Ohio Dominican University ensures uninterrupted access to academic systems by deploying a high-availability cluster with StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN)

CHALLENGE

Before deploying StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN), Ohio Dominican University relied on three IBM DS3400 SANs connected via Fibre Channel. The setup consumed an entire rack of space, making it inefficient and difficult to manage. Maintenance and upgrade costs were high, and the system lacked the flexibility needed to adapt to the university’s evolving IT demands. The Fibre Channel infrastructure also required expensive hardware and complex management, further driving up operational costs.

Finding a cost-effective, reliable, and easily scalable storage solution that would integrate with the existing Hyper-V environment became a top priority for the university’s IT team.

StarWind VSAN works great. We have two servers we use for storage. These two servers are fully redundant to each other, and all of our clustered Hyper-V hosts can see both servers, providing high availability.

Chris Theve, Chief Information Officer

SOLUTION

Ohio Dominican University chose StarWind VSAN because it replaced its Fibre Channel setup with a more affordable and efficient Ethernet-based solution. This significantly reduced hardware expenses and simplified maintenance. The new environment runs on two fully redundant servers, ensuring high availability and continuous access to data across all clustered Hyper-V hosts. StarWind’s reliability allowed the IT team to implement best-practice backup services with ease. Satisfied with the results, the university plans to continue using StarWind as its primary storage platform and expand it to support its DMZ Hyper-V environment in the future.