Business challenge
Mt. Hood Meadows operates on a special-use permit on the Mt. Hood National Forest, offering visitors some of the most spectacular skiing and snowboarding in the Northwest. The resort is just 90 minutes away from Portland, and offers incredible panoramic views halfway across Oregon from its 7,300-foot elevation.
Mt. Hood Meadows previously used a large physical SAN in their primary datacenter to host all its production workloads for multiple applications, including critical point-of-sale systems. The SAN was outdated and becoming increasingly difficult to manage, maintain and update. Mt. Hood Meadows wanted to eliminate proprietary hardware dependency and move to a virtualized solution that was more flexible, scalable, affordable and easier to configure.
They initially chose HPE StoreVirtual VSA to update their infrastructure, but the product reached the end of support. Mt. Hood Meadows began to review alternative solutions to replace the current hosts that were utilizing HPE StoreVirtual. While they considered StarWind and VMware vSAN, StorMagic easily rose to the top as the product support was fast and accurate, and the pricing was reasonable and competitive compared to the alternatives.
Solution
In 2020, StorMagic’s SvSAN virtual SAN software was named by HPE as a replacement to HPE’s retiring StoreVirtual solution. In comparing the two solutions, Mt. Hood Meadows found that StoreVirtual VSAs required three servers for high availability compared to StorMagic’s lightweight two-server requirement, reducing their hardware requirement and associated costs by 33 percent. Not only were they able to reduce their cluster size by one server during the migration, but SvSAN also provided an easy way to integrate an SSD caching tier to the environment, and a simultaneous multi-path IO – both of these features increased the performance of all the applications.
Additionally, Mt. Hood Meadows has realized a performance boost by updating their hardware from 1GB to 10GB network cards for iSCSI in their HPE DL380 servers. They also use Veeam for offsite data protection and backup in a second location and then send primary data files to the cloud for storage, as part of a comprehensive 3-2-1 best practices solution.
Why StorMagic
- Reduced Hardware Dependency: Mt. Hood Meadows initially eliminated the need for a large physical SAN, and later was able to reduce their new virtualized configuration from a three-server solution to just two servers thanks to SvSAN’s lightweight requirements.
- StoreVirtual Replacement: SvSAN is available as a validated end to-end solution, through HPE and HPE-authorized resellers, as a replacement for StoreVirtual. SvSAN is specifically designed to simplify edge sites, enabling high availability using any two HPE servers. SvSAN is a lightweight virtual SAN, which complements the HPE ProLiant and Edgeline ranges.
- Competitive Price Point: SvSAN dramatically lowers costs by eliminating physical SANs, converging compute and storage into a lightweight commodity server footprint. A complete 2-node cluster can be purchased for less than $10,000.
- Exceptional Support: Mt. Hood Meadows found StorMagic’s technical services and support team to be knowledgeable, responsive and even noted they were the best virtual SAN industry support team they’ve encountered.
Technical Configuration
| SvSAN License | SvSAN 12TB Platinum with Predictive Storage Caching add-on |
| Servers | HPE DL380 Gen 10 |
| CPU | 1x Intel Xeon Gold 5220 CPU per host with 18 cores per CPU |
| Memory | 256GB |
| Storage Capacity | 8TB |
| Disk Configuration | 9x 2.4G SAS 10K per host plus 2 x 800GB SSD; HPE hardware RAID; hot spare disks |
| Networking | VSAs iSCSI connections are direct connections over 10GbE patches. The management interface is over the LAN, 1GbE, 3 network cards per server |
| Hypervisor | VMware vSphere |
| Applications | SQL Server for retail point of sale, Micros F&B point of sale (Sybase), Atlassian Confluence and Jira servers, Sage MAS100 ERP, Exchange Server, ShoreTel VoIP, Unifi Wireless infrastructure, etc. |
| VMs | 10+ VMS running on Win2012R2, Linux and Windows |
| Data Protection | Veeam Backup |
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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