StarWind works well, is easy to deploy and easy to maintain.
Marcel Yap, Head of IT Infrastructure & Operations
PROBLEM
Before StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN) deployment, Krida Wacana Christian University had an IT infrastructure with 4 physical servers dedicated to server virtualization and VMware vSphere on top. When building a virtualized environment, the organization used a Direct Attached Storage (DAS) approach, a decision about which was mainly associated with a small scale and limited budget. This approach made the servers independent from each other and thus did not allow having High Availability (HA) functionality and load balancing for effective server resource utilization. As more critical services were deployed and delivered, the requirement for HA became a major challenge. Besides, UKRIDA was very dependent on backup and restore software during an incident. If there was a server failure, the lack of a single storage pool resulted in downtime and the need to restore the virtual machines (VMs) to the backup server
manually. To solve its problems, the organization turned to the analysis of the virtualization market, reading reviews and testing step-by-step product trials. VSAN has become the ultimate solution to leverage existing storage infrastructure. But having found the necessary option, the university faced difficulties again. VMware vSAN turned out to be too expensive and difficult to deploy. Then UKRIDA tried hypervisor-level replication using NAKIVO, Veeam, Zerto, but these solutions were partially automatic, requiring one dedicated node as a manager for the replication function. So, price, ease of use, and efficiency in functionality were the main criteria for choosing virtual storage.
SOLUTION
StarWind VSAN was a solution spot on in terms of all the university’s requirements. Krida Wacana Christian University received a single storage pool without a need to replace existing servers and with a minimum hardware footprint. Requiring only 2 nodes to function, StarWind VSAN provided the required HA and load balancing for a virtualized environment. The organization no longer needs to worry about the safety of academic data and applications because even in the event of an incident, HA is maintained. The issue of the product cost, which was the main university’s concern, was also resolved since StarWind provides enterprise-level functionality at an affordable price. Plus, StarWind VSAN is easy to deploy and maintain. It also allows the organization to use RAM as a storage cache which is a nice feature to accelerate its storage I/O. Thus, in addition to critical HA, Krida Wacana Christian University received many more benefits from StarWind, not for all the money in the world.
About the Company
Krida Wacana Christian University (UKRIDA) is a higher education institution based in Jakarta, Indonesia. It is one of the oldest private universities in Indonesia aiming to deliver high-quality graduates and contribute to better social, healthcare, technology, and digital business environment in Indonesia.
Company Profile
Higher Education Institution
Contact Person
Marcel Yap,
Head of IT Infrastructure & Operations