It was going to cost us over $40,000 to upgrade our existing SAN just to get a slight improvement. With StarWind, I spent less than that for an entire SAN (Servers, Storage & StarWind).
Branden Beachy, Network Administrator
PROBLEM
Being a public education institution, Goshen Community Schools has to constantly process massive influxes of data. Its applications must handle student records, as well as research, financial, and procurement data under strict governmental regulations. The requirements to securely process, store, and handle the growing amounts of data meant that the institution had to extensively upgrade its storage area network (SAN) to ensure the needed level of performance. Prior to StarWind VSAN deployment, Goshen Community Schools utilized Dell Compellent SAN with VMware ESXi on top. It was its single point of failure (SPOF) without the benefits of data redundancy. Having a restricted operational budget, the institution couldn’t afford to constantly upgrade its hardware anymore, which rendered its IT infrastructure economically unviable, depreciating its previous investments. Subsequently, their systems began to work slower, and crash hazards were becoming a growing concern. Achieving the necessary high availability (HA) and fault tolerance within the restricting budgetary confines was starting to become a dream too distant — until the institution stumbled across StarWind.
SOLUTION
Goshen Community Schools’ primary interest in StarWind VSAN totaled in alleviating its burden of seeking out the funds for costly proprietary components to upgrade their SAN. After testing out VSAN on its cluster nodes, the institution successfully verified the product’s proof of concept and finally ceased its hunt for a desired solution. StarWind VSAN was easily deployed on the institution’s existing hardware. Notably, Goshen Community Schools had faced a hard decision of having to source and spend $40,000 on upgrading its existing SAN. Luckily, that scenario was dodged. In total, it spent less than the said sum on setting up an entire SAN (servers, storage, and StarWind). The institution received an inexpensive means to resolve their problem, which, in addition, required no new hardware to run and could be built with the components of its choice. As a result, thanks to a sophisticated set of StarWind VSAN features, Gosh Community Schools obtained a solution that was as fast and flexible as it wanted it to be and allowed it to upgrade different parts of its SAN without affecting the whole IT infrastructure.
About the Company
Goshen Community Schools is a public-school district based in Indiana, USA, which offers education to its local population along the K-12 spectrum. It provides primary and secondary education to more than 6,600 students and has over 1,000 employees.
Company Profile
Primary and Secondary Education
Contact Person
Branden Beachy,
Network Administrator