Disability Rights Texas ensures uninterrupted access to critical systems by building a hyperconverged storage platform with StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN)

CHALLENGE

Before deploying StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN), Disability Rights Texas relied primarily on cloud-hosted production workloads but maintained an on-premises Hyper-V cluster as a disaster recovery platform. The existing shared storage infrastructure was based on a traditional SAN solution that came with a high licensing and maintenance cost.

Attempts to replace the SAN with Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct (S2D) proved impractical, as the solution offered limited monitoring capabilities. The organization needed a more cost-effective alternative without sacrificing high availability (HA).

StarWind’s software runs on two Hyper-V hosts in a hyperconverged setup. This saves us money and space since we no longer need to maintain separate servers for the SANs.

Carlton Whitmore, IT Manager

SOLUTION

Disability Rights Texas deployed StarWind VSAN in a hyperconverged configuration across two Hyper-V hosts, eliminating the need for dedicated SAN hardware while preserving HA storage for clustered workloads. By leveraging StarWind s synchronous replication, the organization maintained its existing disaster recovery architecture while significantly reducing infrastructure costs.

The new setup lowered hardware footprint, simplified management, and improved space efficiency by consolidating compute and storage resources on the same hosts. The resulting infrastructure fully meets current requirements and provides a scalable foundation that can support a future transition of additional production workloads back on-premises.