StarWind’s solution was super simple to set up and the performance is excellent.
Scott Hagadorn, Director of Information Technology,
Chapel Hill Presbyterian Church
PROBLEM
The IT infrastructure for the church supports all event scheduling and membership information as well as the email system, bulk email, and resource scheduling. Scott has put in place a VMware environment with 5 servers, 3 of which are virtual. In planning for the future, he knew that in order to fully take advantage of his VMware installation and provide disaster recovery capabilities, he needed a reliable shared storage solution. Additionally, he was out of storage on his existing Direct Attached Storage (DAS) and did not believe it made sense to add more. Faced with severe budget cuts, he needed a solution that would be affordable, work immediately, expand in the future, and be compatible within the current infrastructure. He tried a Buffalo NAS device and some open source solutions, but none panned out.
SOLUTION
StarWind Virtual SAN solution allowed Scott to repurpose a three year old HP server as shared storage and keep him within his budget. Since he could try before buying, he was also able to ensure that he wouldn’t waste time and money on solutions that might not work in production. He found StarWind “super simple to set up and the performance is excellent.” Chapel Hill Presbyterian gained enterprise-class VMware SAN features including performance, reliability, scalability and speed with near-zero downtime and seamless server upgrades and migrations. The solution allows Chapel Hill Church to ensure continuous, mission-critical data protection between the two servers using synchronous data Mirroring, which eliminates a single point of failure and reduces downtime, and live Snapshots to capture a consistent state of the data stored on the SAN at any point-in-time to instantly recover and roll back data. There was no requirement to purchase any proprietary servers, storage or networking equipment. The solution was simple, expandable and reliable and gives the church enterprise-class VMware SAN features at an affordable cost. Scott has improved his process for upgrading new machines and applications using virtualization to save time and if a server goes down, simply does a manual failover though StarWind to a second ESX box.
LOOKING TO THE FUTURE
As Scott looks forward, he is already planning on building another server and utilizing the StarWind Virtual SAN and will take his exchange data offsite for Disaster Recovery.
About the Company
Chapel Hill Presbyterian is a very active and thriving church located in Gig Harbor, Washington with 75 staff members and approximately 3000 people in the congregation. The church runs a number of activities ranging from regular weekly programs for all age groups to retreats and special events. The facilities themselves need to be managed as well as all the information regarding member accounts, donations, and scheduling.
www.chapelhillpc.org
Industry
Religious Institution
Contact Person
Scott Hagadorn, Director of Information Technology for the church, knows better than anyone that, as with any other organization, keeping the church’s data safe and accessible is crucial to its success and smooth operations.
Environment
VMware servers Keep Membership data safe Schedule people and resources Email system with bulk mail capabilities.
Business Benefits
Meeting current storage needs Providing Business Continuity and Expanding Disaster Recovery