Hillis-Carnes Engineering Associates significantly enhances the reliability of its engineering operations by ensuring fault tolerance with StarWind HCI Appliance

CHALLENGE

Before StarWind HCI Appliance (HCA) deployment, Hillis-Carnes Engineering Associates had four physical hosts running Microsoft Hyper-V without redundancy. Any host failure could lead to up to 48 hours of downtime. Additionally, the storage was fragmented across multiple hosts, hindering expansion and management. Traditional SAN solutions were considered, but the need for dual SANs for redundancy was deemed costly and complex. After evaluating options like Dell VxRail and Scale Computing HC3, the company chose StarWind HCI Appliance.

From the moment of StarWind HCI Appliance deployment, it has been very reliable, we have had zerodowntime so far, and working very well. It has satisfied our main requirements of centralizing storage management, hardware fault tolerance, simplifying Windows licensing.

Ho-Ching Yung, IT Director

SOLUTION

By implementing StarWind HCI Appliance, Hillis-Carnes Engineering Associates saved on licensing and achieved a streamlined infrastructure. With built-in StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN), the company consolidated storage management, allowing all VMs within the cluster to use a centralized virtual SAN. The addition of fault tolerance ensured the company could withstand the loss of one node, significantly reducing the risk of prolonged downtime.

Since the deployment of StarWind HCI Appliance, Hillis-Carnes Engineering Associates has experienced zero downtime. In this regard, the company plans to use the StarWind solution further in its colocation center.