Mt. Hood Meadows Ski Resort Chooses StorMagic

StorMagic, Inc. announced that Mt. Hood Meadows Ski Resort has added StorMagic SvSAN to update and virtualize its environment and has since achieved a performance improvement and realized a 33% cost reduction.

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 The SAN was outdated and becoming increasingly difficult to manage, maintain and update. The user 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 rose to the top as the product support was fast and accurate, and the pricing was reasonable and competitive compared to the alternatives.

“Mt. Hood Meadows chose StorMagic for three primary reasons: SvSAN’s rich features, the solution’s competitive price point and the company support team’s vast knowledge and fast response time,” said Paul Thomson, director of IT, Mt. Hood Meadows Ski Resort. “StorMagic support is the best that we have experienced with any virtual SAN provider. The StorMagic team is extremely knowledgeable, engaging, quick to respond and helpful, even with the smallest details.”                     

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 HA compared to StorMagic’s lightweight two-server requirement, reducing their hardware requirement and associated costs by 33%. 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.

Case study: Mt. Hood Meadows Migrates to StorMagic SvSAN from HPE StoreVirtual for Point-of-Sale Data Management