We strongly recommend StarWind solution. Since our initial deployment our storage needs have grown and the product has successfully grown with us. We have increased our storage exponentially without any complications. We can now perform maintenance on our storage cluster without creating an outage.
Michael J. Gage, Network Operations Manager at LocalTel Communications
CHALLENGE
“Most companies are facing challenges with growth and resources. We found ourselves in a situation where we had a difficulty to maintain infrastructure that was no longer meeting our needs. We had simply outgrown our storage solution and needed to find a new solution that could replace the previous one and grow together with our business,” said Michael J. Gage.
The company quickly became overwhelmed with the issues. “We exhausted our available resources and began having failures. We worked with vendor support and were losing ground quickly. We applied countless software patches and firmware updates. We began losing integrity on our iSCSI targets which impacted our ability to function.”
LocalTel Communications needed a new solution, which could help them to meet heavy I/O requirements and provide the high level of redundancy and reliability necessary for their IT environment. However, the company had limited funds and even less time.
SOLUTION
LocalTel Communications chose StarWind solution – StarWind Virtual SAN as its primary storage. “We deployed our spare storage server with StarWind. First, we did some production testing with non-critical virtual machines. Then, we reclaimed one of the active storage servers to add high-availability to our StarWind deployment. We had an unexpected hardware failure during the migration where a raid controller failed and had to be replaced. But StarWind continued to run even though we lost an entire node. Everything was still running smooth. We replaced the failed controller and brought the node back online without interrupting the migration,” said Michael J. Gage.
“Finally, we utilized the last original server as the third live server for StarWind, having created the 3-node high availability cluster. Today we have about 200 active VMs that range from idle to very heavy I/O requirements and everything is performing very well! We have not had to execute services affecting maintenance on our data stores since StarWind implementation.”
About the Company
LocalTel Communications is one of the subsidiaries of the Computer 5 Inc., founded in 1982. The company provides telephone, Internet, television, networking, phone systems, computer repair and service. The headquarters is based in East Wenatchee, WA.
www.localtel.net
Industry
Telecommunications
Environment
VMware vSphere
Challenge
Redundancy and replication of critical data, reliable iSCSI targets for VMware hosting