The University of Alabama ensures 24/7 uptime of its critical healthcare software by building a highly available stretched cluster with StarWind Virtual SAN

CHALLENGE

Before deploying StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN), the Department of Anesthesiology and Perioperative Medicine at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) faced limitations in its IT infrastructure, which was divided between two separate buildings on distinct networks – one for the hospital and one for the campus. Using Microsoft Hyper-V at both locations, the hospital data center’s SAN infrastructure proved inadequate for supporting new vital signs capturing software.

The existing storage was too slow, and the cost of upgrading to new SAN storage was expensive. The university needed a cost-effective solution to address these issues.

StarWind VSAN is the only solution that would do what we needed. It is a unique product.

David Benz, Senior System Analyst

SOLUTION

The UAB Department of Anesthesiology and Perioperative Medicine chose StarWind VSAN because it allowed the hospital to build a stretched cluster, synchronize storage between two buildings over a network, and utilize faster disks in its Hyper- V hosts. This eliminated the need for costly SAN upgrades and provided the required level of performance for the vital signs capturing software.

StarWind VSAN enabled high-speed shared storage across the stretched cluster without additional hardware investments. With this solution in place, the hospital ensured that its critical healthcare applications could perform reliably.