In the energy industry, production and utilization sites vary from gigantic to small and can be mainland, very remote, or even off-shore. Smooth delivery of services and operations security are critical. Space and IT-savvy personnel are at a premium. StarWind solves all those pain points and more with just one 2-node SDS solution that will hold up even if one node fails, is simple to manage, and unrestricted at scale!

Find out how you can ensure flawless fault tolerance, ease of operation, and flexible scalability with minimum hardware footprint at any of your energy sites, from Enterprise to Edge, thanks to StarWind.

StarWind Giveaway Round 2 Yet another competition of luck has concluded.
Now, it's time for Round 3!
Follow the link to learn about the details of the new giveaway and try your chance at winning a Synology 6 Bay NAS DiskStation DS1621+!

With new vSphere versions, it’s not just about one-click upgrades. There are various things an admin has to account for in good time. You need to consider the interoperability of other VMware products and other existing infrastructure components, which upgrade path to take, back-in-time upgrade threats, developing the upgrade plan, and necessary post-upgrade procedures.

Read the article by Alex Samoylenko, a virtualization pro, discussing the key things you need to take care of before upgrading your VMware vSphere to a new version.

StarWind Virtual SAN is a lightweight piece of software that entirely removes the need for physical shared storage while maintaining all the SAN benefits. With StarWind, businesses also don’t need a witness: constant uptime and fault tolerance are ensured with 2 nodes already. Works with any industry-standard hypervisor and has no HCLs.

Check out how real-life users turn everything StarWind VSAN offers to their maximum benefit with minimum costs, bypassing the outdated need for physical shared storage.

AWS (Amazon Web Services) Certification is becoming close to mandatory based on the modern high market demand for cloud and DevOps. However, the rules and levels may be somewhat confusing. There are several paths available within the program, each one training in a specific element. Therefore, guidance from an alum will be of great help.

Read the new article by Mikhail Rodionov, a K2 and Microsoft specialist, on AWS Certification, its levels, challenges, prices, why you would need it, and where to start.

Looking to set up a remote office? NextCloud is an open-source solution that simplifies access to necessary data and secures it on your personal cloud-based workspace. You can sync, access, and share that data fast among your chosen devices. No more need to worry that files are out of reach or outdated anymore.

Read the article by Karim Buzdar on how to set up NextCloud with LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP) on Ubuntu 20.04 to organize a productivity platform on your self-hosted home system.

Virtual SAN from StarWind is now officially certified with Veeam Backup & Replication V11! This means that StarWind is perfectly compatible with all the latest features Veeam has to offer. In addition, the certification entails that Veeam B&R infrastructure built with StarWind VSAN is qualified for support from both Veeam and StarWind.

Check out the Veeam knowledge-base article for details on the testing environment used to test StarWind VSAN and other certification minutiae.

The USS Midway Museum had 4-node Hyper-V failover cluster with Windows Server 2012. The organization wanted to create shared storage using commodity hardware. However, storage vendors charged exorbitant prices for outdated methods of SAN storage maintenance and imposed unprofitable support plans. With StarWind, the USS Midway Museum received shared storage that can be easily deployed on the existing commodity hardware without additional support costs.

Find out how the USS Midway Museum received such a desired high availability (HA) for its applications and saved more than $80,000 on hardware and software expenses with StarWind.

StarWind Backup Appliance (BA) has been created to remove the cumbersome need to calculate backup window schedules and the bottleneck of slow-performing backups. The solution brings near-instant backup and recovery, in addition to a transparent, future-proof architecture by combining all-NVMe storage, other best commodity hardware components, your hypervisor of choice, and a StarWind SDS engine.

Learn more about the new StarWind All-NVMe Backup Appliance and how it redefines the role and functioning of a modern backup infrastructure by clicking the link below.

StarWind and all its products are available for purchase and full support in Australia and in the Asia-Pacific region! We’re shipping worldwide, as well as providing ProActive Support, AI Health Monitoring, and Backup Status Vigilance 24/7/365 round the globe! Enterprise-grade hyperconvergence at SMB price for everyone and everywhere is what we’re all about.

