Ciena Healthcare saves over $80,000 in upfront costs immediately by deploying a flexible and highly available storage cluster with StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN)

CHALLENGE

Before deploying StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN), Ciena Healthcare was running its IT infrastructure on IBM storage systems paired with VMware virtualization. While the setup worked, it had several downsides. The main issues were vendor lock-in on disks and licensing, as well as limited scalability.

As the organization’s needs grew, it became clear that the existing setup couldn’t be expanded easily or cost-effectively. Alternative solutions like VMware vSAN were reviewed, but the licensing costs were too high. A TrueNAS solution was also considered but wasn’t mature enough at the time to be a reliable option in production. Ciena Healthcare needed a more flexible, scalable solution that wouldn’t come with unnecessary complexity or high costs.

StarWind provided a better cost-effective solution that was highly flexible in its deployment and easy to set up and maintain.

Raymond Van Valkenburg, IT Systems Engineer

SOLUTION

Ciena Healthcare selected StarWind VSAN for its simplicity, speed, and deployment flexibility. During proof-of-concept testing, StarWind outperformed competitors by being exceptionally easy to set up and maintain. It allowed the organization to build a highly available (HA) storage cluster using existing resources without being tied to specific hardware or licenses.

The new setup met all the necessary performance and reliability requirements while staying easy to maintain. Switching to StarWind also brought signifi- cant cost savings – over $80,000 upfront compared to VMware vSAN. The infrastructure now runs smoothly and is much easier to scale as needed.