Stem Systems ensures 24/7 operation of its client’s production environment by deploying a high-availability storage cluster with StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN)

CHALLENGE

Before deploying StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN), Stem Systems worked with an Irish cement production plant running a 7-year-old VMware cluster with 2 ESXi hosts and a Dell PowerVault SAN. The SAN had hardware faults and created a single point of failure. Fixing it required significant downtime, which was not acceptable in a 24/7 production environment. The infrastructure supported SCADA monitoring, temperature alarms, and other critical workloads. The customer also needed a clear migration path to Hyper-V without risking uptime.

Traditional approaches required complex redesign and high operational effort, which did not meet reliability and resource requirements.

StarWind has been in place for 18 months at the time of this report and has shown 100% uptime since its installation. StarWind is our first choice for any customers requiring highly available local server infrastructure.

Stephen McLoughlin, Founder

SOLUTION

Stem Systems chose StarWind VSAN for its client company to replace the physical SAN and create a highly available storage layer across two servers running Hyper-V. Storage was mirrored in real time, eliminating the single point of failure. The environment can operate fully on either host if needed. Live replication allows seamless VM migration for maintenance and patching with no downtime.

The StarWind solution runs with minimal supervision and delivers stable performance. Being in place for 18 months, the system powered by StarWind has consistently achieved 100% uptime. The customer also reduced costs by £35,000 over five years by removing SAN hardware, support, and monitoring overhead.