Cass County Government saves over $100,000 in hardware replacement costs by migrating to an all-NVMe storage solution with StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN)

CHALLENGE

Before deploying StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN), Cass County Government relied on Dell EMC Unity and Hyper- V for virtualization, but the infrastructure was approaching its end of life, leading to concerns about resiliency and ongoing support costs. The existing hardware was no longer meeting their needs, and upgrading or maintaining it would have been prohibitively expensive.

The IT department evaluated multiple options, including LINBIT, Ceph, StorMagic, and Nimble, but found that these alternatives either lacked the flexibility they needed or came at a higher cost. Without a cost- effective, scalable solution, their infrastructure was at risk of failure, which could have resulted in operational disruptions.

By providing a solid software platform that was hardware agnostic to the point of being able to run on our choice of hardware, StarWind allowed us to purchase double our existing storage footprint and migrate to an all-NVMe solution at a dramatically lower cost than other solutions.

Bob Henderson, Director of IT

SOLUTION

Cass County Government chose StarWind VSAN because it allowed upgrading its infrastructure without being tied to expensive, proprietary hardware. With StarWind, the institution was able to migrate to an all-NVMe storage solution and effectively double its existing storage footprint at a fraction of the cost of other options. The system’s ease of use and flexibility meant the transition was smooth.

The new setup powered by StarWind VSAN has performed reliably, and the government estimates they saved over $100,000 in hardware replacement costs. StarWind ProActive Premium Support made the entire process even more seamless.