StarWind’s solution has simplified my life considerably… I can’t stress enough just how simple it is and how quickly I can build a SAN and at the price point.
John Meng, IT Manager, Tectura Applied Engineering Solutions
PROBLEM
With 1,800 employees in over 20 countries, Tectura needed to speed up the process for testing and developing new virtual environments when it prepares solutions for a worldwide base of customers. To reduce the amount of time that the IT group needed to set up their testing environment, they needed to get centralized, shared storage for their server clusters and went to StarWind for help.
John Meng is the Applied Engineering Solutions manager for all internal IT. The 36 people in his department needed a virtual testing environment that was easy to install, use and take down and then restored back up when they needed to perform additional testing and development with Microsoft Server clusters.
Meng had already made a substantial investment in shared storage in his group’s production systems, including Fibre Channel and rival iSCSI solutions. However, none of these options met the combined requirements of being cost-effective and also easy to use. Simplicity here was critical for the IT group to accelerate through its development workload efficiently.
Each project required the group to spend several hours to set up a clustering environment and, as a result, threatened to lengthen development schedules beyond the hours allocated to deliver any given solution.
Because the Engineering Solutions team was already lean and running at peak capacity, John Meng found it increasingly difficult to continue working with existing, complex shared storage systems.
SOLUTION
StarWind’s solution allowed Meng to convert existing Windows servers into shared storage in less than 30 minutes and this dramatically cut the amount of time required to get a clustered environment up and running for each project. With StarWind, Tectura can now build and deploy a complete SAN quickly. Meng points out that server clusters are very easy to install with the help of StarWind which is easy to configure and offers rock solid reliability and high performance.
Meng has been using StarWind since 2007 and is effusive in his praise, pointing out the fundamental improvements that StarWind made in his group’s productivity. Nearly three years later, his opinion hasn’t changed.
“StarWind’s solution has simplified my life considerably. I can’t stress enough just how simple it is and how quickly I can build a SAN and at this price point.”
LOOKING TO THE FUTURE
As the Applied Engineering Solutions group moves forward, it plans to make use of some of its legacy hardware to build virtual SANs with StarWind in its production environment. StarWind Virtual SANs run very efficiently on existing hardware with existing Ethernet network infrastructure so Tectura will neither have to make new equipment purchases nor get new training.
About the Company
Tectura is a worldwide provider of consulting, software and IT implementation services. The Redwood City, California company’s Applied Engineering Solutions division is the No. 1 Top 100 reseller for Microsoft Business Solutions, delivering flexible, fully integrated solutions based on Microsoft Dynamics® ERP software for aerospace, life sciences, manufacturing and distribution, retail and service industries.
www.tectura.com
Industry
Technology Consulting and IT services
Environment
Test and development of virtual server environments based on Microsoft Dynamics ERP software
Business Benefits
Drastic reduction in the time required for the team to get a clustered environment up and running