Case Study: CMS Internet achieves affordable, highly available disaster-recovery storage with StarWind Software's Virtual SAN

CMS Internet Chooses Starwind SAN Software over EMC Clariion ISCSI SAN

CMS Internet, a Central Michigan hosting and IT services provider, needed an affordable, highly available storage solution to run nearly 40 VMware VMs that power its data center. With strict SLAs and a requirement to mirror storage offsite across town for disaster recovery, CMS found traditional SAN appliances like EMC CLARiiON prohibitively expensive and sought a cost-effective HA alternative.

CMS deployed StarWind Virtual SAN software on industry-standard SuperMicro servers (RAID10 with ten 1TB SAS/15k drives per node), creating a two-node HA cluster with automatic failover to the offsite node. The solution delivered the required redundancy and eliminated single points of failure at roughly $3,000 per HA node, met CMS’s reliability and networking separation needs, and provided strong pre- and post-sales support.

CMS Internet

Andy Kasdorf

Network Infrastructure Engineer