Archway School ensures continuous access to its critical educational resources by creating a hyperconverged IT infrastructure around StarWind HCI Appliance (HCA)

CHALLENGE

Before implementing StarWind HCI Appliance (HCA), Archway School’s IT infrastructure was built on three host servers, expensive iSCSI switches, and a Nimble SAN with a VMware hypervisor on top. However, the SAN was out of support, making third-party maintenance an expensive necessity. Additionally, it was due for renewal, and replacing it with a new SAN would cost too much.

The school required a cost-effective and reliable alternative that could seamlessly integrate with its VMware environment. Other potential solutions, such as Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct (S2D) and Dell PowerEdge VRTX, either lacked reliability or introduced additional failure points.

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

SOLUTION

Archway School chose StarWind HCI Appliance because it allowed to consolidate its infrastructure into a hyperconverged environment. Thanks to the StarWind solution, the school was able to eliminate the need for external storage, significantly reducing hardware footprint and power consumption. StarWind replaced the previous SAN setup with 2 hosts utilizing local all-flash storage, which was combined into a single storage pool. This approach delivered higher performance and removed the necessity for iSCSI switching, thereby eliminating a major point of failure.

By implementing StarWind HCI Appliance, Archway School now benefits from a highly resilient IT infrastructure that meets its operational requirements.