Newcastle High School for Girls GDST ensures reliable access to educational resources by creating a highly available cluster with StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN)

CHALLENGE

Prior to StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN) deployment, Newcastle High School for Girls GDST had three separate hosts running Hyper-V standalone. Although replication across hosts was in place for disaster recovery (DR) purposes, the school encountered a pressing issue when they decided to introduce Remote Desktop Services (RDS). The need to expand their server infrastructure for RDS required a redundant cluster environment.

The options were either a dedicated SAN or StarWind. A dedicated SAN was dismissed due to its perceived single point of failure and higher cost, leaving the school with the dilemma of finding a solution that could offer the required resiliency.

 StarWind allowed us to introduce a SAN quickly and easily and gave us a full Hyper-V cluster with redundancy far greater than our previous setup.

Andrew Taylor, ICT Operations Manager

SOLUTION

StarWind VSAN allowed Newcastle High School for Girls GDST to swiftly introduce a SAN and create a robust Hyper-V cluster. The new infrastructure demonstrated superior redundancy, ensuring uninterrupted services even in the event of host failure.

The school’s future plans include the potential addition of an extra host if they need to expand their RDS servers. The resulting infrastructure not only met but exceeded their requirements, with end-users experiencing seamless operations despite a host failure.