We have tried different storage system solutions to obtain data synchronization and redundancy, but most of them didn’t provide the real-time synching that we required. Then we tested StarWind, and even tried to “sabotage” it but it just kept working! StarWind meets all our needs and has taken a prominent place in our IT environment.
Sander van’t Hullenaar, IT Director, Nitroserve.nl
CHALLENGE
Nitroserve required a powerful, highly available storage solution, which would deliver synchronous mirroring, automatic failover and failback to completely eliminate single points of failure and downtime. The company wanted to better serve its ever-growing client base and to be reliable, secure and up-to-date with the latest technology.
“In order to have a fully redundant shared hosting and database cluster we needed a redundant storage engine. Having implemented a load-balanced IIS and SQL clusters, we used single RAID10 iSCSI storage. The biggest problem we had to overcome was a single point of failure of one of the storage servers,” said Sander van’t Hullenaar.
Nitroserve was looking for a solution that would combine flexibility, speed and reliability for its storage platform. The company tried different storage solutions for data synching and redundancy, but most of the solutions on the marketplace didn’t provide real-time synching, thus none of them met the main requirement for the optimal solution. After a wide search, Nitroserve opted for the StarWind solution – StarWind Virtual SAN.
SOLUTION
Nitroserve tested the StarWind solution for a month, and even tried to “sabotage” it, but the software just kept running. As a result the company decided to adopt StarWind Virtual SAN for Hyper-V for its IT environment.
“The StarWind solution turned out to be an ideal fit for our needs: it delivers the required real-time synchronization and perfect load balancing of data between the iSCSI targets.”
With StarWind Virtual SAN, Nitroserve built a highly available fault-tolerant SAN. The storage provides data availability, great stability and gives outstanding performance. StarWind supports active-active High Availability, makes storage fully redundant, and guarantees business continuity even in case of failure.
In addition, StarWind operates inside parent partitions of hypervisor hosts and transforms their directly attached storage (DAS) into fault-tolerant SAN, so no additional hardware is required to deploy a highly available Hyper-V cluster.
RESULTS
High Availability and Business Continuity
“The StarWind solution has helped us to set up our IT environment – where it has a prominent place – and to maximize speed and optimal use of both storage servers. At the moment, StarWind handles all our iSCSI targets for our clustered services.”
“Our business cannot accept any downtime and we are confident that the StarWind solution will keep our IT environment healthy, and deliver uptime and availability for our services.”
Use of Existing Hardware
StarWind Virtual SAN runs directly, side-by-side with virtual machine hypervisor, and does not require a dedicated storage server, disks, flash, switch or other network equipment. “With StarWind we are able to use our existing Hyper-V servers to run a full HA cluster.”
About the Company
Founded in 2004, Nitroserve has become one of the largest hosting providers in the Netherlands, where it delivers services through a green data center in Rotterdam. At first it specialized in shared Web hosting on the Microsoft platform, then in 2010 the company added Hyper-V and dedicated server hosting to its portfolio.
Today Nitroverse hosts approximately 5,000 websites on its clustered Microsoft platform.
www.nitroserve.nl
Industry
Web hosting, VPS and dedicated server hosting
Environment
Hyper-V virtual environment