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Please note that this post is sponsored by NAKIVO. Although it is sponsored, the topics and words below are written on my own accord, and they are not those of NAKIVO. There is no shortage of data protection products on the market these days. In fact, there probably has never been a more favorable time for consumers to find a solution that is a fit for them. But in such a crowded market, there can be a lot of considerations one has to make. Do you need to protect multiple hypervisors? What about replication? Do you have workloads in AWS? ...

I am happy to announce that NAKIVO has become a sponsor of this site. For those not familiar with NAKIVO, they are the company behind NAKIVO Backup & Replication. The product started off with a heavy focus on virtualization, and through the years the feature set has been greatly expanded upon. Currently their suite of products include protection for workloads running in VMware, Hyper-V, as well as an AWS EC2 component. ...

Last year I wrote a post summarizing my 2016 - this may not be the most interesting of topics for most readers, but it is something that I have found useful. I get value from this exercise as it forces me to reflect back on my year and see what goals I achieved, and which ones I didn’t. I also find that the action of writing down a goal (publicly, in this case) also makes it real. It makes it something to strive for. ...

Last month I was invited to attend my first HPE Tech Day held in Anaheim, California. Actually, it was held at the Grand Californian Disneyland Hotel … pretty cool for someone like me who had never been to Disneyland. Although the location was definitely head and shoulders above most events that I have gone to, I didn’t let that get in the way of when it came to assessing what I saw. ...

When working with VMware Horizon, you’ll find the concept of desktop pools comes up fairly often. Honestly, they aren’t overly complicated to understand. But regardless, it is important to understand what they are, what the different types are, and what options are available. TYPES OF DEKSTOP POOLS When defining a desktop pool, you’ll be able to choose from one of the following three options below. Each type of pool has limitations as to what type of VMs or machines it can use: ...

When it comes to IT, performance is not always solved by throwing more resources at the problem. A lot of us might be familiar with problems that arise when over provisioning vCPUs on a vSphere host. The host ends up spending more time trying to schedule and coordinate the vCPU tasks than it does to actually perform the tasks. Recently at Tech Field Day 15 we received a briefing from DataCore. As part of my preparation, I put together a primer on the company. As it turns out, it was useless - in a good way though. DataCore has recently launched a brand new product called MaxParallel, which is the first in a series of solutions. So what problem do they solved? Essentially they work around or minimize bottlenecks when it comes to processing workloads. The first product in the series is aimed squarely at SQL Server running on Windows. ...

The first Steelhead appliance ever sold. Riverbed is synonymous with WAN acceleration, and rightly so. The company has been doing this, and doing it well, for a number of years now. As a little bit of trivia, the first Steelhead server was sold in 2004 to Environment Canada. But with so much of the world going mobile-first, Riverbed intends to keep serving their customers. There are a number of wireless AP vendors out there, so what characteristics make Riverbed’s Xirrus attractive? ...

Disaster Recovery is something that can be critical to every business, but not every business has a good DR plan. Heck, I would be willing to bet that a lot of SMBs don’t even have a plan that is made up of much more than “fix the problem”. A large reason for this is designing a good, versatile DR environment is not cheap. Not every organization has the money to lay out for equipment, facilities, maintenance, etc. ...

While studying for my VCP7-DTM exam, I found that there were definitely some core aspects that I had to wrap my head around. I notice that while studying if I hit a stumbling block, I really need to crack it in order to grow. With that in mind, I decided that I wanted to write about a few of those blocks that I ran into. This partially came out of me wanting to understand concepts better. The other, larger part, came from me being too lazy to write a study guide. So, let’s get this going! ...

Imagine a world where you don’t need to worry about the security of your data. Concerns such as malicious attackers, trojan horses, and insider threats are non-existent. Doesn’t that sound nice? Of course it does, but let’s face it, that isn’t the real world. Quite the opposite in fact. Most organizations are constantly under attack, and not necessarily just from the outside. The good news is that Skyport Systems is aiming to be your best friend in defense. ...