MUM Industries has removed performance bottlenecks in a cost-efficient way with StarWind Virtual SAN

CHALLENGE

Before deploying StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN), MUM Industries operated a virtualized environment based on VMware vCenter with two ESXi hosts connected to a shared SAN built on mechanical HDDs. Their enterprise resource planning (ERP) system generated high IOPS spikes, especially during month-end processing, which repeatedly saturated the SAN and caused noticeable slowdowns.

The company considered moving to an all-flash array, but purchasing a new SAN or adding another one was too costly and excessive for their scale. Native VMware vSAN was also not viable due to its requirement for a minimum of three hosts, which exceeded budget constraints.

StarWind could easily create a VSAN in a VMware environment with two hosts. StarWind VSAN was my first choice and ended up being my last choice. I have zero regrets.

Bryan Schuler, Network Administrator

SOLUTION

MUM Industries implemented StarWind VSAN to build a cost-efficient, high-performance storage layer on their existing two-host cluster. They equipped each host with six enterprise-grade SSDs in a RAID 10 configuration and added dual 10Gb SFP+ adapters for dedicated iSCSI and synchronization traffic.

StarWind enabled a fully redundant all-flash VSAN without the need for additional hosts. After validation testing, the ERP system was migrated and performed flawlessly. The environment now delivers stable, high IOPS, fast resynchronization, and uninterrupted VM operation during maintenance or failover scenarios.