Case Study: Goshen Community Schools achieves fault-tolerant, scalable shared storage and major cost savings with StarWind Software (VSAN)

Goshen Community Schools gets extremely fast shared storage with the components it wanted thanks to StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN)

Goshen Community Schools, a K–12 public district in Indiana serving over 6,600 students and 1,000+ staff, needed a fault-tolerant, performance-optimized shared storage solution to handle student records and other regulated data. Their existing Dell Compellent SAN with VMware ESXi was a single point of failure, and limited budgets made a costly SAN upgrade (estimated at $40,000) impractical as performance degraded and downtime risk grew.

After testing and deploying StarWind Virtual SAN on existing hardware, the district implemented a scalable, highly available storage cluster without buying expensive proprietary components. The project avoided the $40k upgrade, cost less than that to build the full SAN (servers, storage, and StarWind), and delivered the required fault tolerance, flexibility, and improved performance while allowing incremental upgrades with minimal disruption.

Goshen Community Schools

Branden Beachy

Network Administrator