City of Süßen relies on StorMagic SvHCI

The customer

Süßen is a city with more than 10,000 inhabitants in the district of Göppingen in Baden-Württemberg, Germany. Süßen operates a total of 13 facilities in the city area, including an indoor swimming pool, the city library, the city archive, as well as installations such as solar panels and an environmentally-friendly pellet heating system.

The challenge

The small but powerful IT team of the city of Süßen was faced with the challenge of finding a reliable and cost-effective alternative to the until then free VMware licence, which had been discontinued by Broadcom after its acquisition of VMware in November 2023. With limited resources and the need to ensure smooth operation of the city’s IT infrastructure, finding a stable solution was a top priority.

“Perpetual software licenses have been one of the primary components in the VMware infrastructure software suite for years,” said Bruce Kornfeld, Chief Product Officer at StorMagic. “With Broadcom preventing customers from continuing to use these licences for free, many end users are now struggling to afford the transition to subscription and as such, are looking for alternative hypervisors that are better suited to their needs.”

The solution

For almost two decades, StorMagic has been enabling organisations of all types and sizes to use, protect, and manage their applications and data at and near the edge. Its solutions are easy to implement and maintain, and eliminate downtime to provide value anytime, anywhere. StorMagic’s solutions are simple, reliable, and cost-effective, without sacrificing enterprise-class features, serving customers from SMBs to Fortune 500 companies with one to thousands of sites.

The city of Süßen has been relying on StorMagic SvSAN – the simple hyperconverged storage solution – for years to make its central data storage in its main data centre highly available. The city was looking for an alternative hypervisor to VMware, and worked with StorMagic to deploy

its latest product offering, SvHCI.

Launched to combat the chaos caused by Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware, StorMagic SvHCI combines a hypervisor and virtual networking with its proven virtual storage technology used by thousands of customers around the world. This full-stack HCI (hyperconverged infrastructure) solution is purpose-built for edge and small- to medium-sized business (SMB) environments and includes StorMagic’s in-house 24x7x365 customer support.

Following implementation with the city of Süßen, this hyperconverged system is now running on two Dell R-Series servers in a cluster of two nodes with 10TB of mirrored storage, at Süßen’s public indoor pool facility. StorMagic SvHCI was chosen because of the existing positive experience with StorMagic SvSAN in the VMware environment, which formed a solid basis for confidence in the new implementation, as well as the attractive cost-performance ratio and the ease of implementation and management.

The technical configuration comprises:

2 node SvHCI licence

2x Dell R-Series servers

10 Virtual Machines

2 CPUs with 8 cores each

128 GB RAM working memory

10TB storage capacity

2.5-inch SSDs, Raid 5 disc configuration

10 Gbit with HPE Aruba 1960 network

Veeam Backup & Recovery backup partner

The benefits

StorMagic SvHCI provides a radically easy-to-manage and reliable HCI software solution for different locations and applications. It offers comprehensive virtualization at low cost and is the perfect replacement for the installation previously used by the city of Süßen. The solution fulfils today's performance requirements, avoids overprovisioning, and guarantees the requirements of tomorrow with simple scaling, all with a convincing price-performance ratio that stands out in comparison to other solutions currently on the market.

SvHCI enables the city's IT team to deploy quickly and easily and offers an intuitive user interface that significantly reduces the administrative burden. As a result, the city of Süßen was able to organise its IT landscape more efficiently than before and focus on its core tasks.

The fast response time and the high quality of the solutions provided by StorMagic Support, combined with the personal support provided by a dedicated regional contact, contributed significantly to the success of the project. The independent installation of SvHCI by the city’s IT team made it possible to create a customised IT solution to run the public indoor pool’s applications for its building, heating, cash register, and inventory management systems. SvHCI ensures reliable and highly available operations, which is essential in ensuring that the general public have a positive experience when visiting the pool.

“We have great confidence in StorMagic, as we have been using SvSAN successfully in our main data centre for a long time,” said Stefan Rieder, IT architect at the city of Süßen. “The new hyperconverged SvHCI software has a significantly better price-performance ratio compared to competing options on the market. SvHCI was therefore the perfect replacement for VMware for us.”

“We’re delighted that we’ve been able to help the city of Süßen transition to StorMagic SvHCI,” said Kornfeld. “The city’s leaders need to provide well-operated and cost-effective infrastructure for their citizens, and we’re pleased that their positive experience with SvSAN has led to our expanded relationship.”

“StorMagic has seen a significant increase in customer enquiries related to migrating off of VMware since the acquisition,” added Susan Odle, Chief Growth Officer at StorMagic. “We are uniquely positioned to help customers because both SvSAN and SvHCI can rip and replace VMware on existing hardware on as few as two nodes. In many cases, we're able to do this within the budget envelope of long-standing VMware maintenance contracts. With an outage rate of 0.03% across 50,000 nodes in the last two years, our technology is proven to deliver simply reliable virtualized IT infrastructure to customers running business critical applications at the edge.”