Case Study: Alliance Engineering of Oregon achieves storage cost savings and ESXi High Availability with StarWind Software's Virtual SAN

Alliance Engineering of Oregon saved on storage hardware by creating a virtualshared storage for HA ESXi deployment with StarWind Virtual SAN

Alliance Engineering of Oregon, a Salem-based firm that designs pole-frame buildings, needed High Availability for their VMware ESXi hosts but lacked the shared storage required for HA. Purchasing dedicated SAN/NAS hardware was expensive and would add management overhead.

They implemented StarWind Virtual SAN by running StarWind on VMs (using the free Microsoft Hyper‑V Server on each ESXi host and a Windows Server 2012 R2 express VM for management) to present shared storage while retaining local fast storage for VMs. The setup delivered the shared storage needed for VMware HA without buying additional hardware, reducing costs and ongoing maintenance, and the IT manager plans to keep using StarWind for their datastores.

Alliance Engineering of Oregon

Nicholas Sharp

IT Manager