CanPay Software Inc. achieves lower capital and support costs by replacing legacy hosts and SANs with StarWind HCI Appliance (HCA)

CHALLENGE

Before deploying StarWind HCI Appliance (HCA), CanPay Software Inc. relied on a traditional infrastructure built around two Dell hosts and two Dell EqualLogic SANs, running on VMware. This setup required regular hardware and storage maintenance, which added recurring costs every year. The infrastructure was also approaching the end of its lifecycle, so a hardware refresh was unavoidable.

Replacing it with a similar architecture would have been expensive and would not have solved a key issue. The storage layer was not fully redundant and represented a single point of failure. This posed a risk to availability and business continuity. Alternative solutions were evaluated, but many were too costly for a small business or required a complete change in technology.

With StarWind HCI Appliance, we have a much faster, quieter environment. We have had no issues so far. There is no need for all the connections that have filled up our switch.

Curtis Scammell, Director

SOLUTION

StarWind HCI Appliance provided CanPay Software Inc. with an all-flash, hyperconverged solution that fit both technical and budget requirements. The new setup consists of two compact 1U servers, replacing the previous combination of hosts and large SAN systems. This reduced hardware footprint, power usage, and noise, which was important for an environment without a dedicated server room. The company was able to keep using VMware, avoiding retraining and preserving existing operational processes. Migration was straightforward and completed using VMware vMotion. Existing VM-level backup tools remained fully compatible.

The result is a faster, quieter, and more reliable infrastructure with fewer network connections and no single point of failure. The solution also allows for easy scaling by adding another node if future growth requires it.