Lees-McRae College ensures educational service continuity by replacing aging servers with a clustered infrastructure around StarWind HCI Appliance (HCA)

CHALLENGE

Before implementing StarWind HCI Appliance (HCA), Lees-McRae College operated with six standalone Hyper-V hosts that had reached end- of-life support. Frequent failures of spinning drives and a lack of failover left the infrastructure vulnerable, with virtual machines (VMs) remaining offline if a host failed. Without cluster storage, the college relied on Shared Nothing Live Migration, making host maintenance slow and tedious.

The older servers with 1Gbps NICs compounded the problem, creating inefficiencies. So, the organization sought hyperconvergence to reduce the number of servers and achieve redundancy.

StarWind HCI Appliance has worked out extremely well. I see StarWind as a very pragmatic solution. It meets all of our needs at a price that fits our budget.

Ben Holtsclaw,
Director of Technology Services

SOLUTION

Lees-McRae College chose StarWind HCI Appliance for its cost savings and reliable support. It provided the college with a two-node cluster featuring all-flash arrays, reducing their hardware footprint while increasing performance. The new setup introduced redundancy, ensuring that if one node fails, the other can seamlessly take over the workload.

By consolidating from six hosts to two and switching to high-speed storage, the college saved over $13,000 compared to a traditional SAN setup. With StarWind HCI Appliance, the college eliminated server sprawl and built a more resilient, high-performance infrastructure, offering operational continuity.