Admins usually call for RDMA to offload CPUs and to keep the latency as low as possible. Still, “RDMA” is an umbrella term. There are, actually, three big RDMA technologies developed so far: InfiniBand, RoCE, and iWarp. Which one leads the future, and do admins need RDMA that much after all?
Find out more about RDMA technologies in the recent article by Didier Van Hoye, an experienced subject matter expert advisor and infrastructure architect.
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 upcoming free webinar which Dell PowerEdge 14G model will be the perfect fit for your company.
In spite of RDMA prevalence, you still need numerous tools and a lot of finger work just to measure a single Windows-Linux RDMA link performance. No fun at all! With StarWind rPerf, all that pain becomes a thing of the past: there are only one free tool and a few quick cmdlets needed now to get the job done.
Learn more about StarWind rPerf in the full article by Vladyslav Savchenko, a Technical Support Engineer at 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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
Do you know that not every solution requires high available storage? Sometimes there is a need in functionality that gives us the option not to leverage any OS caching. Precisely this UseWriteThrough option you can find in the New-SBMMapping commandlet in Windows Server 2019. It allows a user to disable caching with SMB mappings in certain scenarios thus giving a possibility to prefer reliability over performance in non-continuously available file share scenarios. So, always check “paper proof of concepts” and find the best options for your IT infrastructure and business development!
Read the article by Didier Van Hoye, Expert in Microsoft technologies, to find out how to use SMB Mapping Option UseWriteThrough and about its benefits.
BLDD Architects, a U.S. company operating in the field of architectural and structural design, had aging EMC SAN infrastructure with VMware on top. Such an architecture entailed issues with poor performance, the difficulty of maintenance, and high financial costs. In this case, the viability of the IT infrastructure is out of the question. StarWind software-defined storage stack allowed to create maintenance-friendly and high-performance IT infrastructure.
Find out how BLDD Architects ensured the balanced and long-term development of its business processes with StarWind.
Innitec used to run tape-centric backup environment for years. There is actually nothing wrong with the physical tapes. But increasing data volumes caused a discrepancy. Storage became inefficient. Intervention was necessary. Virtualization technologies in the form of StarWind Virtual Tape Library (VTL) became a rescuer in the case.
Find out how Innitec attained simple management of backup environment with no changes and extra expenses on new hardware and licensing.
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 video how to configure high availability (HA) and fault tolerance (FT) VMware environment.
StarWind takes the floor at NVMe Developer Days held December 6 at the Hilton Bayfront San Diego. The NVMe Developer Days program gives developers a chance to discuss the current state of NVMe and share ideas on how to broaden its applications.
At this conference, StarWind presents NVMe-oF (NVMe over Fabrics) – the protocol tailored to unleash the full NVMe performance in any environment. The result is far better than what storage systems can achieve over such legacy storage protocols as iSCSI, iSER, and Fibre Channel.
Greet StarWind with open arms at NVMe Developer Days on December 6 from 3:30 to 4:45 pm at the Hilton San Diego Bayfront!
StarWind takes the stage as a Silver Sponsor at the UK VMUG UserCon 2018 held on December 13 in Leicester, UK. VMUG UserCons are created by VMware users for VMware user to discuss the latest developments in virtualization technologies. At this conference, StarWind will present a new way of improving the performance of the traditional iSCSI protocol – iSCSI Accelerator. Feel more enthusiastic about NVMes? Meet our NVMe over Fabrics (NVMeoF) – the protocol tailored to squeeze maximum NVMe disks’ performance!
Visit the event to learn how to vanish the latency across your storage infrastructure! Find out more about this conference at the link.
In order to build your own Hyper-V lab in Azure, you need two Hyper-V instances. But, hey, why do we need Hyper-V Replica here? This technology allows you to shift a virtual machine from a server on-prem to Microsoft Azure for maxing out your services uptime. With Hyper-V Replica, returning your services back to the normal functioning becomes a matter of only a few seconds… Looks like a must-have for your Hyper-V environment, doesn’t it?
Read the article by Nicolas Prigent, a System Engineer, to find out how to configure Hyper-V Replica in Azure.
Johnson’s Construction Limited, a Canadian company dealing with the Heavy Civil Construction, had a single point of failure in their existing IT infrastructure which could be catastrophic. Although Microsoft Server 2012 R2 allowed to have failover cluster for the Hyper-V VMs, it did not support failover for the file server which hosted the Hyper-V disks.
Learn from this case study how Johnson’s Construction Ltd. eliminated downtime and turned the entire system into the highly available (HA) cluster with StarWind.
There are many anti-spam tools. And they are pretty good. For example, better-known and reliable domains can be added to your whitelist. However, spoofed emails will always be redone because they represent legitimate business emails. SPF, DKIM, and DMARC is a mechanism that will protect your email box and will allow you to get rid of annoying spam, ensuring verification of the sender's domain. Stop spam emails right now!
Read the article by Gary Williams, a virtualization, storage, and Windows systems administrator, to find out how to configure SPF, DKIM, and DMARC anti-spam solutions.
It is never superfluous to provide an extra level of protection for your data and privacy in management. The Microsoft platform allows users to register and manage their applications, have a set of identifiers, and access their data 24/7. Creating a user with Azure Function will allow you to secure your data and provide private access to applications. Ensure information privacy right now!
Read the article by Florent Appointaire, a Microsoft Engineer, to find out how to automate the user creation with Azure Function.
If you are a VMware vSphere administrator who wants to solve the problem of a low network throughput, Network I/O Control (NIOC) is exactly what you need! It’s a traffic-specific vSphere Distributed Switch (vDS) mechanism of network bandwidth regulation that was firstly introduced in vSphere 4.1 in 2010. NIOC appeared when 10G networking was increasingly prevalent and became a real breakthrough. With this mechanism, you can ensure high network throughput and go with fewer network adapters in ESXi hosts. That sounds pretty good, doesn’t it?
Read the article by Alex Samoylenko, a Virtualization technology professional, to find out how to configure NIOC.
