StarWind showed us the best possible configuration and tweaked our existing
system by a lot. The infrastructure works very well.
Igor Beck, IT and Infrastructure Administrator
PROBLEM
Before Milchwerk Jäger GmbH implemented StarWind Virtual SAN (vSAN) and later StarWind HCI Appliance (HCA) into its IT infrastructure, the company used standalone Windows Servers with Hyper-V on it. Virtual machines (VMs) that were important had been configured to do the
built-in replication by Microsoft. For high availability (HA) scenarios, the company utilized failover clustering by Microsoft with an SHA cluster storage by Synology. Later it had an IBM Storage V3700 with SAS interfaces. On the Synology SHA cluster, there was an iSCSI bug that degraded the performance of the system by a lot. It can be said that more than 4 VMs killed the overall IT infrastructure performance. The alternative was the use of NFS, but that was only an option for VMware. The IBM Storage was performance-wise but had the limitation of SAS, which wasn’t an optimal solution for failover clustering.
SOLUTION
Milchwerk Jäger GmbH opted for StarWind due to several reasons. First of all, StarWind turned out to be the only storage solution manufacturer that gave the company a full try over the whole storage system as long as it needed. The second one is the price per performance factor that is beyond competition right now. The company used its commercial off-the-shelf hardware for a vSAN solution at no extra costs. And the most important is StarWind’s know-how in virtualization and storage systems that provided Milchwerk Jäger GmbH a single hyperconverged platform combining network, storage, compute, and software in a small 2-node footprint. StarWind showed the company the best possible configuration and tweaked its existing system by a lot. Performance problems were instantly gone because of the unique multipath configuration of the mixture of loopback and dedicated NICs for iSCSI connections. So, every future system the company will build or buy either runs with StarWind software or is part of the StarWind HCA lineup.
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StarWind HyperConverged Appliance Configuration |
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| Appliance Model | HCA P-Spec 7.6 |
| Cluster Size | 2 nodes |
| Cluster density | 2U |
| Servers | Dell PowerEdge R640 |
| CPU | 2 х Intel® Xeon Silver 4210R, 2.4 GHz, 10 cores, 20 threads per node |
| Memory | 8 x 16GB 2933MHz DDR4 (128 GB total) per node |
| Cluster Storage Capacity | 7.6 TB of All-Flash storage |
| Disk Configuration | Dell Perc H740 Low – Profile Adapter w/ 8 GB of NVRAM cache BOSS controller card with 2 x M.2 Sticks 240GB (RAID 1) 9 x 960GB SSD SATA 6Gbps S4610 per node |
| Networking | Intel i350 Quad Port 1GbE BASE-T Mellanox ConnectX-4 Lx Dual Port 25GbE SFP28 Network Adapter |
| Hypervisor | Hyper-V on Windows Server 2019 |
About the Company
Milchwerk Jäger GmbH is a German dairy manufacturing company founded 150 years ago. It produces a variety of cheese products exported to Italy, France, and Eastern Europe as well as South-East Asia.
Company Profile
Food Manufacturing
Contact Person
Igor Beck, IT and Infrastructure Administrator