Case Study: Chapel Hill Presbyterian Church achieves affordable enterprise VMware shared storage and disaster recovery with StarWind Software

Chapel Hill chooses StarWind iSCSI SAN Software for shared storage

Chapel Hill Presbyterian Church, a busy congregation in Gig Harbor, WA, needed a reliable, affordable shared storage solution to support its VMware environment and critical systems (membership data, scheduling, email). With existing direct-attached storage full, limited budget, and failed attempts with other devices and open-source options, the IT team required a simple, compatible way to enable disaster recovery and improve uptime.

They deployed StarWind Virtual SAN, repurposing a three‑year‑old HP server to provide enterprise VMware SAN features without buying proprietary hardware. The setup was quick, inexpensive, and delivered strong performance, synchronous mirroring and live snapshots for near-zero downtime, seamless migrations, and manual failover to a second ESX host. The church met current storage needs, improved business continuity, and plans to expand the solution and move Exchange offsite for disaster recovery.

Chapel Hill Presbyterian Church

Scott Hagadorn

Director of Information Technology