Krida Wacana Christian University ensures continuous academic services by building a highly available IT environment with StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN)

CHALLENGE

Before deploying StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN), UKRIDA operated four physical servers dedicated to server virtualization, all running VMware vSphere with DAS. Each server functioned independently, creating challenges in achieving high availability (HA) and load balancing. During incidents, recovery relied on manual backup and restore processes, leading to downtime as virtual machines (VMs) were restored to backup servers.

Cost constraints initially led to choosing DAS, but as critical services expanded, the need for HA and load balancing became essential. VMware’s vSAN solution proved too expensive and complex.

StarWind VSAN works well, easy to deploy and easy to maintain. Our main applications for academic purposes are running on it.

Marcel Yap,
Head of IT Infrastructure
& Operations

SOLUTION

UKRIDA chose StarWind VSAN because it provided an affordable, efficient solution that required only a small footprint with just two nodes to achieve HA and load balancing. StarWind VSAN allowed the university to repurpose its existing servers as part of the storage infrastructure, integrating with the primary servers via iSCSI to enable HA and resource optimization. This deployment refreshed their old servers and eliminated downtime issues, ensuring continuous availability and improved load balancing for their virtualization environment.

UKRIDA is now considering extending StarWind VSAN for better availability in their virtual desktop infrastructure.