Stevens & Co ensures continuous business operations and cuts costs by building a highly available IT environment thanks to StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN)

CHALLENGE

Before deploying StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN), Stevens & Co ran standalone Hyper-V servers with internal storage. At a certain point, such an infrastructure started to be underwhelming for the amount of IOPS its applications needed. Also, there were issues of a single point of failure (SPOF) and lack of high availability (HA).

To achieve HA, Stevens & Co required shared storage, specifically a Storage Area Network (SAN). However, hardware SANs were too expensive. The company explored alternative storage solutions like VMware vSAN and HPE StoreVirtual VSA but found VMware would require a total overhaul of their virtualization setup, while HPE had discontinued StoreVirtual.

Hardware SANs were too expensive for the company at that stage. StarWind allowed to achieve high availability without any unnecessary costs or upgrades.

Christopher Todd, IT Manager

SOLUTION

Stevens & Co selected StarWind VSAN because it could be easily integrated into its existing Hyper-V environment without requiring an expensive hardware SAN or a major virtualization overhaul. StarWind VSAN was installed into the existing nodes, creating a 2-node fault-tolerant environment. The solution’s “mirroring” of hard disks and flash between hypervisor servers allowed the company to achieve HA and eliminate an SPOF issue.

Thanks to StarWind, Stevens & Co achieved HA and fault tolerance without wasting any costs on unneeded features or hardware.