StarWind HCA has proved successful, our domains are
centralised and performance has been excellent.
Mark Newman, Director for ICT & Data
PROBLEM
Before implementing StarWind HCI Appliance (HCA), all the schools of Rodillian Multi Academy Trust were running separate domains using legacy hardware either with discreet SANs or direct-attached storage (DAS) and a mix of Hyper-V and a VMware hypervisor on top. The server estate was out of warranty and support at most sites. The existing infrastructure was not suitable for running the organization’s central services and primary site. So, Rodillian Multi Academy Trust needed a solution that would provide robust resilience and capacity/scalability for the potential growth of the organization.
SOLUTION
Rodillian Multi Academy Trust has chosen a highly cost-effective StarWind HCA solution as it provided both resilience and high specification hardware. The organization went to the market and looked at other solutions and StarWind HCA was deemed the best value product for its requirements. Using StarWind HCA, all out-of-date and out-of-support servers were replaced with one high-performance hyperconverged platform. The StarWind product allowed to centralize the organization’s domains into one with Hyper-V on top and to be scalable as Rodillian Multi Academy Trust grows as an organization.
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance Configuration | |
Appliance Model | HCA V-Spec 57.5 |
Cluster Size | 3 nodes |
Cluster density | 6U |
Servers | SuperServer 2029P-E1CR24H |
CPU | 2 х Intel® Xeon® Gold 5220R, 2.20 GHz, 24 cores, 48 threads per node |
Memory | 12 x 32GB 2666MHz DDR4 (384 GB total) per node |
Cluster Storage Capacity | 57.5 TB of All-Flash storage |
Disk Configuration | LSI 3108 w/ SuperCap 11 x MICRON 5300 PRO 3840GB SATA 2.5″ SSD per node 2 х SAMSUNG PM883 240GB SATA SSD per node |
Networking | Mellanox ConnectX®-4 Lx EN Dual Port 25GBe SFP28 NIC Supermicro Quad Port 10Gb/s SFP+ |
Hypervisor | Hyper-V on Windows Server 2019 |
About the Company
Rodillian Multi Academy Trust is a trust of secondary schools in the Yorkshire area of England. It specializes in transforming under-performing schools by allowing them to benefit from “The Rodillian Experience.”
Company Profile
Education
Contact Person
Mark Newman, Director for ICT & Data