Formica UK & Ireland recovers one-third of its capital expenditures (CapEx) within 2 years by moving to hyperconvergence with StarWind HCI Appliance (HCA)

CHALLENGE

Before deploying StarWind HCI Appliance (HCA) and StarWind Virtual Tape Library (VTL), Formica UK & Ireland relied on an HP Blade chassis with 16 nodes and an HP Fibre Channel SAN to manage its infrastructure of 60 physical servers running mixed Windows Server versions. The oversized infrastructure exceeded the company’s needs after a strategic shift rendered many on premises applications obsolete. This bloated setup was costly to maintain and consumed excessive power.

Seeking to modernize its IT environment, the company decided to migrate to a virtualized setup.

We are more than happy to continue to use the StarWind platform, as its modular approach to adding and removing nodes is flexible and straightforward.

Technology Architect

SOLUTION

Formica UK & Ireland chose StarWind HCI Appliance and StarWind VTL because they met the requirements for modernization and cost reduction. StarWind HCI Appliance modular architecture enabled seamless node additions and reductions, while the VSAN nodes running on Linux reduced licensing costs significantly. The all-flash arrays boosted application performance and improved data deliverability, resulting in a 57% increase in job performance and a 30% improvement in overall efficiency.

The new setup offered high resiliency with three data copies always available and allowed long-term backups to be offloaded to cheaper platforms via StarWind VTL and cloud integration.