Area Agency on Aging Region 9 ensures operational continuity and cuts costs by building a highly available IT environment around StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN)

CHALLENGE

Before deploying StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN), AAA-9 operated a standalone Hyper-V host environment without a high-availability (HA) cluster or a reliable way to create one. This setup left their systems vulnerable to downtime and limited operational efficiency.

The agency wanted to maintain its preferred hypervisor without being locked into a specific vendor or adding extra hardware for shared storage but needed a cost-effective solution to achieve HA and improve its IT resilience.

The resulting infrastructure works so well that I rolled VSAN out to 2 more hosts to create a second HA cluster in the environment for testing purposes.

Justin Graves, IT Supervisor

SOLUTION

AAA-9 chose StarWind VSAN because it provided a cost-effective path to building an HA and resilient server cluster while allowing the organization to continue using its existing Hyper-V environment. StarWind VSAN integrated seamlessly, avoiding additional equipment expenses for shared storage.

The resulting infrastructure performed so well that the agency extended its use to create a second HA cluster for testing purposes. The implementation saved significant costs compared to other solutions like VMware vSAN, Maxta, and Nutanix.