Educational Episodes: Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI)

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.

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.

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.

Microsoft is always looking to offer newer and faster ways for their customers to embrace cloud services, even if you are not moving any of your workloads to Azure, MS wants for your company to integrate with the cloud. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platforms are a simple way to start, even for Internet-of-Things (IoT), that’s why the Redmond company is announcing: IoT Central.

I did previously setup during a few occasions, VPN access on Windows Server 2012 R2, but haven’t tested that on the newly released Windows Server 2016. Remote access role is a VPN which protects the network connection or your remote connection from one side to another and protecting both sides from attacks or data sniffing as VPN protocol uses a tunnel inside of a standard data connection.

The reason for writing this article was the goal of eliminating any possible confusion in the process of configuring the StarWind Virtual Tape Library in pair with the Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager. The integration of SCDPM provides a benefit of consolidating the view of alerts across all your DPM 2016 servers. Alerts are grouped by disk or tape, data source, protection group and replica volumes, which simplifies troubleshooting. The grouping functionality is further completed with the console capable of separating issues that only affect one data source from problems that impact multiple data sources. Alerts are also separated into backup failure or infrastructure problems.

On 28th of September, Microsoft has released the Virtual Network peering, in GA. This new functionality gives you the opportunity to connect 2 Virtual Network in Azure between them, by using the network of the Azure Datacenter. Bye bye VPN S2S between virtual network 🙂

These days, more and more companies need high-quality, reliable and efficient server hardware.  Home labs used by enthusiasts and professionals in the IT sphere for software developing and testing, studying for an IT certification, and configuring virtual environments became popular as well. Small companies are also interested in cheap and compact servers, the production of which is based on a couple of virtual machines or networking applications. Supermicro company ranks one of the leading positions in server development for a long time. Supermicro products range from the Hi-End clusters to microservers. Recently the company released two compact servers: SuperServer E200-8D and its younger model – SuperServer E300-8D.

Linux virtual machines in a cloud service like Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Microsoft Azure have become a very common practice. You can find pretty much anything that you need regarding Linux applications, including appliances or even PaaS technologies that actually work with Linux in the backend. Now Ubuntu has decided to go a bit further than that and offers an OS version with a customized kernel for AWS.