Geo-clustering and stretched clustering

April 10, 2024

Taras Shved

Director of Sales Engineering with more than 15 years of professional IT experience. Almost 2 years of Technical Support and Engineering at StarWind. Storage and virtualization expert. IT systems engineer. Web designer as a hobby.

Introduction

In today’s business landscape, companies distribute their workloads across various remote locations, spanning different cities, countries, or even continents, to deliver uninterrupted services regardless of any disruptions. To guarantee the consistent availability of business-critical applications, organizations distribute their workloads across various remote locations, spanning different cities, countries, or even continents.

Problem

Traditional stretched clusters usually employ vast amounts of different over-engineered and overprovisioned hardware and software sets, which isn’t very efficient: it is costly to obtain and expensive to maintain. Additionally, as stretched clusters are frequently employed for disaster recovery purposes, they must be capable of managing secure data transfer and ensuring local fault tolerance in the event of an on-premises disaster, which is complicated or even impossible in case of using equipment from different vendors. These issues prompt businesses to seek a solution for integrating and unifying their geo-clustered infrastructure into a coherent environment.

Solution

To address all these challenges effectively, StarWind HCI Appliance (HCA) offers stretched- and geo-clustering using unified prebuilt and preconfigured hardware platforms that allow businesses to achieve scalability and cost-efficiency for their business-critical infrastructure while ensuring security compliance. Deployment, integration, and maintenance tasks are offloaded to StarWind engineers, while further management can be done using familiar and convenient tools.

Conclusion

StarWind HCI Appliance (HCA) ensures 24/7/365 application uptime by introducing unified, integrated, and cost-effective hardware and software platforms with active-active storage replication between distant locations for uncompromised stretched-/geo-clustering and hybrid cloud support. Every software and hardware appliance is thoroughly tailored to current requirements to ensure IT infrastructure is utilized at its highest potential and no resources are left on standby. Along with intuitive web management, an AI-powered sophisticated telemetry, and a “call home” system, backed by a single support umbrella, the StarWind HCA becomes a perfect solution for maintaining business continuity across geographically distributed locations without undermining simplicity. It eliminates losses caused by service downtime, costs less, and can be operated unmanned, saving labor time, effort, and money.