StarWind Blog

Andrea Mauro
June 7, 2017

Design a ROBO infrastructure. Part 4: HCI solutions

As written in the previous post, for ROBO scenario the most interesting HCI (Hyper-Converged Infrastructure) configuration is a two nodes configuration, considering that two nodes could be enough to run dozen VMs (or also more). For this reason, not all hyperconverged solutions could be suitable for this case (for example Nutanix or Simplivity need at least 3 nodes). And is not simple scale down an enterprise solution to a small size, due to the architecture constraints.

Didier Van Hoye
June 2, 2017

Why do we always see Responder CQE Errors with RoCE RDMA?

Anyone who has configured and used SMB Direct with RoCE RDMA Mellanox cards appreciates the excellent diagnostic counters Mellanox provides for use with Windows Performance Monitor. They are instrumental when it comes to finding issues and verifying everything is working correctly.

Mikhail Rodionov
May 30, 2017

Windows Server 2016: NIC Teaming Functionality

NIC teaming is not something we got with Windows Server 2016, but I just find it interesting to review this functionality as we have it in the current iteration of Windows Server, as usual, touching a bit on the basics and history of this feature.

Gary Williams
May 25, 2017

You can’t have too much monitoring

One of the things I come across time and again is a lack of monitoring in what are supposed to be corporate environments. I am honestly surprised at how little monitoring is carried out on infrastructure. These days, it is quite possible to carry out some very in-depth monitoring by using a freely available software on Linux and Windows. In this article, I’m going to go through the various monitoring tools that I use to monitor both production and my lab environment.

Karim Buzdar
May 23, 2017

Intraforest Migration in Windows Server 2016 with Active Directory Migration Tool (ADMT) 3.2

In this first blog post, I’ll walk you through to migrate Active Directory objects (users, groups, and workstations or member servers) between two domains in the same forest (Intraforest) using Active Directory Migration Tool (ADMT) 3.2. ADMT allows you to migrate objects (including users, groups, computers, profiles, service and managed service accounts) with the help of ADMT console, command line, and VBScript. However, in this post, I’ll focus only on ADMT console and command line.

Alex Khorolets
May 22, 2017

Virtual Tape Library on Azure used with Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager 2016

Tapes have been on the “backup market” for a long time and still are considered as a good option to store and secure a high amount of backup data. However, the continuous increase of backup size becomes a bottleneck in terms of fitting backup windows and reduces a simplicity and redundancy of backup solutions. Today more and more companies consider backing up their production data to more reasonable storage solutions, like Clouds. Here comes in hand the technology that emulates physical tapes on top of inexpensive, fast, and high-capacity spindle drives.

Jon Toigo
May 11, 2017

Data Management Moves to the Fore. Part 4: Why Cognitive Data Management?

In previous installments of this blog, we have deconstructed the idea of cognitive data management (CDM) to identify its “moving parts” and to define what each part contributes to a holistic process for managing files and more structured content. First and foremost, CDM requires a Policy Management Framework that identifies classes of data and specifies their hosting, protection, preservation and privacy requirements of each data class over its useful life. This component reflects the nature of data, whose access requirements and protection priorities tend to change over time.

Augusto Alvarez
May 10, 2017

Microsoft Previews Pre-Checks for Azure Backup and Completely Free

Microsoft is transforming the Azure Backup platform into a reliable solution for managing the virtual machines protection after all Azure Backup is one of the “low-hanging fruits” available for IT admins that want to start trying cloud solutions. Now they are previewing the Azure Backup pre-checks to guarantee a clean and straightforward process when you are protecting your workloads.

Alex Bykovskyi
May 5, 2017

StarWind Virtual Storage Appliance Linux edition

This article describes the new StarWind Virtual Storage Appliance, which was released on 26th of April. StarWind has always been a Windows native solution. However, due to market trends and the huge interest of our customers, we have decided to work in Linux direction. The main goal of the article is to show what StarWind VSA can do for clients and how you can work with it.

Educational Episodes: Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI)

Featured blog posts

All blog posts

Design a ROBO infrastructure. Part 4: HCI solutions

Why do we always see Responder CQE Errors with RoCE RDMA?

Windows Server 2016: NIC Teaming Functionality

You can’t have too much monitoring

Intraforest Migration in Windows Server 2016 with Active Directory Migration Tool (ADMT) 3.2

Virtual Tape Library on Azure used with Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager 2016

Data Management Moves to the Fore. Part 4: Why Cognitive Data Management?

Microsoft Previews Pre-Checks for Azure Backup and Completely Free

StarWind Virtual Storage Appliance Linux edition