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

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

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.

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.

Prime Advisors Inc. is a quickly growing American investment consulting company with over 30 years of experience. To keep up with customers’ needs, Prime required a shared storage solution for their virtualization environment, and this is where StarWind helped to build one using off-the-shelf commodity hardware and StarWind software. New shiny storage came with top-notch performance & w/out huge SAN price tag. Read the Success Story here.

One of the most anticipated events in the computer world - Experts Live Europe 2018 - starts pretty soon! Being a gold sponsor for the event, StarWind will talk about building affordable enterprise-level Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) for consolidating compute, storage, and networking, and simplifying the management of VMs and applications. Experts Live Europe is the annual Microsoft community IT conference that attracts the best speakers and experts in the world to talk about new achievements in the Microsoft Cloud, Datacenter, and Workplace areas. It will be held from October 24-26, 2018 in Prague. See you at the conference!

Welcome to watch ELEU18 Gold Sponsor Video about 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.

NVMe...Hey, wait, what about these SATA & SAS SSD drives? Well, NVMe drives will ditch them at some point, you know! Originally, SATA & SAS were designed to connect slower “spinning” hard drive media. Such a hardware interface entails significant overhead in I/O processing and it was never designed for parallelism with all the sockets and cores we get from Intel & AMD these days. NVMe drives are much faster compared SATA & SAS SSDs, they provide the performance you need for your latency dependent applications like databases, on-line stock trading and transactional processing. NVMe solves many of the performance problems associated with legacy storage because it significantly reduces and optimizes the data transfer path as a protocol and adds parallel I/O handling as well. Improved hardware interface and simplified software package specific to NVMe will help to “boost” your HPC workloads and get the first fruits in a short time. Oh, cool, but how (…and why?!?) to bring all those NVMe “bells & whistles” to SMBs & ROBOs? Well, StarWind knows the trick!
Find out more about StarWind NVMe over Fabrics (NVMf) in the StarWind experts’ talk at the Storage Field Day 17.

Migration of virtual machines is an important feature of virtualization technology that allows applications to move transparently along with their runtime environments between physical machines. AWS Server Migration Service (SMS) allows the migration of one or multiple on-premises virtual machines to AWS in an easy way from a single pane of glass. Plan, automate, and track step-by-step replication of running server volumes with just one tool — the AWS console!

Read the article by Paolo Valsecchi, StarWind System Engineer, to find out how to use the AWS Server Migration Service appliance.

StarWind takes the stage at Experts Live Europe 2018 as a gold sponsor! We will talk about the Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) and how SMB and ROBO can consolidate compute, storage, and networking, and simplify the management of VMs and applications taking into account IT-resource and budgets limitations. Experts Live Europe is the annual Microsoft community IT conference that attracts the best speakers and experts in the world to talk about new achievements in the Microsoft Cloud, Datacenter, and Workplace areas.

The conference will be held on October 24-26, 2018 in Prague. Get more details here.

StarWind takes the stage at Experts Live Europe 2018 as a gold sponsor! We will talk about the Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) and how SMB and ROBO can consolidate compute, storage, and networking, and simplify the management of VMs and applications taking into account IT-resource and budgets limitations. Experts Live Europe is the annual Microsoft community IT conference that attracts the best speakers and experts in the world to talk about new achievements in the Microsoft Cloud, Datacenter, and Workplace areas.

The conference will be held on October 24-26, 2018 in Prague. Get more details here.

Less than just a week ago, Microsoft released Windows Server 2019 – the new server OS that many have been waiting so long. And, trying to make user experience even better, Microsoft released a new free utility allowing you to manage the entire production environment from a single web-based console – Windows Admin Center known before as “Project Honolulu”. After some polishing, it became a really cool tool to manage on-prem, cloud, and hybrid environments that integrates with Azure Services. Give it a shot!

Read the recent article by Vladan Seget, an IT and Virtualization consultant, to learn how to use Windows Admin Center for Windows Server 2019.

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 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.

Thorburn Associates, an American company designing space layouts, lighting, and acoustic solutions, used to run its production on the aging physical shared storage. If any server went down, the production would go down as well. The company badly needed a new IT infrastructure, and the industry-proven shared storage provider to ensure its applications uptime.

Find out how Thorburn Associates built a fault tolerant environment with StarWind.

Recently we’ve released a completely new version of StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN) for VMware vSphere, this time a ready-to-go Linux-based VM delivering shared storage for VMware vSphere environments. In a nutshell: no Windows & associated Windows licensing, even higher performance, uber-simple deployment & management. Now we are excited to present an updated build! This time we improved RAM & flash caching, added software RAID support and made web UI even better looking. In this article series our expert shares some tricks and hints on using StarWind VSAN and discusses its deployment on top of the OS-managed software and pure hardware RAIDs.

Read the full article by Alex Bykovskyi, a Solutions Architect here at StarWind, to learn how to deploy and properly set up StarWind Virtual SAN for vSphere.

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.

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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.