Case Study: Hillis-Carnes Engineering Associates, Inc. achieves zero downtime and increased data resiliency with StarWind Software's HyperConverged Appliance

Hillis-Carnes Engineering Associates increases data resiliency and minimizes downtime with StarWind

Hillis-Carnes Engineering Associates, a Maryland-based geotechnical engineering firm with 30 years’ experience, was operating four standalone Hyper-V servers and faced constant risk of production loss from hardware failures. They evaluated traditional SANs (which would have required two units for redundancy) but opted for a more cost-effective software-defined storage approach that could run on just two physical nodes.

The company deployed a 2-node StarWind HyperConverged Appliance with StarWind Virtual SAN, integrating it with the four existing servers to form a 6-node cluster. This centralized storage management increased fault tolerance, simplified Windows licensing, and—after about 12 months in production—has delivered reliable infrastructure with zero downtime reported.

Hillis-Carnes Engineering Associates, Inc.

Ho-Ching Yung

IT Director