Curious about RAID? Discover the technical differences and find out which one suits your needs best.

Safeguarding your data is crucial in today’s digital landscape, but with so many backup options available, how do you choose the right one? Our latest article dives into data backup, comparing tape, disk, and virtual tape library (VTL) technologies.

vSphere 8 introduces VMware vSAN Express Storage Architecture (ESA), focused on efficiency, performance, and less CPU usage. The new configuration has been optimized for NVMe-based TLC flash devices, abandoning cache layers and disk groups. VMware will privilege the deployments of vSAN as ESA, moving forward.

Cockpit graphical user interface (GUI) provides all the basic configs for Linux server management without the need for text-based commands. Working in an enterprise, for an admin, will most likely mean working in a heterogeneous IT environment. Frequently, Windows services will be primary, so managing a Linux server can be a bit of a drag for someone who’s not too well-versed in it.

IT administrators are always confronted with the problem of building innovative, fast, modern, and reliable IT infrastructure that fits the budget and saves resources for future growth. To commence, you should plan, select, re-plan, clarify goals, and so on ad infinitum in a vicious circle. However, the issue of guaranteeing the data safety will always be relevant on the agenda. Choosing a SAN (Storage Area Network) with the iSCSI protocol as one of the possible storage solutions will ensure data security and constant availability. In addition, this approach is cost-effective in terms of maintenance and support.

Let’s imagine a situation: a power outage went out and an incorrect server shutdown has occurred. Everything is aggravated by the fact that you have no power backup. What will happen to your write operations? They sink into oblivion and data will be lost. But StarWind says “no” to these troubles! Log-structured Write-Back Cache (LSWBC) is a StarWind feature which speeds up the processing of write requests and saves data when the server is incorrectly shut down. What about RAM caching? Your data also will be saved.

StarWind & VMware vSphere users get unrestricted VSAN from StarWind 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?

In this article, I discuss what VSAN from StarWind for vSphere is and how to set it up on the hardware RAID. StarWind VSAN for vSphere is a Software-Defined Storage solution that is designed specifically for vSphere environments. It comes as a preconfigured VM template, so just a couple of quick steps are needed to start running your vSphere environment on StarWind VSAN: download the solution, deploy it, and “play”. Here, I want to share some tips and tricks on working with VSAN for vSphere.

You may have heard that RAID is no longer applicable for enterprise storage: that it’s time had passed. RAID has dominated enterprise storage for decades and, while not a hot topic of conversation today, it remains a key strategic approach for businesses to consider. To some degree, it is true, RAID is no longer the singular answer to enterprise storage that it once was.  For decades it was unchallenged as a technology and as an approach, and so reigned alone – a foregone conclusion in a giant sea of storage.  Today, RAIN has joined the space and is a viable alternative to RAID in many scenarios.  But just because RAIN is newer and the darling of storage conversations does not mean that RAIN will simply displace RAID nor that RAID’s position of importance has been eliminated.  Not at all.