Archway School reduces IT operational expenses by replacing its aging SAN storage with the help of StarWind HCI Appliance (HCA)

Thanks to StarWind, two hosts with local storage were combined
into a single pool and have enough redundancy that everything
successfully operates on its own if one host fails

James Moth, IT Manager

PROBLEM

Prior to implementing StarWind HCI Appliance (HCA), Archway School had three host servers, expensive iSCSI switches, and a Nimble SAN with a VMware hypervisor on top. The SAN was out of support, third-party support was expensive, and it was due for renewal. Replacement SAN solutions weren’t cost-effective for their implementation size as the price for a new SAN alone was similar to a new hyperconverged solution. Amongst the solutions compared to StarWind there were Dell PowerEdge VRTX and Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct (S2D). But Archway School discarded both options as S2D would have provoked a change of hypervisor and wasn’t considered reliable enough, while Dell VRTX was similarly priced but for a more old-fashioned approach to the solution introduced more points of failure. StarWind fell into the bracket of both cost-effective and reliable.

SOLUTION

Archway School resolved its issues of out-of-support SAN storage and high IT operational expenses by introducing only one StarWind solution. Using StarWind HCA, hardware footprint was significantly reduced, while the energy usage and heat output became lower. At this, the IT infrastructure performance increased due to the use of all-flash storage and direct-attached network (DAS) interfaces with no switching in between as a point of failure. Thanks to the StarWind hyperconverged platform, the organization received enough redundancy to go smoothly.

About the Company

Archway School is a secondary school for pupils aged 11 to 18 in Gloucestershire, England.

Company Profile

Education

Contact Person

James Moth, IT Manager