Thanks to StarWind, two hosts with local storage were combined
into a single pool and have enough redundancy that everything
successfully operates on its own if one host fails.
Gregory Gazeley, IT Manager
PROBLEM
Before implementing StarWind HCI Appliance (HCA), Blocka Construction Inc. had a single bare-metal server running everything. The company had no virtualization, no redundancy, and although files were being backed up, many configurations and settings were still not. The company also had a limited budget for IT, so wasn’t comfortable rolling out a failover cluster from scratch on its own. Blocka Construction Inc. made a point of StarWind HCA due to its attractive price and high-performance characteristics.
SOLUTION
Blocka Construction Inc. has chosen StarWind as it provided a cost-effective out-of-the-box solution where everything just works. The company received a blank slate to set up virtual machines (VMs) without needing to worry about the details of the hypervisor configuration. Now it has proper VM image backups instead of just file-level. The current company’s IT infrastructure consists of 5 Windows Server 2019 VMs running in the failover cluster, as well as a hybrid unit with OS installs + databases on SSD and bulk file storage on HDDs. Thanks to StarWind HCA, infrastructure speed and performance were improved, thus increasing overall productivity and efficiency. Its downtime has been reduced from a couple of hours a month to 0, allowing the company to save at least $5,000 a year. After 3 years of using StarWind HCA, Blocka Construction Inc. has plenty of room to grow on the disks, and the performance has been excellent.
| StarWind HyperConverged Appliance Configuration | |
| Appliance Model | HCA P-Spec 8.8 |
| Cluster Size | 2 nodes |
| Cluster density | 2U |
| Servers | Dell PowerEdge R540 |
| CPU | 2 x Intel Silver 4110, 2.1 GHz, 8 cores, 16 threads per node |
| Memory | 2 x 32GB 2666MHz DDR4 (64 GB total) per node |
| Cluster Storage Capacity | 12 TB of HDD storage, 3.84 TB of SSD storage |
| Disk Configuration | Dell Perc H740 Low – Profile Adapter w/ 8 GB of NVRAM cache 6 х 4TB 7.2K 12Gbps NL SAS 3.5 HDD per node 4 x 960GB 6Gbps SATA Mix Use TLC 2.5 SSD 2 x 240GB M.2 SSDDell BOSS Controller Low Profile Card (RAID 1) |
| Networking | Mellanox ConnectX-4 Lx Dual Port 25GbE DA/SFP On-board- Broadcom 5720 Dual Port Gigabit Ethernet |
| Hypervisor | Hyper-V on Windows Server 2019 |
About the Company
Blocka Construction Inc. is a construction company headquartered in California, U.S., and focused primarily on industrial and commercial projects. It does general contracting, electrical, heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) work on everything from water treatment plants and pump stations to Tesla’s factories.
Company Profile
Construction
Contact Person
Gregory Gazeley, IT Manager