Talking about SQL Server 2016 features, it won’t be fair to leave Always Encrypted aside. This feature prevents your sensitive data from leaking out and enables to get more freedom for your data placement choices. Always Encrypted comes in handy, when, let’s say, you hire external vendors to administer your SQL server and do not want them to see your sensitive data, or when both your client and data are hosted in Azure. So, if you still do not use it, that’s high time to start!

Read the full article by Mikhail Rodionov, IT engineer focusing on applications and infrastructure support domains, to learn more about SQL Server Always Encrypted benefits and why and when you need it.

Some month ago, Microsoft released a new Azure feature allowing to deploy service catalogs right in the public cloud. What is that thing for? To make teamwork in Azure a breath! Now, thanks to prebuilt templates and controlled parameters, your teams can deploy web apps or VMs so that they won’t break your budget (if you set everything right, of course).

Learn how to deploy service catalogs in Azure in the full article by Florent Appointaire, a Microsoft Engineer specialized in Cloud Technologies.

Microsoft Flow is a handy tool to create automated workflows between your favorite apps and services. It allows you to collect data, sync files, and automate all that boring jobs related to, let’s say, sending emails once a tweet with a buzzword is posted.

Find out how to set Microsoft Flow in the full article by Florent Appointaire, a Microsoft Engineer specialized in Cloud Technologies.

Let’s be honest, any system administrator may face the need of hot-adding the network interfaces to the guest VMs in his Microsoft Hyper-V environment one day. And that’s no problem as Windows Server 2016 brought in a whole set of useful features, one of which is the ability to add and remove network adapters on the running VMs. Moreover, you can do that in two ways – GUI, if you’re looking for a straightforward process and PowerShell if you are a fan of automation.

Read the full article by Boris Yurchenko, a Technical Support Engineer at StarWind, to learn how to easily manage Hyper-V virtual NICs on the go.

These days, businesses do not stick to one location anymore. Such trend pushes companies to build stretched clusters, IT infrastructures spanned across several locations. Such approach enables them to implement better disaster recovery strategies and achieve higher performance. To build such environments, you need fast connection and the solution to use resources of all your remote sites just as they were located in one place. Here, StarWind Virtual SAN comes into play – the solution for building high performing active-active replicated shared storage.

Read the full article by Dmytro Malynka, a Solutions Architect at StarWind, to learn more how to build a stretched cluster with StarWind Virtual SAN, and its benefits.

Building cloud-based infrastructures is a hot topic in IT these days. Still, some companies cannot do that due to security, availability, and management concerns. So, they run productions on their on-premises hardware that often hardly scales out, delivers poor disaster recovery, and, what is more important, limits their innovations. We’ve come up with a workaround for these guys!

Find out in our upcoming free webinar how to extend your IT environment to Microsoft Azure with StarWind Virtual SAN.

Register now!

Building cloud-based infrastructures is a hot topic in IT these days. Still, some companies cannot do that due to security, availability, and management concerns. So, they run productions on their on-premises hardware that often hardly scales out, delivers poor disaster recovery, and, what is more important, limits their innovations. We’ve come up with a workaround for these guys!

Find out in our upcoming free webinar how to extend your IT environment to Microsoft Azure with StarWind Virtual SAN.

Register now!

These days, database availability is a must-have for most business. And you, a database admin, are to ensure it. Of course, you need some tools for that purpose. As usual, we know how to help you. In this video, our expert takes a closer look at SQL Server AlwaysOn Failover Cluster Instances technology: its implementation best practices, benefits, how to achieve true HA with this approach and bring better disaster recovery strategies to life using it, and how StarWind Virtual SAN comes in handy!

Find out more about a way to keep your production and database highly available.

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

We all know what backup window really is, right? It’s an extremely short period of time that you are supposed to fit all your backup processes in somehow. Still, this challenge looks not that hard to accomplish as long as you are using that time wisely. That’s, actually, what Veeam Backup & Replication backup job chaining is intended for!

