Business needs and exceedingly rapid data growth require further infrastructure automation. Manual processes simply can’t keep up. IaC solutions leverage public cloud to describe and provide your infrastructure resources in code blocks. IaC increases app deployment speed, improves consistency, decreases human errors, reduces configuration drift and infrastructure development cost.

Read the article by Brandon Lee, a virtualization expert, on Infrastructure as Code solutions, like Terraform and Bicep, their benefits, similarities, and differences.

Rocco's Collision Center, an American auto body and collision repair services provider, needed to achieve cost reduction of its IT budget by resolving a vendor lock-in issue. The one more problem was that the company was keen on obtaining a single-pane-of-glass tool to manage and control its software resources. Implementing StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA), Rocco's Collision Center builds a hyperconverged infrastructure and achieves seamlessness when utilizing software resources, saving near $55K at that.

Find out how Rocco's Collision Center reduces IT operational expenses by creating a totally hyperconverged environment around StarWind HCA.

NVMe-oF is the modern appropriate protocol for getting the most out of NVMe drives, the fastest storage medium to date. Linux users have long been enjoying NVMe-oF, but Microsoft users have been left out. Now, StarWind has brought the power of NVMe-oF to Windows users by means of a lightweight 100% software solution.

Read the article by Volodymyr Khrystenko, a Solutions Architect, on how the performance of StarWind NVMe-oF for Windows compares to NVMe-oF on Linux.

Real-World Production Scenario: Squeezing all possible performance out of Microsoft SQL Server AGs (Availability Groups). Local NVMe Vs. RDMA-mapped (NVMe-oF) remote NVMe storage. Does the juice worth a squeeze?

The NVMe-oF is the hottest network storage trend so far. Up to now Microsoft Windows users had no access this tech due to lack of the NVMe-oF initiator for Windows. StarWind brough NVMe-oF to Widnows! Let’s see how NVMe-oF plays with Microsoft SQL Server AGs (Availability Groups) on Windows Server in the real life scenario.

Read the article to find out how local NVMe performance compares to NVMe-oF RDMA & TCP mapped storage.

Enter Engineering PTE Ltd., an Uzbek construction and engineering company, needed to ensure its 24/7 business operations by building an IT infrastructure always highly available (HA). The company was in search of virtual shared storage that would eliminate the issue of equipment incompatibility, allow replicating data in a real-time mode, and maintain high performance and HA even in the event of a complete power outage. Using StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN), Enter Engineering PTE Ltd. achieves 24/7 operation of its business and ensures HA even during a blackout.

Find out how Enter Engineering PTE Ltd. gets a high-end IT infrastructure powered by StarWind VSAN.

Rubrik Polaris is a SaaS platform that centralizes backup management of cloud environments such as Microsoft 365, Azure, AWS, or GCP. You've already seen how to backup M356 with Rubrik Polaris. Now it's time to find out how you restore it.

Read the article by Romain Serre, a Microsoft MVP, on how to correctly use Rubrik Polaris to restore your Microsoft 365 items.

VMware vSphere is one of the most widespread VMware products. No wonder the company takes its security issues seriously. Another update of VMware vSphere 7 Security Configuration Guide will explain how to make your vSphere environment even more protected.

Read the article by Alex Samoylenko, virtualization technology professional, about top 15 configurations in VMware vSphere 7 Security Configuration Guide update.

MTE Logistix has been provisioning warehousing and logistics services in Western Canada for over 95 years. To continue its signature individual approach to servicing clients as the business developed, the corporation needed to ensure its IT infrastructure could retain stellar levels of performance without any downtime or hardware restrictions. Using StarWind Virtual SAN (vSAN), MTE Logistix achieves true redundancy on a budget, thus ensuring 24/7 business operations.

Find out how MTE Logistix was able to make sure it could successfully continue exercising its client-oriented approach in offering various logistics services as the company grew thanks to StarWind vSAN.

When implementing virtualization into your IT environment, you need first to take care of the security of your virtual and physical infrastructure. In the VMware vSphere environment, the vCenter server appliance (VCSA) is a key management element, so should be as secure as possible.

Read the article by Vladan Seget to find out the best options to secure and implement virtualization at a small scale within a company running 2-3 ESXi hosts.

Dell Druva is among the newer players when it comes to data management as a service. Essentially, Dell Druva is a backup SaaS for other SaaS, such as Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, and Amazon Web Services. Apart from a great GUI and useful features, what’s great is that Druva stores data in AWS, not in Azure.

Read the article by Romain Serre, a Microsoft MVP, on how you can quickly and easily backup your Microsoft 365 using the Dell Druva backup SaaS.

