StarWind removed the need for VMware admin skills, worked better than Storage Spaces Direct, and gave us the high availability features we needed.
Kurt Wiedenhoeft, Director of IT
PROBLEM
One of the main focuses of the company’s activity is providing patients with access to American Care‘s medical services information systems. The company has an in-house electronic medical record (EMR) system that is hosted locally at its corporate data center. That is why having an IT infrastructure running like clockwork is the main priority of American Care, Inc. Before StarWind Virtual SAN VSAN) deployment, the company had a mixed VMware/Windows IT environment with one backup and two primary hosts that did not allow for fault tolerance (FT) and high availability (HA). At the same time, having a failover Hyper-V cluster is mission-critical for ensuring patient data privacy and safety, HIPAA-compliant Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), and telemedicine services. To accomplish this and remove the complexities of VMware administration, American Care, Inc. wanted to standardize its IT infrastructure on Windows Server. After analyzing all aspects of the problem, the company came to the conclusion that the hyperconverged architecture in general and the virtual SAN solution, in particular, would help solve this issue. To this end, they tested a Microsoft solution utilizing Storage Spaces Direct (S2D) but were not satisfied with the performance and configuration requirements.
SOLUTION
StarWind VSAN has become a major component of the hyperconverged architecture and has enabled the company to create a highly available and fault-tolerant Hyper-V cluster. American Care, Inc. has chosen the StarWind solution because of its great performance, simple configuration, and ease of maintenance. The issue of a mixed VMware/Windows environment was resolved because StarWind allowed the company to replace the existing VMware infrastructure with two hyperconverged Windows servers. The complexity of VMware administration has also been leveled out as VSAN simply integrates into existing IT infrastructure and runs on Hyper-V and Windows as a native application. American Care, Inc. no longer worries about its EMR system as HA is constantly maintained ensuring the safety of critical medical data at all times. By creating a hyperconverged cluster with StarWind, the company saved more than $20K without regard to cost savings associated with administration. Once the cluster was configured, everything worked flawlessly. With that in mind, American Care, Inc. plans to use StarWind solutions in future projects.
About the Company
American Care, Inc. is a state-wide healthcare provider serving Medicare and Medicaid patients in Florida’s major metropolitan areas.
Company Profile
Healthcare
Contact Person
Kurt Wiedenhoeft,
Director of IT