CSL, a leading provider of marine dry bulk cargo handling and delivery services, faced problems with too complicated maintenance and support, which begets the need for a hyperconverged solution instead of costly SAN one. They were looking for a cost-efficient solution and have found StarWind HCA, thereby performing maintenance without complexity, reducing hardware footprint, and overall improving performance and reliability.

Find out how CSL found a hyperconverged solution for their problems with StarWind and reduced hardware footprint of their datacenters from over 25 to 4 units.

Microsoft Teams is set to supersede Skype for StaffHub and Business. It’s a powerful tool in itself, so knowing how to make the most of it is crucial for managing your workload organically. Luckily, PowerShell Universal Dashboard can help you monitor your Microsoft Teams Cloud call queues as if they were on the palm of your hand.

Read the easy guide by Nicolas Prigent, a Swiss System Engineer, to learn how to monitor your Microsoft Teams like a kapellmeister.

TechHQ released an article that dispels common myths about virtualization and hyperconvergence having skyrocketing prices. The piece explains the features that hyperconverged infrastructures (HCIs) bring and how, in the past, they were only available to big corporations. However, today, any business can build an HCI, and they cost only a fraction of what you would expect.

Read the full article by TechHQ about how businesses of any size can now get the desired enterprise-grade features without the enterprise price tag.

Not every company owns a sophisticated infrastructure packed with shared storage, virtual SANs, NVMe, etc. Migrating systems, especially VMs, in an average IT environment could create workload disruptions because you’d have to stall other processes. Finally, however, those days are over: vMotion can migrate your VMs while keeping all systems active and operational.

Read the guide by Paolo Valsecchi, a System Engineer, to learn how vMotion can help you hot migrate VMs within your vSphere environment even if you don’t have shared storage.

BTT Cloud, a Lithuanian IT Managed Service Provider (MSP), had compute and storage separated scenario with software-defined storage (SDS) and Hyper-V on top. Such infrastructure was distinguished by a large hardware footprint and required a lot of time, effort, and tools for administration. With StarWind, the company moves to hyperconvergence and gets rid of tons of standalone servers.

Find out how BTT Cloud receives flexible and scalable IT infrastructure and breaks new ground for business growth with StarWind.

StorageReview has recently published an article about their lab tests on StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA). In a nutshell, “StarWind [HCA] easily surpassed the notion that you need lots of nodes to drive strong performance.” The review concludes that HCA is more flexible, accounts for better output, and is way more efficient than other turnkey appliance alternatives. We are flattered by such feedback after our product having completed the set of their meticulous tests.

Check out the full report on StarWind HCA by StorageReview to see what their lab has to say about the innovation our solution brings to the HCI market’s table.

Creating apps in Ubuntu that will work seamlessly on different platforms may seem like quite the challenge. Nonetheless, with the right knowledge, you can manage that like a pro. By installing Django on Ubuntu Server 18.04 LTS and configuring it to use PostgreSQL (which is focused on SQL standards compliance), you can now easily build apps there using heterogeneous databases.

Read the article by Mikhail Rodionov, an IT engineer focused on K2 and Microsoft technology stack, to learn how to install Django on Ubuntu Server 18.04 LTS and configure it to use Postgres database now.

Artem Berman, StarWind COO and Co-Founder, recently gave an interview to SuperbCrew, sharing his thoughts about the relevance of hyperconverged infrastructures (HCIs) for the contemporary business. He also emphasizes how StarWind was the catalyst of making HCIs “a thing” and how our products redefine how companies utilize IT resources to grow sustainably.

Read the interview to get a prompt excurse into StarWind’s background, how its products have a positive impact on the modern economy, and where it thinks the future of IT resources lies.

Electronics Box, a Polish security and fire alarm systems supplier, had a 2-node Windows Server Failover Cluster with a shared storage system based on a single SAN and Microsoft Hyper-V on top. Every part of the company’s IT infrastructure was redundant except for the storage system. So all attempts to build a fault-tolerant environment without reliable shared storage were idle. StarWind allowed the company to create a stretched cluster at several geographical locations with complete redundancy so from now on its alarm monitoring central station would operate seamlessly.

Find out how Electronics Box got a real painkiller for all of the company’s IT infrastructure issues with StarWind

Intellegens Inc., a US Managed IT Services Provider (MSP), had an IT infrastructure with a number of servers and SAN/NAS setup in both Hyper-V and VMware clusters. The main issue of the existing IT environment was related to a lack of centralized enterprise storage. This was resulting in performance hits, high latency, and unnecessary complexity on the path of infrastructure growth. StarWind allowed the company to get enterprise-class storage performance without any bottleneck issues, reliability, and simplicity in IT infrastructure operation with no need to buy tons of costly hardware, all at a price affordable for SMB.

