Weidner Apartment Homes ensures business continuity for corporate operations by creating a highly available environment with StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN)

CHALLENGE

Before deploying StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN), the IT infrastructure of Weidner Apartment Homes relied on physical servers. As the company moved toward virtualization, it needed shared storage for a two-node VMware-based environment. Traditional SAN infrastructure was considered excessive for the initial scale of deployment and difficult to justify from a capital expenditure perspective. VMware vSAN was also evaluated, but its requirement for a three-node architecture would have significantly increased costs.

The company needed a cost-efficient and highly available (HA) shared storage tailored for a compact virtualization cluster.

StarWind VSAN allowed us to virtualize part of our corporate infrastructure without needing to invest in expensive SAN equipment that was overkill for our needs. Everything works great with all requirements satisfied.

Tyler Funk, 
 Senior IT Systems Engineer

SOLUTION

Weidner Apartment Homes selected StarWind VSAN to build an HA shared storage platform for its twonode VMware environment without investing in costly physical SAN hardware. StarWind VSAN enabled the company to virtualize part of its corporate infrastructure while maintaining the original architecture plan and minimizing hardware expenses. Compared to VMware vSAN, StarWind provided a more mature and flexible solution that supported a two-node configuration.

As a result, Weidner Apartment Homes achieved reliable shared storage and simplified infrastructure management. The company plans to expand its StarWind deployment as the infrastructure grows.