Find out how and why to chain Veeam Backup & Replication jobs in the full article by Romain Serre, a Senior Consultant.

Fairly often, inexperienced users suffer from malware. Sometimes, that stuff consumes the vast amount of your PC power to mine cryptocurrency for some bad guys. Well, that’s probably not a thing you want, right? So, if your PC running Windows 10 Enterprise becomes too slow without any good reason, there may be a high time to install Defender Application Guard.

Read the full article by Vladan Seget, an IT and Virtualization consultant.

Install Gitlab: the tool that comes in handy for any admin
Many of us view Gitlab as something that only developers may use. Indeed, these guys love it, but are they the only ones who may find it handy? That’s time to dispel that myth! Gitlab is more than the cool repository for scripts of any size and shape. It is a feature-rich solution, so that won’t be fair to leave that thing on the table.

Find out more about what Gitlab is and how to enable HTTPS and container registry in the full article by Gary Williams, a virtualization, storage, and Windows systems administrator.

Regarding the growing demand on the cloud, it’s no problem finding a cloud storage provider. However, there are only few market players that can be considered true leaders of this industry. Amazon is one of these guys, with S3 cloud storage serving a perfect fit for any business regardless of its size. But still, even Amazon’s customers face several challenges during data migration process to S3, especially, when it comes to petabytes.

Read the full article by Sergey Sanduliak, a Technical Support Engineer at StarWind, to learn about 5 awesome solutions that make data migration to AWS easier.

Looking to replace your tape-based backup infrastructure with cost-efficient and convenient cloud and backup storage but don’t wanna ruin the established backup process? Join us at VeeamON 2018 to find a remedy to this problem – new free StarWind Virtual Tape Library technology! At the event, Max Kolomyeytsev, Product Director at StarWind, will take the floor with a presentation: "How to keep your backup process unchanged when replacing physical tapes with object and cloud storage” to showcase all the benefits of this new solution. When? May 16, 1:35 PM.

We’re waiting for you at booth 501.

Learn more about StarWind VTL free here!

Unfortunately, all IT environments are vulnerable to disasters, errors, and power outages. There’s nothing you can do about that. Still, being an IT department manager or a system admin, you can set up your environment so that production keeps on running despite a disaster.

Learn from our recent video about such conventional disaster recovery site options for Windows Server 2016 as Storage Replica, Veeam Replica, and Microsoft Hyper-V Replica.

Now, thanks to Veeam Agents, you can perform remotely orchestration- and data-protection-related tasks on all computers within IT environment at once right from the Veeam Backup & Replication console. Looks cool, right? Well, with Protection Groups, things become even better: you can automate that stuff!

Find out more about Veeam Backup & Replication Protection Groups and how to use them in the full article by Paolo Valsecchi, Veeam Vanguard System Engineer and VMware vExpert.

Reddit is a perfect place to get into news and trends, isn’t it? Actually, that’s why StarWind has started a subreddit!
There, we share blog articles, announce events, and discuss interesting stuff going on in IT these days.

Stay tuned, subscribe to StarWind’s subreddit!

Database availability is a must-have for modern businesses. You, a database admin, are to keep the risk of data loss minimal. Sure, you need some tools to accomplish that mission. In the series of upcoming free webinars, we’ll discuss technologies that may come in handy.

Find out more about SQL Server Always On Failover Cluster Instances!

StarWind announces the new generation of StarWind HyperConverged Appliances. What will they give you? Being 100% software-defined, the Appliances require only one onsite node to make your applications Highly Available. Once one more node added, the entire setup can tolerate one disk and even single node failure. Another nice thing about the solution is that it makes sysadmin's life easier due to bringing configuration, migration, and integration efforts entirely on StarWind’s side.

For more info, check out the product page!

Evolving along with companies’ needs, Microsoft is about to release new Windows Server 2019. Feeling comfortable with the good old 2016 version? Get ready for something even better!

Learn more about the features Windows Server 2019 will bring to your IT environment in the full article by Karim Buzdar, a Microsoft Certified Solutions Associate for Server Infrastructure.