Lipsey Logistics, LLC, a U.S. logistics company, needed to have its IT infrastructure always highly available (HA) for the proper operation of the company's phone system, domain controllers, and many other devices. But existing 7+ years-old physical servers couldn't provide for that. Using StarWind Virtual SAN (vSAN), Lipsey Logistics, LLC migrated several of its physical servers to virtual machines (VMs) and moved them over, thus ensuring the needed HA.

Find out how Lipsey Logistics, LLC achieves 24/7 business operations by deploying an HCI cluster built with StarWind Virtual SAN (vSAN).

Businesses continue on their journey of moving from monolithic applications to cloud-native micro-services. Kubernetes becomes more common, allowing you to orchestrate and manage containers in an intelligent, easily scalable, and highly available manner. But how does storage work exactly when it comes to containers?

Read the article by Brandon Lee, a virtualization expert, on Kubernetes container storage, the differences between ephemeral and persistent storage, and their use cases.

CSL Ships, a Canadian-based marine transportation company, faced the problem of too complicated maintenance and support of its 25+ servers. It begets the need for a hyperconverged solution instead of costly SAN systems. Using StarWind HCI Appliance (HCA), CSL Ships reduces the hardware footprint of its data centers from over 25 to 4 units and vanishes all the issues related to the overwhelming complexity of the maintenance and management process of over-bloated server infrastructure.

Find out how CSL Ships saves tens of thousands of dollars of its IT budget with StarWind HCA.

his StarWind webinar will focus on how ZFS solutions can be used to deliver backup storage. You will learn about the idea behind modern backups, advice for compiling backup infrastructure, the advantages of ZFS for constructing resilient backup storage, and how to leverage ZFS for backup storage using StarWind SAN & NAS and Veeam B&R.

Register now for the upcoming webinar to learn how you build a solid and robust backup system by strengthening it with ZFS-delivered resilient backup storage.

You can’t be too close to comfort whenever cybersecurity is involved. Despite ESXi being pretty secure even after out-of-the-box installation, its security can be tightened more. Certain common, baseline hardware elements can be added and several tweaks to ESXi security itself will make all the difference you didn’t know they could.

Read the new post by Vladan Seget, a virtualization expert, on how to ensure the proper security of your VMware ESXi hosts specifically at the hypervisor level.

Rapid Response Networks, an American managed IT services provider (MSP), struggled with the issues of the high cost and complexity of implementing SAN storage at its multiple locations. The company's top-priority goal was to deploy a stretched cluster at a reasonable price. Using StarWind Virtual SAN (vSAN), Rapid Response Networks achieves 24/7 business operations of its several remote offices by deploying a set of stretched high availability (HA) clusters at no extra costs.

Find out how Rapid Response Networks builds an HA IT environment using off-the-shelf hardware with StarWind vSAN.

Previously, we discussed how to backup Microsoft 365 using Druva, a backup software as a service from Dell that leverages Amazon cloud. While Druva proves a bit fussy in terms of configuration and backup, it is rather simple when it comes to data restore, regardless of whether it’s OneDrive, Teams, Sharepoint, or whatever you want to restore.

Read the article by Romain Serre, a Microsoft MVP, on which steps to take to easily restore your Microsoft 365 data from your Dell Druva backup.

The Newtron Group, a US electrical and instrumentation contractor, had compute and storage separated scenario with 7 Gateway compute nodes, Hitachi SAN, and Hyper-V on top. Maintaining a large number of servers required considerable money. The company sought to reduce the number of servers and get active-active high availability (HA). Using StarWind Virtual SAN (vSAN), The Newtron Group deploys an HA cluster and decreases the number of servers by 4 times.

Find out how The Newtron Group saves $200,000 on IT operational expenses thanks to StarWind vSAN.

Azure Virtual Desktop is a cloud service for virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). It allows you to set up a whole desktop virtualization environment in the cloud, without running any gateway servers. You can deliver OS capabilities, apps, and diversify your workload how you want, for as many users as you want in a cost-efficient and effective manner.

Read the post by Florent Appointare, a Microsoft Engineer, on how to get started with Azure Virtual Desktop to deploy your own VDI and start benefitting from it now.

Ensuring security in the conditions of remote work proves challenging. Conventional approaches for enforcing compliance out of the enterprise premises don’t suit a hybrid workforce well. Microsoft Intune is a modern, cloud-native approach to provision, manage, and secure end-user clients regardless of their workstation device and location.

Read the article by Brandon Lee, a virtualization expert, on how Microsoft Intune helps meet the challenges in providing services and enforcing compliance for the present-day hybrid workforce.