StarWind VSAN creates a highly available environment with just a two-node setup. Similar solutions usually require three nodes minimum. We didn’t need to test other options.
Mart Vernik, IT Administrator
PROBLEM
The National Archives of Estonia constantly receives and processes endless amounts of data that keeps on coming in various formats from the social activity in Estonia. The agency must follow meticulous governmental standards while dealing with said data. Such conditions demand that applications are always available, fault-tolerant, and safe. The growing amounts of incoming data began to slow the IT-infrastructure down causing the need for upgrades. Before deploying StarWind VSAN, the agency’s IT-environment was built around Dell® AX4-5 server array interconnected via redundant Fiber Channel (FC) switches and Host Bus Adapters (HBAs) with VMware ESXi serving as the hypervisor. Bare-metal server arrays have limitations due to size, type, connection, and physical network requirements. The said configuration could not stand up to the growing work challenges. It became harder to reach the desired performance and other system threats were beginning to appear on the horizon. The agency was searching for alternative ways of optimizing its IT-infrastructure without acquiring new traditional storage — and that’s when it met StarWind.
SOLUTION
The main attraction The National Archives of Estonia found in StarWind VSAN was the chance to avoid purchasing expensive new proprietary hardware. The agency did not consider other options and proceeded to testing out our solution straight away. Having seen that it achieves High Availability (HA) with only two nodes, while other vendors would require at least three to do so, the decision was adopted without deliberation. VSAN removed the complexity in operating its environment and granted constant uptime for its applications. The agency also concluded that it would save a considerable amount of funds with deploying VSAN instead of their initial plan. Thus, for a very competitive price, The National Archives of Estonia was able to create a failover cluster with StarWind VSAN, achieving HA, fault-tolerance, and flexibility instead of buying traditional storage solutions.
About the Company
The National Archives of Estonia is a government agency tasked with collecting, preserving, and documenting the history, culture, nationhood, and social conditions in Estonia. The agency preserves the Estonian cultural heritage, observe the citizens’ basic rights and duties and facilitates the transparency of its democracy.
Company Profile
Government archival agency
Contact Person
Mart Vernik,
IT Administrator