Find out how Intellegens Inc. received a cure-all solution for all its problems thanks to StarWind.

Intel Optane, 2nd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable CPUs, ConnectX-5 NICs, Spectrum 100GbE NICs, SuperServers, and StarWind VSAN combined — sounds like heaven… And it is! StarWind and its friends at Intel, Supermicro, and Mellanox were able to build the world’s fastest HCI, scoring 26.8M IOPS across the entire cluster, which is 100% of underlying storage performance!

Find out from this video how this dream team achieved such a milestone, and what it means for the future of customer ROI, hardware footprinting and performance elevation.

Security issues, unfortunately, remain a priority even today, because, obviously, there is no such thing as too much protection. In the case of the custom domains on your apps, the same rules apply. Luckily, there is a new security feature for Azure App Service released. App Service Managed Certificates will help you to secure your domains on Windows and Linux apps!

Read the article by Florent Appointaire, a Microsoft Engineer, to find out how to protect your Azure Web App with a public trusted certificate.

VMware was proud to reveal its Project Pacific at this year’s VMworld. The new solution promises to transform vSphere into a Kubernetes-native platform. Project Pacific says it’ll unite software dev teams, DevOps teams, and vSphere admins in one workflow and be fully mergeable with Kubernetes, going as far as vSAN, NSX, and VVols support, among many other features. But is it as perfect as it seems?

Read the article by Alex Samoylenko, a virtualization tech pro, and learn about the promises VMware Project Pacific offers and possible pitfalls, which the naked eye might not see.

Crash scenarios may vary, and they always happen when you least expect them. VMs do have a recovery point but, while you troubleshoot, it may be a good idea to restore them into Azure to reduce downtime. The process has certain requirements and may prove a bit fussy, but once you’ve ensured the VM (or even workload) migration to Azure, you’re DR is sealed.

Read the article by Romain Serre, a Senior Consultant, to learn how to use Veeam as a vehicle for VM migration from a restore point to Azure.

Just like you, customers, we, StarWind employees, like to buy goods or services that have genuine reviews. Googling for hours, reading dozens of platforms and promotions can often confuse a person regarding a product. That’s why IT Central Station has compiled a report, covering HCIs that are being used and have been reviewed by 300+ real-life IT specialists.

Download the free report now and find out all the tea that IT managers and directors have to spill on StarWind HCA, providing you with comprehensive and true feedback on our solution.

Cohesiveness is something hyperconvergence vendors have been really going for this year. Recently, VMware has introduced its vRealize Operations Managers 8.0, an update of its “friendly admin” type of product. The new version has additions to workload planning, cost comparison, HCI nodes removal, scalability, on-prem/cloud health monitoring, and more.

Read the full article by Vladan Seget, where he covers the most stand-out features of vROPs 8.0.

The Society of St James, a British charity for the homeless, was searching for a solution to re-use its existing IT resources smartly, bring constant uptime, and ties the whole infrastructure together. With StarWind, the charity got the chance to build a single highly available (HA) Hyper-V cluster to run its considerable IT environment without buying any new devices or servers.

Find out how the Society of St James simplified its IT environment while dramatically boosting its performance without any new proprietary components thanks to StarWind.

“Preparation is key to success” — a saying that people have developed for a very good reason. In the new series, our Solutions Engineer will dissect the process of migrating production data and carry you through its journey step-by-step. During episode 1, you will learn about migration scenarios, what hazards lie ahead, how to prepare for migration and why it is mandatory to do so.

Tune into our new webinar series and master the art of production data migration.

Interface IT Solutions Group LTD, a Canadian Managed IT Services Provider (MSP), had a Windows Server environment based on physical SAN and with VMware ESXi on top. The existing IT infrastructure was fragmented and lacked a solid foundation. The company was looking for a product that would allow creating a consolidated server architecture and achieving high availability with minimal hardware footprint and at an affordable price. StarWind allowed Interface IT Solutions Group LTD to consolidate memory, compute, and storage resources in one software-defined hyperconverged platform and get high availability with only 2 two nodes.

Find out how Interface IT Solutions Group LTD gets a hyperconverged solution with perfect price-performance ratio thanks to StarWind.

If the previous part, you read about general boundaries of cybersecurity and why it’s mandatory to uphold. Continuing the topic, the initial steps to ensuring your business is cyber-secure, you need to create a solid foundation. Baseline OS security tools have to be configured and active 24/7, and much success of cybersecurity depends on educating your staff.

Read the full article by Benoit Voirin, a cybersecurity consultant, about why employee engagement and education are key in nailing cybersecurity and how best to approach them.