Innotech Windows + Doors, a Canadian company manufacturing European-style windows and doors, used to run its production on individual Microsoft Hyper-V servers. Such an IT infrastructure did not allow any load balancing and automatic failover if one of the production servers went down. Also, standalone servers could not provide the required level of data redundancy. The traditional SAN could fix the issues, but couldn’t fit the bill, so this is where StarWind appeared.

Find out how Innotech Windows + Doors fixed their virtualization uptime & data redundancy issues with StarWind.

Geyma Sistemas de Informacion SL, a Spanish company that deals with virtualization, cloud, security and maintenance, chooses StarWind to replace their obsolete SAN. Before StarWind, the company had a Microsoft’s virtualization solution on top of Dell hardware. However, it no longer met company’s increased I/O and uptime requirements.

Find out how Geyma Sistemas de Informacion SL achieved high availability and better I/O performance with StarWind.

VPN connections provide remote access to the necessary data and you can get information about your company's assets at any time. The connection to Azure virtual networks is possible by configuring two types of VPN, namely Site-To-Site (S2S) and Point-To-Site (P2S). S2S VPN allows you to connect two networks and constantly maintain communication between them. P2S VPN is effective for connecting to a virtual network from a remote location if you have a small number of clients for whom such an access is needed. You’re asking how to establish a secure connection of individual clients running Windows 10 to the Azure Virtual Network?

Read the article by Nicolas Prigent, System Engineer, to find out how to create a VPN P2S tunnel between your laptop and your Azure Virtual Network hand over first at the link.

ProPortion Foods, a U.S. company providing retail and food services, had issues with expensive aging HPE MSA SAN maintenance and product updating. StarWind has become a “ready-to-go” deployment to all the company’s issues required. Using HPE servers running StarWind software defined storage stack allowed the company to reduce its warranty costs up to 80% and simplify product updating.

Find out how ProPortion Foods achieved high availability at a reasonable price with StarWind.

Do you use VMware but don’t know how to guarantee the data safety, allow the virtual machines migration, enable continuous application availability, and eliminate any single point of failure within your IT environment? Consider taking advantage of the combination of VMware and Linux-based StarWind VSAN. VMware high availability (HA) ensures constant VMs operation, while StarWind is responsible for the storage fault tolerance.

Learn from the upcoming free webinar how to configure high availability (HA) and fault tolerance (FT) VMware environment.

VMware vSphere 6 offers all new and new features including a new VMware vCenter management services architecture. vCenter 6.0 can be deployed in embedded and external options and separately as a Platform Services Controller (PSC) and as vCenter. If the Platform Services Controller (PSC) provides common infrastructure services for the data center, then the vCenter Server ensures the remainder of the vCenter Server functionality. But you’ll agree, it would be great to have a common platform that combines both solutions. This option would help reduce the number of VMs per sites without any load balanced dependencies and provide fault tolerance.

Read the article by Andrea Mauro, Virtualization expert and architect, to find out about vCenter deployment options and PSC topologies at the following link.

Migrating sites to the cloud can be quite troublesome. For such cases, Microsoft introduced the Windows Site Migration Tool. This is a program that can collect the necessary information about a website hosted on IIS, analyze it, and then automatically transfer all settings, files, and even the database directly to the Microsoft Azure cloud. Make sure that the migration of the sites is really easy and can be completed within a few minutes!

Read the article by Florent Appointaire, Microsoft Engineer, to find out how to migrate IIS websites to Azure SQL quickly and easily.

Do you rely solely on your on-site backups? Unfortunately this isn’t an option as it does not guarantee your data is safe & available after a catastrophic or even temporary loss of service affecting your primary “one and only” data center. It is incumbent to provide you with a hybrid cloud backup for ensuring superior disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity (BC), close-to-100% uptime and zero data loss! StarWind Virtual Tape Library (VTL) enables users to back up their virtual machines with Veeam to both on-premises and / or cloud storage. Combination of Veeam, StarWind VTL, and Backblaze B2 cloud storage provides maximum security and rapid recovery when required. Save your time and money!

Read the article by Roderick Bauer, Content Director for Backblaze, to find out how to achieve economics, instant access, and faster recovery using Veeam, StarWind VTL, and Backblaze B2 cloud storage at the link.

StarWind & VMware vSphere users get unrestricted StarWind Virtual SAN features, storage capacity, and outstanding cost-efficiency. Using StarWind VSAN, the process of deploying VMs, providing fault-tolerant storage, connecting it to hypervisor, and creating highly available VMs becomes a “piece o’ cake!”. But what about software RAID configuration? How not to get lost in a variety of choices between the different RAID levels?

Read the full article by Alex Bykovskyi, StarWind Solutions Architect, to know about a software RAID configuration and find out how to configure it inside a StarWind VSAN at the link.

