The Newtron Group cuts servers by 4x and saves $200K on hardware by creating a highly available IT infrastructure around StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN)

CHALLENGE

Before deploying StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN), the Newtron Group used 7 Gateway compute nodes with Hitachi SAN on physical Windows 2003 servers with Hyper-V. The lack of support for an active-active SAN solution from Microsoft caused redundancy and high availability (HA) issues. Additionally, maintaining this setup was becoming increasingly cumbersome and costly.

Considering an alternative, the company evaluated HPE StoreVirtual VSA but found it too expensive and complex.

The StarWind product has been wonderful and rock-solid stable. We are so impressed with this product that it will continue to be used in our environment for the foreseeable future.

Bob Kennedy,
Company Representative

SOLUTION

StarWind VSAN allowed the Newtron Group to transition from a separate compute and storage model to a combined compute/storage model. This consolidation enabled the company to reduce its server count from nine to just two, significantly lowering maintenance costs. With StarWind VSAN, either node could seamlessly run the entire operation, enhancing flexibility and reliability. The transition to StarWind VSAN proved transformative, providing a rock-solid, stable environment.

The company renewed its contract with StarWind for three more years, saving around $200,000 over four years compared to HP.