Business Challenge
Cover & Rossiter is a regional Certified Public Accounting and Advisory firm serving clients in Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Maryland. Founded in 1939, Cover & Rossiter works as a partner with its corporate clients to assist them in successful business operations, and individual clients with investing and financial planning.
Cover & Rossiter’s original infrastructure included three Dell 2970 VMware servers connected to a PowerVault iSCSI SAN. The network was outdated, non-redundant and didn’t offer enough power to run all of the required applications in the event of a server failure. Darren Wright, Cover & Rossiter’s IT consultant for 20 years, knew that he could reduce costs and add speed by moving to a hyperconverged infrastructure.
The advisory firm initially installed StarWind software in a two-server HCI configuration, but soon moved to StorMagic SvSAN due to the solution’s greater flexibility, and StorMagic’s exceptional support services.
Solution
Wright reduced his spindle count and added a FusionIO card into the replacement HPE Proliant DL385p servers to maximize CPU performance. He built one “flash-only” data store, and a separate “spinning-only” data store in the new configuration. The virtual machines running on the “spinning-only” data store do not require the speed of flash. StorMagic SvSAN virtualizes the FusionIO card as part of its seamless virtualized storage environment and the most performance sensitive applications run on this “flash-only” data store.
All company data runs on the new SvSAN solution including: SQL servers, terminal and file servers, Exchange databases, and VoIP. There are additional HPE Proliant DL385p servers that access the shared storage pool presented by SvSAN. Wright conducts live, rolling server upgrades to all of the server sites in real time – something that was not possible before. Downtime for updates and outages have been eliminated since StorMagic was added to the environment.
The servers are on a 10Gbit network with two switches to handle all the data mirroring, and the remote witness, a Raspberri Pi, is on a 1Gbit connection that resides in a separate onsite location. Veeam software is used for backup to a third server onsite with replication conducted every two to four hours and kept for two days.
Why StorMagic
Cover & Rossiter chose StorMagic SvSAN due to:
- Incredible cost savings — StorMagic is compatible with any x86 server and came in at 38 percent less expensive than buying a new SAN.
- Ease of management — With their previous configuration, management was a painful process including manual firmware updates that required downtime. With SvSAN, management is considerably simplified with no downtime required.
- Peace of mind — SvSAN runs locally onsite and eliminates common worries, like malware, ransomware and breaches, associated with offsite hybrid or cloud solutions.
Technical Configuration
Server Configuration (Per Server)
| SvSAN License | SvSAN 6TB Platinum |
| Hardware | HPE Proliant DL385p |
| CPU | Two CPU sockets with 16 cores per CPU |
| Memory | 256GB |
| Storage | Eight total disks – 3.2TB SAS-based and FusionIO 1.2TB disks |
| Networking | Three dual 10Gbit NICs per server |
| Hypervisor | VMware vSphere 6.0 with vSphere Essentials Plus Kit |
| Applications | SQL servers, terminal and file servers, Exchange databases, and VoIP |
| Data Protection | Veeam |
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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