High availability for mission-critical apps

August 03, 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

Since modern businesses depend on critical business-specific applications, service interruption or downtime leads to direct money loss. To prevent this, fault-tolerant hardware and software are mandatory, so a highly available yet simple data center infrastructure is extremely important for achieving business continuity and the prosperity of organizations functioning in today’s digital business landscape.

Problem

Historically, each data center infrastructure component was obtained and installed separately. That includes but is not limited to compute servers, storage, various networking equipment, and a vast list of software, including operating systems, hypervisors, management, and monitoring applications from different vendors, which lead to support complexity and fingerpointing. Moreover, those components may have inconsistent levels of redundancy to achieve the required availability. That is causing complexity in support and management, introducing multiple points of failure, and, as a result, increased cost spending.

Solution

StarWind HCI Appliance (HCA) aggregates servers, storage, networking, hypervisor, and data mover in a minimalistic, highly efficient, and scalable platform. An integrated solution for critical applications that comes from a single vendor effectively decreases the variety of hardware and technologies to deal with, reduces the effort and time required for maintenance and management, and eliminates support fingerpointing. Built with availability in mind, StarWind HCA offers true fault tolerance for hardware and software levels, while AI/ML-powered failure prediction technology makes sure any potential issues are mitigated proactively, reducing critical application downtimes and consequent business losses to basically zero.

Conclusion

StarWind HCA is a solution crafted to be a perfect building block to run critical applications for new modern data centers (greenfield) or infrastructure refreshes/replacements (brownfield). Using the most effective and powerful (premium-grade) hardware, every platform is designed from scratch and purpose-built to meet customer’s unique needs. It is an all-inclusive turnkey product pre-built, pre-configured, integrated, and commissioned into existing infrastructure, which costs less and requires less work, time, and effort.