Oerlikon Fairfield maintains uninterrupted operation of critical production workloads by creating highly available shared storage with StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN)

CHALLENGE

Before deploying StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN), Oerlikon Fairfield operated a VMware-based virtual environment relying on local ESXi datastores. This architecture limited storage flexibility, complicated virtual machine (VM) migration between hosts, and introduced performance bottlenecks that affected workload responsiveness. As the infrastructure expanded, the company required a more resilient and scalable shared storage platform without investing in costly traditional SAN hardware. Existing storage limitations also reduced operational efficiency and made it difficult to maintain optimal VM availability.

Oerlikon Fairfield needed a solution that could enhance storage reliability, improve VM mobility, and deliver better performance while remaining easy to integrate into the existing VMware infrastructure.

StarWind VSAN allowed the use of flash cache and replication of the storage among ESXi hosts, and this has proven to have a great impact on VM performance and reliability.

Kyle Aschenberg,
 Company Representative

SOLUTION

Oerlikon Fairfield chose StarWind VSAN to create a highly available shared storage layer across its ESXi hosts. By leveraging storage replication and PCIe SSD flash cache with existing spinning drives, the company significantly improved VM performance, reduced latency, and increased infrastructure reliability. StarWind VSAN enabled seamless storage synchronization between hosts, simplifying VM migration and enhancing uptime without the need for dedicated SAN hardware. The resulting infrastructure provides stable and reliable performance, while also allowing future scalability toward an all-flash configuration for even greater efficiency.