Case Study: Farmers & Merchants Bank achieves high I/O performance, HA and $60,000 hardware savings with StarWind Virtual SAN (StarWind Software)

Farmers & Merchants Bank gets a high intensity of I/O operations saving $60,000 on hardware with StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN)

Farmers & Merchants Bank, a Nebraska-based financial institution offering business and consumer banking, needed a shared storage solution to protect critical financial data across primary and disaster-recovery sites. With two Hyper-V hosts per site and an expensive Dell EqualLogic SAN delivering heavy I/O, the bank required high availability and fault tolerance but found Storage Spaces Direct unreliable on Server 2019 and impractical to downgrade.

The bank deployed StarWind Virtual SAN on Windows Server 2019, avoiding additional SAN hardware while achieving the required IOPS, HA and FT. The software-defined solution simplified administration, delivered strong vendor support, and produced roughly $60,000 in upfront hardware savings.

Farmers & Merchants Bank

Joseph Havlat

IT Director