High availability, data safety, and no vendor dependency are there with StarWind Virtual SAN

June 20, 2023

Jeremy Moffitt

Network Administrator. Has over two decades of expertise and excels in project management, ERP implementation, and Six Sigma methodologies.

CHALLENGE

Previously, the company ran its production on storage comprised of two NAS servers orchestrated with VMware ESXi. This environment had been working quite well until the split-brain occurred one night. The Reynolds Company asked its hardware vendor what had happened to the servers, but even after looking through logs, its support team failed to figure out what was going on. That incident was a starting point for finding another solution to guarantee system reliability and ensure data safety without locking into specific vendor’s hardware.

Our primary goal was 24×7 uptime with the possibility of doing maintenance without VM shutdown or migration in case of update or failure. StarWind has never let us down.

Jeremy Moffitt, Network Administrator

SOLUTION

After investigating the market, Reynolds Company has picked StarWind Virtual SAN. StarWind VSAN saved the company both money and efforts as it could be deployed on the off-the-shelf hardware. In fact, there’s no vendor lock-in at all! The Reynolds Company, basically, created an active-active highly-available cluster out of two existing servers and StarWind VSAN. Active-active replication also enabled the company to ensure 24/7 uptime. The Reynolds Company could keep its production VMs up and running even having one host under maintenance.