I still remember the days (almost 10 years ago) when SATA drives hit the storage market by a storm and it became a much cheaper replacement to Fiber Channel drives which were the defacto choice for enterprise storage at that time.  In short few years, SATA drive has became a very desirable option in enterprise storage when capacity rather than performance is the focus.

I remember having the discussion over the years with many IT Admins about when Tape will be obsolete as result of storage prices going cheaper by day. Larger and larger SATA drives with lower price tags have been hitting the market over the year, which has  only spurred more of these discussions. Nonetheless 10 years later Tape Drives are still the main backup medium today at large enterprises.…

If you have decided to use StarWind Virtual Tape Library in an environment where you have Symantec Backup Exec and looking to find out how to integrate both products together then you have came to the right place. In fact if you have used or setup Symantec Backup Exec with ADIC Scalar 100 or HP MSL 2024 Tape library previously then you have went through the complete process before.

In this post, I will show you how to integrate your Symantec Backup Exec with StarWind Virtual Tape Library that is emulating HP MSL 2024. This post, assume you have already setup the StarWind Virtual Tape Library & drives. If you have not yet done so, then please start by going through my previous post: StarWind Virtual Tape Library.…

The StarWind iSCSI SAN has always been my lab primary SAN. It has never failed me, & I know of many companies who is quite happy with their StarWind iSCSI SAN and who refuse to move to a hardware box after seeing the benefits & how it fits their need. It has been amazing year this year as StarWind were kind enough to sponsor my blog. Though that is not all for StarWind this year. They have been nominated as finalist in multiple categories in the Storage Award 2012. Below are the categories they were nominated for & if you are a happy customer of their or welling to try their software and see if they deserve a vote, then the categories to vote for them are:

– Storage Virtualization Product of the Year

– Storage Magazine “One to Watch” Award.…

StarWind Software Inc., an innovative provider of SAN software for iSCSI storage and VM Backup technology, today announced the release of new StarWind iSCSI SAN v5.8 and Hyper-V Backup Plug-in. The iSCSI SAN software is enhanced by the powerful VM Backup technology that is included as a plug-in.

Backup plug-in is built specifically for Hyper-V-based environments to provide fast backup and restore for Hyper-V virtual machines. The backup solution delivered by StarWind performs all operations on the Hyper-V host level thus it requires no backup agents to be installed on virtual machines (Agentless Architecture).

Hyper-V Backup Plug-in makes fast backups and allows quick, reliable restore of both virtual machines and individual files. It utilizes advanced technologies for maximum disk space saving (Global Deduplication).…