Education Resource Strategies ensures continuous access to critical analytical tools by creating a highly available infrastructure with StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN)

CHALLENGE

Before deploying StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN), Education Resource Strategies operated a non-clustered Hyper-V environment with storage distributed across separate nodes using file replication. This architecture introduced critical single points of failure in both compute and storage layers. In the event of a node failure, neither system could deliver seamless failover, resulting in service disruption and limited operational resilience. The lack of true high availability constrained maintenance windows and increased risk during updates.

Budget limitations as a non-profit organization ruled out traditional SAN or enterprise HCI solutions, leaving no straightforward path to achieve redundancy and fault tolerance.

As a non-profit with a limited budget, StarWind provided great value in allowing us to create a high-availability virtual SAN using our choice of commodity hardware.

Arthur Musaelian, Company Representative

SOLUTION

Education Resource Strategies chose StarWind VSAN to transform its infrastructure into a highly available, software-defined storage platform built on commodity hardware. StarWind enabled synchronous replication between nodes and tight integration with Hyper-V, eliminating single points of failure and ensuring continuous service availability. The new architecture delivers resilient, scalable shared storage with seamless failover and improved uptime. It also allows non-disruptive updates during business hours.

The solution met all technical and financial requirements, and the organization plans to scale further by adding nodes as demand grows.