Alexander City Schools ensure continuous operation by creating a hyperconverged IT infrastructure around StarWind HCI Appliance (HCA)

CHALLENGE

Before StarWind HCI Appliance (HCA) deployment, the IT infrastructure at Alexander City Schools consisted of 2 Dell rack servers with Dell EqualLogic SAN running a VMware hypervisor. The aging devices were becoming increasingly unreliable, necessitating frequent replacements and risking system failures. The critical issue was the lack of a reliable failover mechanism. If any part of the solution failed, the entire system could potentially go down, posing a severe risk to the school‘s day–to–day activities.

This situation called for a robust, fail–safe solution that could ensure continuous operation even in the face of hardware failures.

Migrating to StarWind HCI Appliance was very easy, and everything is running faster and more reliably. Now we have more room to expand our servers if necessary. 

Neal Wagoner,
Technology Technician

SOLUTION

Alexander City Schools turned to StarWind HCI Appliance after reading positive reviews from IT professionals who had transitioned from traditional infrastructure models to hyperconverged solutions. StarWind HCI Appliance simplified and enhanced their IT setup by reducing the hardware footprint to just 2 servers, eliminating the need for a separate
SAN device and additional switches. This consolidation not only freed up space but also paved the way for future expansion.

The new infrastructure satisfied all requirements, providing a reliable failover mechanism that ensured continuous operation even during hardware failures.