Computer Consultant Association

Background

Founded in 1997, the Computer Consultant Association (CCA) has built a strong reputation in Poland as an IT engineering and consulting company specializing in system design, implementation, and support. Over the years, the company became a trusted Microsoft Certified Partner and gained expertise across a wide range of vendors including HPE, Cisco, Dell, and QNAP.

Beyond IT consulting and integration, CCA has also developed its own SaaS platform, WiFi-Spot.net, launched in 2010. Today, it powers thousands of Wi-Fi hotspots across public events, transportation, and enterprises, requiring the company to maintain extremely high levels of availability, scalability, and efficiency.

Challenges

For years, CCA relied on an HP Enterprise SAN iSCSI solution to deliver storage. But as demand increased, performance dropped, and the aging system became harder to maintain with confidence.

“We reached a point where the SAN no longer kept up with our workloads,” explains Tomaszewski, CEO of CCA. “It wasn’t just about performance—reliability was becoming a concern, and the cost of expanding or maintaining it didn’t make sense anymore.”

At the same time, CCA was managing other HA file systems like GlusterFS and Longhorn. While functional, they added layers of complexity and operational cost.

CCA needed a cost-effective, trustworthy, and modern High Availability solution that would:

• Deliver performance comparable to enterprise SAN at a lower cost per terabyte.
• Guarantee uptime of at least 99.995% for critical services.
• Simplify management while reducing operational overhead.
• Support high-performance Kubernetes deployments and future AI data workloads.

Solution

After evaluating options, CCA turned to QNAP High Availability. Two QNAP TS-h1277AXU-RP NAS units were deployed as a high availability RAID-1 cluster, connected via dedicated 10GbE heartbeat links and tied into the datacenter’s 40GbE core network. This architecture provided a single cluster IP address, ensuring uninterrupted access to all storage services in the event of a failover.

“From the start, QNAP impressed us with its combination of performance and affordability,” says Tomaszewski. “We could build a highly available, enterprise-grade cluster without the overhead of traditional SAN solutions.”

The solution was carefully designed with security and efficiency in mind. Network traffic was segmented into VLANs to separate individual services and enhance security. All bare-metal servers were connected to the core switches using either 40GbE uplinks or dual 10GbE links, maximizing throughput and redundancy.

Built on this foundation, the QNAP HA cluster supports a variety of critical storage services, including:

• Backup SMB shares: Centralized storage for VM backups and database snapshots, ensuring reliable recovery and streamlined data protection.
• NFS persistent storage: High-performance storage for Kubernetes clusters, powering critical workloads and web applications.
• Dedicated NFS shares: Shared storage for Linux VMs and clustered services, improving scalability and service resilience.
• iSCSI targets: HA-enabled volumes supporting Hyper-V clusters, ensuring smooth virtualization and database operations.

Thanks to QuTS hero’s ZFS architecture with caching, CCA achieved higher performance while using more cost-efficient drives, and simplified volume management compared to its legacy systems. The entire setup—including decommissioning the legacy SAN and migrating workloads—was completed by CCA’s engineers in just one week.

Result

The switch to QNAP HA storage transformed operations for CCA. Failover testing confirmed seamless continuity, while performance easily outpaced the legacy SAN and native Kubernetes HA file services.

“Failover worked exactly as we hoped—fast, smooth, and invisible to end-users,” notes Tomaszewski. “That gives us the confidence to keep scaling our services without worrying about downtime.”

Key outcomes included:

• Enterprise reliability: HA performance exceeded the 99.995% uptime requirement.
• Optimized costs: A lower TB-per-cost ratio and reduced maintenance overhead cut TCO significantly.
• Simplified operations: Consolidating multiple HA systems into one streamlined solution freed up valuable engineering time.
• Future readiness: The system is already positioned for AI data storage and disaster recovery expansion.