Bloemsec eliminates single points of failure, increases uptime with StorMagic SvSAN

Business Challenge

Bloemsec provides professional, all-inclusive security services, including armed response, guarding, dedicated patrol and video surveillance. The company was founded in 2002 and its mission is to ensure the safety of Bloemfontein’s citizens through excellent security solutions.

Bloemsec previously used standalone, nonshared storage in their datacenter. The environment lacked redundancy, required manual failovers and caused the headache of downtime during failover events. The network was complicated, and lacked the reliability to support Bloemsec’s mission-critical systems.

The company wanted to add high availability, high reliability and continuous access to video surveillance footage with a virtualized environment. Two South African-based IT consultants reviewed and collaborated on Bloemsec’s environment: Drive Control Corporation (DCC), a specialist distributor of IT products and official StorMagic partner, and First Technology Central (Pty) Limited, a single-source provider of IT products and services. The two advisors recommended a StorMagic virtual SAN solution to boost availability at Bloemsec.

Solution

Following DCC and First Technology’s recommendations, Bloemsec deployed StorMagic SvSAN as a high availability, hyperconverged solution deployed on a Microsoft Hyper-V failover cluster. SvSAN provides redundant storage between the two compute nodes. SvSAN was very easy to set up, and offered an unmatched level of simplicity and affordability compared to other virtual SAN solutions on the market. StorMagic was able to streamline Bloemsec’s environment down to two nodes, which reduced their need for more hardware and controlled their costs.

Bloemsec has removed the single points of failure that were present in the previous environment and greatly increased uptime since installing SvSAN. Acronis Backup is used to protect virtual machines and all data is sent from the primary datacenter for backup in the cloud.

Why StorMagic

Bloemsec chose StorMagic SvSAN for several reasons, including:

• Ease of setup – SvSAN can be deployed as a single server, simple 2-node cluster, or multinode cluster, with the flexibility to meet changing capacity and performance needs. This is achieved by adding additional capacity to existing servers or by growing the SvSAN cluster, without impacting service availability.
• Cost-effective – Eliminates physical SANs by converging compute and storage into a lightweight commodity server footprint thereby dramatically lowering costs.
• Added redundancy – StorMagic offers high availability and can be kept online during routine maintenance. In contrast, physical SANs must be taken offline to run maintenance operations and routine updates. With SvSAN, downtime has been virtually eliminated.
• Overall simplicity of the product – StorMagic was founded on the concept that IT equipment had become too complicated to deploy and manage, and its core mission is to make the complex simple. SvSAN is running at approximately 1,000 customer sites, some with dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of locations.

Technical Configuration

Server Configuration (Per Server)

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