De La Salle Santiago Zobel School saves $50,000 in deployment costs by building a high-performance IT infrastructure with StarWind Virtual HCI Appliance (VHCI)

CHALLENGE

Before StarWind Virtual HCI Appliance (VHCI) deployment, De La Salle Santiago Zobel School’s IT infrastructure was built on a Nutanix AHV cluster. While reliable, it became increasingly difficult to justify the high costs associated with licensing and support. The solution also limited the school to specific hardware vendors, restricting flexibility in future upgrades. With a lean IT team, maintaining such a complex system required more time and resources than were available. The school needed a simpler, more cost-effective solution that could still deliver high availability and performance without locking them into proprietary hardware or expensive support plans.

With a lean IT team, we needed a storage solution that was simple to deploy and manage. StarWind VHCI delivered exactly that – streamlined management without the complexity of traditional SAN or large-scale HCI solutions.

F. Aromin, IT Director

SOLUTION

De La Salle Santiago Zobel School decided to transition to a Hyper-V cluster powered by StarWind VHCI. The choice was clear thanks to their existing Microsoft licensing and experience with Hyper-V. StarWind provided an easy-to-manage, cost-efficient platform that didn’t require dedicated SAN hardware or complex configurations. The deployment was fast and smooth, with excellent support from the StarWind team at every step. By adopting a 3-node StarWind cluster using commodity servers, the school saved around $50,000, achieving the same performance and reliability at nearly half the cost. The new setup now fully meets their operational needs and simplifies IT management.