You need to learn something new about HCI today. The 4th video of the “Hyperconverged Infrastructure. Educational Episodes” project is already available for viewing. We analyze the RAID technology, characterize RAID types and levels, as well as discuss RAID use cases to help you to choose the most suitable RAID for the HCI system and get maximum performance, redundancy, and storage efficiency.

Join our cost-free project and watch the “RAID technology: How to increase storage performance and/or reliability in the HCI?” episode by following this link.

OK, so you’re a VMware administrator looking to free your CPU resources to run more VMs in your environment. No problem, this can be effectively achieved by offloading network I/O to RDMA hardware. So what should you do? Just replace iSCSI with iSER. In this way, data will be transferred directly from the application memory to the network adapter, avoiding few additional network layers and remarkably lowering system’s CPU utilization, allowing to increase VM density.

Join this webinar and learn how to increase your VMware VM density!

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.

How to create developer and test environments in minutes with Azure DevTest LabsAzure DevTest Labs is a service that helps developers and testers quickly create environments in Azure while minimizing waste and controlling cost. The only thing to do is to configure Azure DevTest Labs to allow developers deploy only a specific version of SQL Server which is called a VM image. When they need a new VM image, you simply add this image to the Lab and it’s over! The Developers are autonomous and can create their own servers without interacting with the production environment.

Read the full article by Nicolas Prigent, a Microsoft MVP in Cloud and Datacenter Management, to learn how to use Azure DevTest Labs.

This StarWind webinar will focus on disaster recovery in modern small- and midsize enterprises (SMEs). Prolonged downtime, along with data loss, can lead to significant costs all the way to reputational damage and business extinction. Approaching DR seriously can help reduce damage and recover quickly and effectively.

Register now for the upcoming webinar to learn about the vital factors for proper disaster recovery implementation, including Hyper-V Replica, vSphere Replication, and Veeam B&R.

In fact, connecting iSCSI targets in Microsoft environment is not rocket science, but requires time and efforts. First, you are to add target discovery portals (a dozen of clicks), then proceed with connecting the targets (numerous clicks again)… and you need to repeat these operations again and again! Sounds not that good, right? Fortunately, this annoying procedure can be automated.

Read the full article by Boris Yurchenko, a Support Engineer at StarWind, to find out how to automate Windows iSCSI connection.

Only two days left to join our data protection webinar! Learn how to fend off ransomware and build a bulletproof backup solution for your business.

Reserve your spot now: https://www.starwindsoftware.com/kill-ransomware-dead-3-2-1-1-rule-immutability

Any storage admin understands clearly that underlying storage determines how fast mission-critical applications can run. Obviously, to max it out, you need disks performing at near-to-lightning speed and configure a proper SCSI controller. Let’s say, you’ll build your storage with NVMes, or just add them to the existing one, but what controller will you choose?

Watch our upcoming webinar to learn how to choose the appropriate SCSI controller, allowing to push your NVMe performance to the limit!

As you probably know, you can orchestrate your vSphere environment with either Command Line Interface or Graphic User Interface. The former grants you more freedom, while the later is pretty much intuitive. They both seem great, but which one should you pick to manage your IT ecosystem efficiently?

Read the full article by Andrea Mauro, a virtualization expert and architect, to learn more about peculiarities of managing vSphere with Command Line Interface and Graphic User Interface.

Being a system admin, you’d prefer to have more boring stuff done without your involvement, right? A thing you’d love to automate is updating Microsoft Failover Cluster. Thanks to Cluster Aware Updating, that can be done easily without any downtime.

Read the full article by Paulsen Muzari, a Technical Support Engineer at StarWind, to learn how to update Failover Cluster automatically without any downtime.

Microsoft considers AlwaysOn as an agile and efficient set of technologies capable of ensuring high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) for SQL Server platform. You should really learn a bit more about this tech even if you are already familiar with it.

Why? Just ‘cause AlwaysOn saves you from stitching an HADR solutions from various different vendors that at the end of the day turns your life into one big finger pointing session.

Read the full article by Mikhail Rodionov, IT engineer focusing on applications and infrastructure support domains, to figure out what SQL AlwaysOn is and how it works.

Unfortunately, all environments fail one day. Mistakes are made, disasters occur, and there are no IT infrastructures immune to that yet. Being a system admin or IT department manager, the only thing you can do to mitigate troubles’ harsh consequences is coming up with a disaster recovery strategy and employing a nice dedicated solution. If your IT environment runs on Windows Server 2016, we are happy to discuss some of them.

Learn from our upcoming free webinar about architecting a disaster recovery site for IT ecosystems run on Windows Server 2016 with Storage Replica, Hyper-V Replica, or Veeam Replica.

In fact, underlying storage you have determines your applications’ performance. That’s not something new for you and, being a storage admin, you know that excellent storage performance is about not only disks but also the right system configuration.

Learn from this video how to configure your system to squeeze maximum performance out of your NVMes.

These days, Amazon AWS has become one of the most popular public cloud storages. No wonders, these guys offer extremely cheap storage and cover their service for good. Though, you are to stay vigilant: without careful control over your expenditures on the cloud, even Amazon AWS may break your bank!

Read the full article by Florent Appointaire, a Microsoft Engineer specialized in Cloud Technologies, to learn how to set up a solution for managing Amazon AWS costs.

Companies expand, and IT ecosystems are to keep up with their pace. Usually, such growth is associated with opening one or more new offices. This brings admins not only new toys to play with but also makes their work more annoying. Indeed, that’s your storage admin’s mission to grant all your colleagues their data availability wherever they are, right? Fortunately, we know how to help you.

Learn from our recent video how building Hyper-V or vSphere stretched clusters simplifies your IT routines.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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!