Case Study: Lake Erie College achieves cost-effective hardware refresh and academic data protection with StarWind Software's HyperConverged Appliance (HCA)

Lake Erie College replaces overage hardware and ensures academic data safety with StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA)

Lake Erie College, a small private institution in Painesville, Ohio, faced aging servers running VMware ESXi with no replication or redundancy, putting academic data at risk. With a limited IT budget, the college needed a cost-effective hyperconverged solution to replace outdated hardware, improve performance, and add failover and data protection.

The college adopted StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA) and moved to Microsoft Hyper-V, replacing legacy kit and achieving hyperconvergence within budget. The deployment delivered reliable backups, Hyper‑V live migration to minimize downtime, and a high-performance, highly available, fault-tolerant environment with low configuration and maintenance overhead—improving performance, redundancy, and peace of mind.

Lake Erie College

Brad Luhta

Director of Information Technology