and provide greater flexibility without compromising performance.

StarWind allowed us to move away from a tightly coupled, hardwaredependent HCI platform to a flexible, software-defined architecture. Overall, the resulting infrastructure fully satisfies our operational and business requirements.

Company Representative

SOLUTION

Baker Tilly deployed StarWind HCI Appliance running Hyper-V with StarWind VSAN to replace its aging Cisco HyperFlex environment. By leveraging softwaredefined shared storage on commodity hardware, the company eliminated VMware licensing overhead and avoided proprietary hardware dependencies while maintaining an HA infrastructure for its virtualized workloads.

The new platform simplified management, reduced both capital and ongoing operational costs, and decoupled compute and storage decisions, enabling independent hardware refreshes and future expansion. As a result, Baker Tilly gained a resilient, scalable, and vendor-independent HCI platform that fully meets its operational and business requirements.