A Kemp LoadMaster appliance is a critical service for load balancing and application content delivery. Thanks to flexible deployment options for a wide range of hypervisors and cloud platforms, Kemp LoadMaster allows you to distribute user traffic and improve application performance in private and hybrid cloud systems intelligently and efficiently. At the same time, usually Kemp is in front of critical services such as E-mail, web applications, SharePoint and if you lose it, you’ll get service outage. Deploying an HA cluster will solve this problem and provide a high availability, especially for a physical appliance!

Read the article by Romain Serre, StarWind Senior Consultant, to find out how to deploy a Kemp LoadMaster HA cluster at the link

The latest technology allows moving as separate databases and log files and the entire system. In this context, speed, ease, and lack of downtime are critical factors for the success of this process. How to ensure them and not to get lost in a variety of options for migrating SQL Server databases to Azure?

Read the article by Florent Appointaire, Microsoft Engineer, to find out how to migrate SQL Server databases to Azure SQL with a reduced time of unavailability

Building a new environment or doing a forklift upgrade always starts with planning, right? And, planning, in its turn, often starts from hardware! As servers are often the most expensive and important part of your future infrastructure, you want them to scale easily, deliver you the expected performance, and be supported well. You know, that’s what Dell PowerEdge 14G servers are all about!

Learn from the video which Dell PowerEdge 14G model will be the perfect fit for your company.

So, are you losing disk space and want to return it?

Everyone knows that modern operating systems write data into the empty blocks but not in the ones that are just marked as deleted. VMware vSAN 6.7 Update 1, TRIM/UNMAP feature to be exact, will help you to easily restore data that marked as deleted. For space-saving concerns, vSAN allows creating thin provisioned disks that grow gradually as they are filled with data.

Read the full article by Alex Samoylenko, a virtualization technology professional, to find out how to enable TRIM/UNMAP process.

Prime Advisors Inc. is a quickly growing American investment consulting company with over 30 years of experience. To keep up with customers’ needs, Prime required a shared storage solution for their virtualization environment, and this is where StarWind helped to build one using off-the-shelf commodity hardware and StarWind software. New shiny storage came with top-notch performance & w/out huge SAN price tag. Read the Success Story here.

One of the most anticipated events in the computer world - Experts Live Europe 2018 - starts pretty soon! Being a gold sponsor for the event, StarWind will talk about building affordable enterprise-level Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) for consolidating compute, storage, and networking, and simplifying the management of VMs and applications. Experts Live Europe is the annual Microsoft community IT conference that attracts the best speakers and experts in the world to talk about new achievements in the Microsoft Cloud, Datacenter, and Workplace areas. It will be held from October 24-26, 2018 in Prague. See you at the conference!

Welcome to watch ELEU18 Gold Sponsor Video about StarWind

Building and running an on-premises IT infrastructure can costs you a dime and requires a lot of efforts from your team. True, hardware is expensive, and under “team” we mean more than one sysadmin to keep an eye on production and do all that IT-related routines to keep your business running smoothly. And, here comes workaround – all-cloud IT environments! Deploy your IT infrastructure in a public cloud, achieve the required performance, and scale as you go. That won’t be that expensive and tedious as running an on-premises environment!

Find out more about how and why to build all-cloud IT environment in this video.

NVMe...Hey, wait, what about these SATA & SAS SSD drives? Well, NVMe drives will ditch them at some point, you know! Originally, SATA & SAS were designed to connect slower “spinning” hard drive media. Such a hardware interface entails significant overhead in I/O processing and it was never designed for parallelism with all the sockets and cores we get from Intel & AMD these days. NVMe drives are much faster compared SATA & SAS SSDs, they provide the performance you need for your latency dependent applications like databases, on-line stock trading and transactional processing. NVMe solves many of the performance problems associated with legacy storage because it significantly reduces and optimizes the data transfer path as a protocol and adds parallel I/O handling as well. Improved hardware interface and simplified software package specific to NVMe will help to “boost” your HPC workloads and get the first fruits in a short time. Oh, cool, but how (…and why?!?) to bring all those NVMe “bells & whistles” to SMBs & ROBOs? Well, StarWind knows the trick!
Find out more about StarWind NVMe over Fabrics (NVMf) in the StarWind experts’ talk at the Storage Field Day 17.

Migration of virtual machines is an important feature of virtualization technology that allows applications to move transparently along with their runtime environments between physical machines. AWS Server Migration Service (SMS) allows the migration of one or multiple on-premises virtual machines to AWS in an easy way from a single pane of glass. Plan, automate, and track step-by-step replication of running server volumes with just one tool — the AWS console!

Read the article by Paolo Valsecchi, StarWind System Engineer, to find out how to use the AWS Server Migration Service appliance.

StarWind takes the stage at Experts Live Europe 2018 as a gold sponsor! We will talk about the Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) and how SMB and ROBO can consolidate compute, storage, and networking, and simplify the management of VMs and applications taking into account IT-resource and budgets limitations. Experts Live Europe is the annual Microsoft community IT conference that attracts the best speakers and experts in the world to talk about new achievements in the Microsoft Cloud, Datacenter, and Workplace areas.

The conference will be held on October 24-26, 2018 in Prague. Get more details here.