When we were faced with replacing our SAN which we had outgrown, we had several choices. We could have purchased another SAN with more capacity from the vendor. Instead, we decided to use StarWind. For lower cost, we were able to achieve greater capability, more capacity, and redundancy.
Norman Allen, Senior IT Manager, Baker Tilly BVI
PROBLEM
Since it was expensive to scale out with the existing storage solution, Norman Allen had to seek for an alternative to satisfy the system needs and meet the budget allocated for the purpose. At that time, the company deployed Dell EqualLogic SAN on 2 Fujitsu RX200 S7 servers using Hyper-V hypervisor environment (Windows 2012 Datacenter), which hosted 25 virtual machines.
In order to increase the storage capacity, Mr. Allen was looking for virtual machine storage solution built on two or more nodes, which he could replicate. He was also expecting to gain high reliability, from the new virtualization environment, avoiding hardware lock-in.
While looking for another option, among others, Baker Tilly (BVI) Limited considered Tegile Systems and Nimble storage solutions. However, both of them were unreasonably priced and did not allow using off-the-shelf hardware. Besides, Tegile’s solution, being a flash-array based one, was too expensive to deploy.
Therefore, the competitors’ alternatives had the following limitations: a lack of flexibility, high price and vendor lock-in.
SOLUTION
Thus, Baker Tilly (BVI) Limited purchased StarWind Virtual SAN.
‘When we were faced with replacing our SAN which we had outgrown, we had several choices. We could have purchased another SAN with more capacity from the vendor. Instead, we decided to use StarWind. For lower cost, we were able to achieve greater capability, more capacity, and redundancy,’ said Norman.
After having deployed StarWind Virtual SAN, Mr. Allen is now able to set up a highly available storage and use it with either of the hypervisor vendors: VMware, Microsoft or Citrix.
Moreover, thanks to the StarWind Virtual SAN synchronous replication feature, he can easily shut down one of the SAN boxes, which will cause no interruptions to the company business process, keeping the performance of other client machines at a high level.
Currently, Baker Tilly (BVI) Limited IT team has 2 servers in a cluster with 75 virtual machines running on it. According to Mr. Allen, ‘StarWind gave us space to store 50 more virtual machines, and it gave us the confidence to do more with our virtual environment.’
About the company
Baker Tilly BVI is a leading firm of Chartered Accountants and Business Advisers in the British Virgin Islands.
www.bakertillybvi.com
Industry
Accounting
Tax
Business Consulting
Contact Person
Norman Allen (MCITP, MCT, MCTS, MCSA), Baker Tilly BVI Senior IT Manager, responsible for purchasing of software, hardware and other IT supplies; oversees the administration and maintenance of the company
infrastructure, etc.