BarCharts Consolidates Their Storage Infrastructure While Being Cost-Effective With DataON and Hyper-V

BarCharts is the premier publisher of quick-reference materials to assist customers worldwide in accomplishing their educational and professional goals. The company started out by running Windows 2008 as its IT infrastructure and consolidate into a single cluster shared storage platform based on Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2 with the use of Storage Spaces.

The challenge that BarCharts faced was that they needed to consolidate the storage infrastructure while being cost effective and also supporting Hyper-V core implementation with minimum down time. The storage solution needed to be cost-effective as well, highly available scalable and a simpler set up than the clustered shared volume storage solution for virtual application. They also looked for a vendor that focused on deploying Microsoft certified software-defined storage with a Cluster-in-a-Box (CiB) Hyper-Converged platform with good hardware features. They wanted the storage platform to serve as the primary near line storage for exchange and SQL applications supporting 6VM and 3.5TB+ of storage capacity.

The Solution: DataON Hardware Appliance For Shared Storage in a Condensed Footprint

DataON Microsoft Hyper-Converged Cluster-in-a-Box (CiB) storage platform engineered from the ground up to scale highly-available compute and shared storage services optimized predictable scalability as a turnkey configuration.

Customer Benefits

According to BarCharts the deployment experience was easy and simple to setup, and they could see a huge increase in performance compared to the previous solution. By consolidating all the compute and storage in a single hyper-converged storage appliance, the overall hardware footprint was reduced to a single 2U system and the company could manage all virtualize VM on a single box with compute nodes and shared storage. The space saving also translated to less electricity, cabling and cost maintenance which had the cost at less than 50% of the competing storage solutions. With one of the key differentiation of the DataON CiB being the internal 10GbE heart beat connection between the two nodes for better resiliency and secured fail-over capability.