Case Study: University of Oxford achieves high availability and zero downtime with StorMagic SvSAN

Achieving high availability with a simple, lightweight, low cost solution using StorMagic SvSAN within the University of Oxford

The University of Oxford’s Faculty of Classics needed a simple, low‑cost way to provide high availability for its critical services — about 20 virtual machines supporting the faculty website, research projects, printing and administration. IT Officer Diggory Gray was tasked with finding a lightweight solution that avoided expensive SAN hardware and heavy resource overhead; he selected StorMagic and its SvSAN virtual storage appliance to meet those requirements.

The faculty deployed StorMagic SvSAN on two Dell servers (each with 128 GB RAM, 2×800 GB SSD and 6×1.2 TB SAS) presenting 3.2 TB usable storage. StorMagic’s lightweight design (requiring only ~1 GB memory before caching) and built‑in failover/failback let the team patch or upgrade one server at a time with virtually no downtime, keeping all 20 VMs running, eliminating user reboots during updates, cutting operating and hardware costs, and delivering significant time savings for staff.

University of Oxford

Diggory Gray

IT Officer