See this video on IT Brief Australia where Orest Lesyuk, a StarWind Solutions Engineer, provides a short intro on StarWind and how you can start benefiting from our products from anywhere in the world and any time zone today.

DBeaver is an open-source, free multi-platform database management software. It’s also an SQL client for developers and database administrators that has a user-friendly UI. It can be used as an alternative for MySQL-Workbench and PGAdmin to work with various databases, like MySQL, PostgreSQL, Greenplum, and others.

Read the new guide by Karim Buzdar on how to properly install and configure DBeaver on Linux to help make your database administration routine more simplified.

AVR, Inc., an American computer software company, struggled to achieve a smooth operation of its electronic billing system, not for all the money in the world. But the company couldn't get its top-priority issue done having non-clustered Hyper-V servers with no HA functionality. Using StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN), AVR creates a clustered environment with HA and redundancy functionalities, reducing downtime to zero.

Find out how AVR ensures a smooth operation of its electronic billing system by building an HA storage cluster powered by StarWind VSAN.

Kerberos is an authentication protocol that has been around since Windows Server 2000. It is the gold standard for on-premises Active Directory authentication. Azure, however, didn’t support it. To further enhance the security and interoperability of its environments, Microsoft announced changes to Kerberos and its Azure Active Directory compatibility.

Read the article by Brandon Lee, a virtualization expert, on the history behind Kerberos, its recent changes in functionality, and Kerberos compatibility for Azure Active Directory.

There is a huge list of servers one could use as backup targets. So much so, that there isn’t really one right option. It depends on an organization’s requirements, wants, and needs. However, like with many things in life, there’s always a go-to scenario. We’ve distilled the necessary tips and configurations for your reading pleasure in a short form.

Read the new article by Didier Van Hoye, a Microsoft MVP, on the server essentials you need to know to build a balanced hardened Veeam repository on Dell R740XD2.

Cockpit graphical user interface (GUI) provides all the basic configs for Linux server management without the need for text-based commands. Working in an enterprise, for an admin, will most likely mean working in a heterogeneous IT environment. Frequently, Windows services will be primary, so managing a Linux server can be a bit of a drag for someone who's not too well-versed in it.

Read the new article by Vladan Seget, a virtualization expert, on how to manage Linux servers using the simplistic Cockpit web-based GUI.

Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) is one of the tools you can use to install the vendor’s operating systems, including Windows Server, Windows 10 and 11. You will be able to personalize the deployment configuration and then carry it out over your business' network. Once you’ve worked on the desired setup, the rest is straightforward.

Read the new article by Vladan Seget, a virtualization expert, on how to deploy Windows 11 in your organization over the network using Microsoft Deployment Toolkit.

On tomorrow's (1/19) webinar Orest Lesyuk (Solutions Engineer, StarWind) will focus on Disaster Recovery in modern small- and midsize enterprises (SMEs).

Prolonged downtime and data loss can result in high costs and reputational damage. Approaching DR seriously helps reduce damage and recover production services quickly and effectively.

Register now and tune in tomorrow to learn more about the vital factors for proper disaster recovery implementation, including Hyper-V Replica, vSphere Replication, and Veeam B&R.

Looking for a powerful network monitoring tool to keep your data center running smoothly? Datacenter admins, this one's for you - Observium Community Edition, an open-source tool. Discover how Observium simplifies network monitoring, offering real-time insights, automatic device discovery, scalability, and more.

Find out in the new article by Vladan Seget, a virtualization expert, for StarWind.

Tape backup and offsite vaulting was probably the last process in IT relying on regular manual labor. Until now. We have a solution that replaces your physical tape process with one that offers fully-automated backup, offsite vaulting, and recovery. The solution also fulfills the 3-2-1-0 backup strategy with your Veeam backups securely stored offsite in cost-efficient Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage. All this in just 3 simple steps and zero changes to the established tape backup process thanks to StarWind Storage Gateway for Backblaze.

Want to see how to do set it up in less than 5 minutes? Join us for the upcoming webinar “3 Easy Steps to replace LTO with Backblaze B2 in Veeam” on June 6, 8:00 pm.

Register here

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