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LocalTel Communications ensures reliable performance for 200 virtual machines by creating highly available shared storage with StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN)

August 13, 2026
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Michael J. Gage
Network Operations Manager. Has more than two decades of experience in network operations, storage technologies, and infrastructure management.
Network Operations Manager. Has more than two decades of experience in network operations, storage technologies, and infrastructure management.

CHALLENGE

Before deploying StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN), LocalTel Communications had an end of life storage infrastructure that could no longer support business growth. The legacy storage platform exhausted available resources and began experiencing failures that compromised the integrity of iSCSI targets used by the VMware vSphere environment. These issues threatened the availability of production workloads while consuming valuable administrative time.

The company needed a highly available (HA) storage solution capable of sustaining heavy I/O workloads and ensuring reliable data replication.

StarWind allowed us to move away from a tightly coupled, hardwaredependent HCI platform to a flexible, software-defined architecture. Overall, the resulting infrastructure fully satisfies our operational and business requirements.

Michael J. Gage,
 Network Operations Manager

SOLUTION

LocalTel Communications deployed StarWind VSAN by first validating it with non critical virtual machines before migrating production workloads. A spare storage server was repurposed as the initial node, followed by the addition of a second node to enable HA. During migration, a RAID controller failure took an entire node offline, yet StarWind VSAN maintained uninterrupted storage availability until the hardware was replaced and synchronized.

The deployment was later expanded into a three node HA cluster supporting approximately 200 VMware virtual machines with workloads ranging from idle to intensive I/O. Since implementing StarWind VSAN, the company has achieved stable storage performance without service affecting datastore maintenance.

About the Company
LocalTel Communications, a subsidiary of Computer 5 Inc., founded in 1982, is a telecommunications provider delivering telephone, Internet, television, and IT services.
Region
NA (North America)
Country
United States
Industry
IT & Services
Product
StarWind Virtual SAN
Inspired by Michael J. Gage’s success? Want to improve business continuity for your business-critical apps and services?
Dmytro Malynka StarWind Virtual SAN Product Manager
We’ve got you covered! StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN) is specifically designed to provide highly-available shared storage for Hyper-V, vSphere, and KVM clusters. With StarWind VSAN, simplicity is key: utilize the local disks of your hypervisor hosts and create shared HA storage for your VMs. Interested in learning more? Book a short StarWind VSAN demo now and see it in action!