StarWind HCA allowed us to increase resilience and redundancy
and reduce the need for any downtime during patching. It was
a fantastic solution and only wish we had discovered it sooner
IT Manager
PROBLEM
Before introducing StarWind HCI Appliance (HCA) into its IT infrastructure, Kaonix Solutions Limited was using a couple of standalone Hyper-V servers and many standalone physical servers due to outdated technology and limited budget. Within this IT environment, there were no high availability (HA), clustering, and resilience. If a physical server failed, it had to be restored from backup or hand-built from bare metal. To solve its problems, Kaonix Solutions Limited banked on hyperconvergence and turned to StarWind. StarWind allowed the company to try out the product for many months before it was actually purchased. Excellent customer support was also provided during this trial period. The price of StarWind HCA was more aligned to the company’s budget compared to other providers, so it was a bargain.
SOLUTION
By choosing StarWind HCA, Kaonix Solutions Limited was able to virtualize the remainder of its physical servers and move over existing virtual servers. The StarWind product allowed the company to set up a failover cluster and achieve HA. So now Kaonix Solutions Limited could provide more resilience and uptime to its customers. Besides, IT infrastructure management became as easy as ABC: switching between the nodes is a doddle, and the StarWind interface, once configured, runs seamlessly in the background without any admin intervention. The end result saved the company money as it reduced its physical server footprint. Kaonix Solutions Limited saved roughly £500 a month in reduced hosting costs, so £6000 over the year. In the future, whenever the need arises, the company would gladly purchase other StarWind products.
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StarWind HyperConverged Appliance Configuration |
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|
Appliance Model |
HCA P-Spec 8 |
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Cluster Size |
2 nodes |
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Cluster density |
2U |
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Servers |
Dell PowerEdge R630 |
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CPU |
Intel Xeon E5-2630 v4, 2.2 GHz, 10 cores, 20 threads per node |
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Memory |
8 x 32GB 2400MHz DDR4 (256 GB total) per node |
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Cluster Storage Capacity |
9.6 TB of All-Flash storage |
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Disk Configuration |
2 х 120GB Solid State Drive SATA Boot 6Gbps 2.5 |
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Networking |
Mellanox ConnectX-3 Pro Dual Port 40 GbE QSFP+ |
| Hypervisor |
Hyper-V on Windows Server 2016 |
About the Company
Kaonix Solutions Limited is a British company providing a range of cloud-based software solutions for the recruitment industry. For many years it was an innovator in Applicant Tracking Software (ATS) and one of the first companies providing a SAAS service.
Company Profile
Managed IT Services Provider (MSP)
Contact Person
IT Manager