Posts made by Oksana

StarWind is a trusted partner to a whole host of successful retailers around the globe. Our solutions easily support all the mission-critical services between HQ and Edge locations, granting superb performance, resiliency, and scalability to retail IT. We’ve got a lot of useful new information for the industry and offers in-store to share with new audiences.

Register in the link to attend Tech for Retail and learn how to make your retail business’ IT infrastructure resilient and future-ready from StarWind Engineers themselves.

COFED, a Congolese public institution, required a shared storage solution to ensure continuous business operations and data integrity. The institution experienced many problems in case its single data center broke down. The work stopped for several hours or even a day while waiting for the data restoration. Using StarWind Virtual SAN (vSAN), COFED creates a 2-node high availability (HA) storage cluster, achieves 24/7 business operations, and ensures zero downtime.

You can read about how StarWind could do the same for your company by following this link.

Microsoft announced Azure Basic Load Balancer (LB) end-of-life from September 30, 2025. Anyone using that tool will have to migrate to the new Azure Standard LB. There are several prerequisites to be made, as well as associated downtime during migration. The new format of the tool is also for-pay.

Read the guide by Florent Appointare, a Microsoft Engineer, on which steps to take to easily migrate from Azure Basic LB to Standard LB.

Synergium, an international translation and localization company, needed to ensure 24/7 operation of its translation services. However, its SAN implementation represented a single point of failure (SPOF) putting in jeopardy smooth IT infrastructure functioning. Using StarWind Virtual SAN (vSAN), Synergium creates an HA storage cluster, eliminates a SPOF issue, and builds a fault-tolerant environment allowing for up-to-the-minute translation technology adoption.

You can read about how StarWind could do the same for your company by following this link.

Microsoft recently announced Windows Hello for Business Hybrid Cloud Kerberos Trust to help with the complexity of passwordless authentication. It is commonly thought passwords are the weakest link in a company’s cybersecurity posture. While Azure has seen various aspects of passwordless authentication, Windows has been lacking.

Read the article by Brandon Lee, a virtualization expert, on how Microsoft approaches passwordless authentication in Windows Hello for hybrid cloud with Kerberos trust.

Being a small rural hospital in the U.S., Northwest Regional Health had an extremely thin IT budget. However, it was forced to purchase new $100,000+ hardware every 5-6 years within its existing IT infrastructure. It was a very heavy cost, plus all DIY support articles were locked behind a service contract. Using StarWind Virtual SAN (vSAN), Northwest Regional Health deploys an HA cluster and gets a sizeable performance increase, while saving $85000 on its capital expenditures (CapEx).

You can read about how StarWind could do the same for your company by following this link.

While VMware has been overhauling and stepping up in all arias of its vSphere environment over the last decade, it’s been sort of looking over its hypervisor. The recent VMware ESXi 8.0 has seen some new introductions here and there. Most notably, improvements are seen in its installation, configuration, and user interface (UI).

Read the article by Vladan Seget, a virtualization expert, on what’s new to note in the latest installment of VMware ESXI 8.0.

RealTime Services, a U.S. company providing accounting and financial outsourcing services, had problems with licensing rented servers and slow storage operations. Whenever they wanted to increase their IT infrastructure performance, the competitor company tried to add another 1-2 years to the contract to extend the license. Using StarWind HCI Appliance (HCA), RealTime Services move to hyperconvergence, achieve ultimate flexibility and performance, and save about $1,500 each month on its IT operational expenses (OpEx).

You can read about how StarWind could do the same for your company by following this link.

Veeam Backup & Recovery v11 now includes the option to backup data to Google Cloud Storage. This provides more flexibility to users who wish to choose Google over Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure, or other public cloud vendors. Such a feature offers further user-friendliness while still abiding by the 3-2-1 backup rule.

Read the new guide by Paolo Valsecchi, a virtualization expert, on what steps to take to store your backup data to Google Cloud Storage via Veeam B&R 11.

Windows 11 2H22 includes several new elements that make its installation into vSphere 8 and then the creation of a VMware Golden Image much easier. Before that, the OS missed some drivers that required more juggling to make things work. Now, it includes the VMware PVSCSI and VMXNET3 drivers and other stuff to fix previous issues.

Read the article by Vladan Seget, a virtualization expert, on the tips for creating a VMware Golden Image for your Windows 11 in your vSphere 8.0.

