Case Study: Semel Institute achieves high availability and major cost savings with StarWind Software's Virtual SAN

StarWind isCsI San Frees Semel Institute from Failures and Downtime and Saves Its Budget

The Jane and Terry Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior needed a more reliable, scalable and cost‑effective storage platform. Their traditional Fibre Channel SAN could not keep up with exploding data, server sprawl (over 50 physical servers) and the growing needs of roughly 3,000 users, while rising maintenance, power and cooling costs prompted the IT team to look for a solution that would support both Hyper‑V and VMware and enable an active‑active failover design.

They deployed StarWind Virtual SAN, replacing the FC array with a hardware‑agnostic, easy‑to‑manage shared storage layer. The institute built an Active‑Active failover cluster with asynchronous replication, CDP/snapshots and high‑speed caching; deduplication reduced disk usage by 80% and 60% of servers are now virtualized on StarWind. The result: continuous availability with no single point of failure, a scalable SAN, and significant savings in hardware, space, energy and administration.

Semel Institute

Jason Liu

System Administrator