Search

Scott County Hospital ensures 24/7 operation of its Electronic Medical Record system by deploying a high-availability cluster with StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN)

April 07, 2026
Download as PDF
Ryan Kimbrel
Chief Information Officer. Has over 22 years of IT leadership experience, specializing in technological innovation, strategic leadership, and network security.
Chief Information Officer. Has over 22 years of IT leadership experience, specializing in technological innovation, strategic leadership, and network security.

CHALLENGE

Before StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN) deployment, Scott County Hospital ran its Electronic Medical Record (EMR) system on a legacy AIX/Unix platform with DAS. This design had no storage redundancy and limited virtualization flexibility. As the environment evolved to Microsoft Hyper-V, the organization still lacked shared, fault-tolerant storage for virtual machines (VMs). DAS could not provide high availability (HA), live workload mobility, or safe host maintenance. Any hardware issue or host downtime risked service interruption to critical clinical systems.

The hospital needed a resilient platform that could keep the Windows-based EMR and other VMs online during failures and maintenance, without the cost and complexity of traditional SAN infrastructure.

With StarWind VSAN, we can easily move VMs between Hyper-V hosts for maintenance. This gives us fault tolerance as well, where we didn’t have any. Support has been amazing!

Ryan Kimbrel, Chief Information Officer

SOLUTION

Scott County Hospital chose StarWind VSAN because it allowed creating an HA storage layer across two Windows Server 2019 Hyper-V hosts. By mirroring storage between nodes, StarWind delivered fault tolerance and continuous VM availability. The IT team can live migrate VMs between hosts for patching or hardware work, while the EMR system remains online. The cluster has already sustained host updates and a hardware failure without disrupting clinical services.

Management is straightforward, and the StarWind Support Team provided configuration reviews, tuning guidance, and recovery assistance. The hospital plans to extend StarWind to new hosts and clusters, using the same architecture to protect additional systems.

About the Company
Scott County Hospital is a critical access hospital that serves the local healthcare needs of Scott County, Kansas, while promoting community growth and fostering a positive lifestyle in the area.
Region
NA (North America)
Country
United States
Industry
Healthcare
Product
StarWind Virtual SAN
Inspired by Ryan Kimbrel’s success? Want to improve business continuity for your business-critical apps and services?
Dmytro Malynka StarWind Virtual SAN Product Manager
We’ve got you covered! StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN) is specifically designed to provide highly-available shared storage for Hyper-V, vSphere, and KVM clusters. With StarWind VSAN, simplicity is key: utilize the local disks of your hypervisor hosts and create shared HA storage for your VMs. Interested in learning more? Book a short StarWind VSAN demo now and see it in action!