TrustRadius has included StarWind HCI Appliance in its Best Software 2022! The software-centric hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) solution from StarWind is singled out as the go-to data center option for modern SMEs. The products for the list were chosen based on customer satisfaction, performance via reviews, and respective market fit.

Click the link to learn about the TrustRadius Best Software 2022 Awards and how StarWind receiving several of them can help your future IT infrastructure decision-making.

Trumid Technologies, LLC., a U.S.-based financial technology company, had end-of-life (EOL) servers that challenged its continuous business operation. The company needed a virtual shared storage solution to create a hyperconverged IT environment. Using StarWind Virtual SAN (vSAN), Trumid deploys an HA cluster, replaces its aging servers, achieves zero downtime, and ensures 24/7 operation of its fintech services.

You can read about how StarWind could do the same for your company by following this link.

The 1st season of the cost-free StarWind “Hyperconverged Infrastructure. Educational Episodes” project is coming to an end. In the last 6th video, we did something extra special for you: we discuss all the tips so you can start building your own production environment. But for this, you need to choose the right way for HCI in your IT strategy - virtualization or containerization.

The answer is in the episode, already available for viewing at this link. Watch the video and find out about virtualization, hypervisors, containers, Docker and Kubernetes, and more.

Serenity Insurance, a U.S.-based insurance company, had aging 8-year-old servers with no redundancy in place. This factor put its production at risk of losing critical medical data and applications. Implementing StarWind HCI Appliance (HCA), Serenity Insurance moves to hyperconvergence, builds a remotely supported and managed IT infrastructure, and on top of everything else, unlocks a new customer base with no threat to its data and apps.

You can read about how StarWind could do the same for your company by following this link.

Business continuity today largely depends on data availability. There are multiple ways Microsoft allows you to achieve that with its Azure cloud services. Among many disaster resistance options, if you use more than one Azure Region, you can use disaster recovery in Azure Site Recovery to replicate your virtual machine (VM) from one region to another.

See the quick guide by Nicolas Prigent, a three-time Microsoft MVP, on how to replicate an Azure VM to another Azure Region using the disaster recovery feature.

Wigmore Academy Trust, a British education institution, had a failover cluster consisting of a 3-node SAN with Hyper-V on top. The cost of renewal, complexity of supporting the stack, limited time and expertise in the IT team, and the expense of the SAN and node maintenance forced the organization to look for a hyperconverged platform. Implementing StarWind HCI Appliance (HCA), Wigmore Academy Trust builds a remotely supported and managed IT infrastructure, ensures zero downtime, increases uptime up to 100%, and saves £20K over 5 years on IT operational expenses (OpEx).

You can read about how StarWind could do the same for your company by following this link.

For some time now, Microsoft has made a single-node configuration available for its cloud service Azure Stack HCI. The name is somewhat misleading since a cluster requires two or more servers to form a group for high availability. Nonetheless, this version is good for dev, test, proof of concept, or initial setup tweaking for further scaling.

Read the article by Brandon Lee, a virtualization expert, on the idea, features, use cases, and benefits of Azure Stack HCI single-node cluster configuration.

How to protect your data in the best possible way in HCI? What to choose: RAID or erasure coding? We provide full answers and practical solutions to these and many other questions in the 5th video of the “Hyperconverged Infrastructure. Educational Episodes” project, already available for viewing. We talk about characteristics and use cases of erasure coding (EC), analyze its pros and cons, compare RAID and EC technologies, and give advice on how to achieve “always-on” availability in organizations.

Join our cost-free project and watch the “Erasure Coding technology: How to protect your data in the best possible way in HCI?” episode by following this link.

vSphere 8 introduces VMware vSAN Express Storage Architecture (ESA), focused on efficiency, performance, and less CPU usage. The new configuration has been optimized for NVMe-based TLC flash devices, abandoning cache layers and disk groups. VMware will privilege the deployments of vSAN as ESA, moving forward.

Read the article by Vladan Seget, a virtualization expert, on the direction, features, and novelties regarding the new VMware vSAN ESA in vSphere 8.

Double Fine Productions, a US-based game development company, required a powerful environment to proceed and store all those tons of media data that it generates. Using just directly attached storage and a VMware vSphere hypervisor, the company could not achieve high performance. So, it was looking for shared storage to ensure decent application performance, fast recovery rates, and effective load balancing. Using StarWind Virtual SAN (vSAN), Double Fine Productions creates a high availability (HA) cluster, enhances the overall infrastructure performance, and ensures the operation of its critical game services 24/7.

You can read about how StarWind could do the same for your company by following this link.