Business challenge
FASTER S.r.l., founded in 1984 and based in Italy, is one of the leading European manufacturers of a wide range of Laboratory equipment. FASTER Supplies top-quality instruments to hospitals, universities, pharmaceutical, biotech, diagnostic, veterinary, food & beverage industries.
FASTER previously used a physical SAN, but had constant problems with performance, reliability and overall hardware issues. The standalone server was ageing, and approaching eight years old. The company began to look for a virtual hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) solution that was easy to set up and use, that could dramatically reduce the costs associated with physical SANs.
Solution
StorMagic fully replaced FASTER’s old servers and physical SAN and overhauled their datacenter with a hyperconverged infrastructure solution based on two Huawei FusionServer Pros. The manufacturer further protects its data through replication with Commvault backup software in the primary datacenter. SvSAN is configured to provide storage for the hyperconverged infrastructure environment, and the VMs are protected by storage in business continuity.
StorMagic was simple to setup and has been very easy to use since day one. Reliability in the environment has been greatly improved, and costs reduced since they made the switch to SvSAN. The virtual HCI infrastructure delivers more than 100 percent performance improvements, resiliency through mirroring between the two servers, and is backed by StorMagic’s excellent support services.
Solutions integrator DI.GI. International S.p.A. identified StorMagic as the ideal partner to address the customers’ needs, recommending StorMagic as the most suitable solution, considering client budget and performance requirements. With DI.GI’s help, FASTER was able to completely decommission its outdated physical SAN with StorMagic SvSAN. The company has reduced costs by moving to a hyperconverged environment, and its performance rates have improved by more than 100 percent.
Why StorMagic
- Simple to Use: SvSAN’s installation process was fast, and is simple to manage day to day.
- Cost Effective: FASTER eliminated their physical SANs with SvSAN, which converges compute and storage into a lightweight commodity server footprint, thereby dramatically lowering costs.
- High Performance : SvSAN creates highly available shared storage across two nodes. FASTER has improved performance rates by more than 100% since making the switch to StorMagic.
- Superior Support: From configuration and installation to customer service, StorMagic has met and exceeded FASTER’s needs.
- Ideal for Manufacturing Environments: Industrial sites that move their data to the edge decrease processing time and reduce overall data storage costs. StorMagic provides the high availability and performance capabilities that are quickly becoming a requirement for industrial environments.
Technical Configuration
Server Configuration (Per Server)
| SvSAN License | SvSAN 6TB Gold |
| Hardware | Two Huawei FusionServer Pro 1288H V5 |
| CPU | 2 CPU with 8 cores |
| Memory | 128GB |
| Storage Capacity | 3.2TB |
| Disk Configuration | 2X300 GB SAS 10K + 4X1.2TB SAS 10K, RAID-5 (single parity) |
| Networking | 10GbE for VMs onsite; 8 network cards per server |
| Hypervisor | VMware vSphere Essentials Kit Plus |
| Applications | Microsoft Active Directory Domain services including File Server, Printer Server, graphical application (CAD), Domain Controller and Backup Media Agent |
| Guest VM Operating Systems | Windows Server 2016 standard edition |
| Data Protection | Commvault Complete(™) Backup & Recovery |
Simple
Provides a true ‘set and forget’ solution for any environment using centralized deployment and management – whether for thousands of sites or just one.
Cost-Effective
Eliminates physical SANs by converging compute and storage into a lightweight commodity server footprint thereby dramatically lowering costs.
Flexible
Delivers on today’s performance needs leveraging any CPU and storage type whilst avoiding over-provisioning with the confidence of scaling for tomorrow’s demands.
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