We are introducing a solution that provides unprecedented storage performance and maximizes the efficiency of existing IT infrastructures, actually... right now!

Join us!

Sutton Group is a set of companies covering footwear retail with more than 40 physical stores and an e-commerce website. Many do shopping online these days, so The Group wanted its Hyper-V SAN to bear intense workloads. Specifically, the company wanted to ensure decent IT infrastructure performance and make its IT-related routines easier.

Learn how StarWind helped to remediate The Sutton Group’s IT-related pains.

We all are excited about the upcoming Windows Server 2019 release. The new server OS brings many cool things to your IT infrastructures and makes some tasks far more easy. For instance, there will be the Storage Migration Service feature introduced. Well, server migration is kinda of a pain for some. There should be a lot of scripts written and some things mapped between servers. Forget about that hassle! Storage Migration Service makes a file server migration as easy as a pie.

Check out the full article by Romain Serre, a Senior Consultant, how to make a file server with Storage Migration Service.

We will introduce a solution that provides unprecedented storage performance and maximizes the efficiency of existing IT infrastructures. Storage Field Day is intended to bring together innovative IT product vendors and independent thought leaders to share information and opinions in a presentation and discussion format.

Join us on September 20, at 1pm PDT. Get more details here.

For any business, Microsoft SQL Server databases are critical workloads that require the lowest possible recovery point objective. In other words, databases are the thing an admin would like to keep always at hand, just in case something goes wrong at the main site. This task becomes fairly easy with Azure Backup – a SQL Server backup solution that requires zero infrastructure. No sophisticated backup infrastructure on premises. No management agent. Azure Backup delivers you a single point of management for backups. And, here’s the quick guide how to back up and restore your databases with Azure Backup.

Read the full article by Florent Appointaire, a Microsoft Engineer specialized in Cloud Technologies, to learn how to back up Microsoft SQL Server databases to Azure and restore them with Azure Backup.

Public cloud is a pretty trendy thing these days. Many use the cloud for disaster recovery purposes while others go even further and build all-cloud IT infrastructures. And, Microsoft Azure is often the public cloud of choice. Why? It is popular, fast, flexible, and reliable. With all those Azure benefits in mind, let’s look at how you migrate VMware vSphere VMs there!

Find out in the full article by Florent Appointaire, a Microsoft Engineer specialized in Cloud Technologies, how to set up and use Azure Site Recovery to migrate your VMware vSphere VMs to Azure.

Database availability and production uptime are things that you, a database admin, are to ensure. Well, sure, you need some tools for that mission. This video sheds light on the technology that may come in handy.

Build a disaster recovery site with Microsoft SQL Server AlwaysOn Availability Groups to preserve business continuity. Watch the full video here.

Double Fine Productions is the company specialized in game development. Working in this industry, Double Fine requires a powerful environment to proceed and store all those tons of media data that it generates. Using just directly attached storage and VMware ESXi, the company could not achieve high performance. So, they were looking for storage to ensure decent applications performance, fast recovery rates, and effective load balancing. However, guys at Double Fine did not want to change the existing hardware... because it was a far way smarter just to deploy a Software-Defined Storage solution on top of what they already had!

Check out how Double Fine dramatically enhanced the overall infrastructure performance with StarWind.

All-cloud IT infrastructures can save you both the money and the hassle. Wait, what is that special about cloud-based environments? In the public cloud, you can run the IT infrastructure that perfectly fits your requirements and scale it easily as you go. Also, that won’t be that expensive and tedious as running an on-premises environment!

Find out more about how and why build all-cloud IT environment in our upcoming free webinar.

VMware vSphere 6.7 features persistent memory support – the non-volatile data storage technology that is fast enough to cover the performance difference between RAM and Flash/SSD. It is the perfect fit for IOPS-intense applications and high-loaded databases. Well, we guess that’s high time to learn how to create VMs with persistent memory disks.

Read the full article by Alex Samoylenko, a virtualization technology professional, to find out more about how fast persistent memory is and how to use it in VMware vSphere VMs.

For many, Veeam Backup & Replication is the solution of choice for backing up and disaster recovery. Why? This powerful solution saves your data from ransomware or loss. Also, it enables to build a disaster recovery site to keep your production up and running no matter what happens to your main site.

Find out how to make a disaster recovery plan with Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5 in the full article by Romain Serre, a Senior Consultant.

Looking for a bit higher performance for Windows system? Well, try optimizing it with VMware OS Optimization Tool! That’s a small tool with enormous possibilities created for more than just to optimize Windows systems for use with VMware Horizon View. Basically, you can disable some Windows services to make your system run more “light” and save some more resource for the REALLY useful apps.

Learn more about how to set up and use VMware OS Optimization Tool in the full article by Vladan Seget, an IT and Virtualization consultant

Database uptime is a must. Data loss is a definite “no no”. Consider a disaster recovery (DR) site to ensure your production uptime and guarantee data integrity and availability no matter what happens to your main site.

In our upcoming free webinar, we discuss the technology that may come in handy.
Find out how to build a disaster recovery (DR) site and ensure your database availability with SQL Server AlwaysOn Availability Groups (AGs).

Register here!

Security is always a hot topic, and you, a sysadmin, are a guy to ensure it. You, typically, should not only save your data from being stolen or compromised but also prevent any possible security breaches at all. True, having services down due to some DoS attack may be just as bad for your business as losing data… So, that’s why you, probably, should learn more about how to ensure your virtual environment security.

Check out the full article by Andrea Mauro, a virtualization expert and architect, to learn how to find and cover your virtualized environment security gaps.

Back in April 2018, Microsoft announced Azure Container Instances for production usage. Wait, what is that thing, actually, for? Azure Container Instances offers the fastest and simplest way to run a container in Azure. You need just one command to run a container, and, you do not need to provision a VM or deploy a container host anymore.

Read the full article by Nicolas Prigent, Microsoft MVP in Cloud and Datacenter Management, to learn how to create Azure Container Instances and how to use it

Before, Cantey Tech Consulting IT infrastructure comprised single-target SANs with VMware ESX hypervisor. The company required the performance and services availability beyond the ones its existing environment could provide. For that purpose, Cantey Tech Consulting required a decent software-defined storage. However, traditional solutions either exceeded the company’s budget or were tricky to deploy. Here, StarWind Virtual SAN came into play.

Learn from this success story how Cantey Tech Consulting achieved high availability of cloud services and boosted SAN performance with StarWind Virtual SAN

StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN) is a well-known, historically-proven, and performance leading Software-Defined Storage solution. It is now available in two very different scenarios – one (Linux virtual machine based packaging) is specifically aimed at VMware vSphere users, another one (application residing inside hypervisor kernel) is targeted at those who run Microsoft Hyper-V. Here comes better flexibility, less restrictions, and simplified licensing. Free edition still remains a “low hanging fruit” with all the commercial version features except UI (it’s CLI only) and without guaranteed support. Yes, production use is allowed.

Check out more details here

Regular backups are necessary to cope with possible data loss and restore information from the earlier times when needed. Even though copying data to Amazon S3 from a remote server is already possible, additional software not fully supported by Amazon is required, which makes the backup process painful. In case you are tired with such an exhausting backup procedure, you have a great chance to explore how AWS CLI can be extremely helpful in the case.

Check out the full article by Gary Williams, an experienced virtualization, storage and Windows systems administrator, to learn more about the updated AWS CLI and the options it provides for the convenient backup.