LightChange Technologies ensures business continuity for its ISP client by building a stretched cluster with StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN)

CHALLENGE

Before deploying StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN), LightChange’s ISP customer relied on two Hyper-V failover clusters with three virtual hosts each, connected to a single Dell EqualLogic SAN. While the SAN replicated volumes to an offsite SAN every five minutes via a direct L2 fiber connection, the setup had significant limitations. A disaster recovery scenario could result in up to five minutes of data loss, and remapping VMs to replicated iSCSI volumes was a time-consuming process.

Despite extensive searching, the company could not find a solution that offered real-time storage replication for geographically separated storage until discovering StarWind VSAN.

StarWind VSAN has become a staple that we now recommend to anyone with a virtual environment in need of true high availability.

AJ Watson, Technical Solutions Engineer

SOLUTION

LightChange selected StarWind VSAN for its ISP client because the solution provided real-time storage replication and transformed its SAN infrastructure. With StarWind VSAN, both SANs are actively used for production VMs, essentially functioning as a RAID1 setup across the two sites. The solution involved deploying two StarWind VSAN servers at each site and connecting the SANs as direct storage.

With redundant fiber connections and stacked switches, the infrastructure achieved high availability and sustained zero downtime during VMware host or SAN failures.