Windows Admin Center: Strengths, Weaknesses, Enterprise Readiness and Everything Else You Need to Know

Windows Admin Center, formerly known as Project Honolulu, provides IT administrators with a unified management interface for Windows Server Management tools that were once only accessible through disparate management tools. To date, Windows Admin Center has over 250,000 unique connection instances across 25,000 customer deployments and over 50,000 downloads.

We’ve been kicking the tires of Windows Admin Center (WAC) for almost a year when we first got wind of the preview at Microsoft Ignite. Since then, we’ve monitored its progress, evaluated its strengths and weaknesses and taken a look at how it might sit in an enterprise environment. I also considered what organizations would need to complement its functionality. Continue reading

Disaster Recovery and Microsoft Azure, an Overview

For business-savvy enterprises, there’s more to using the Microsoft Azure cloud than just adding applications, data, and users.

Small and medium-sized businesses running Azure also must make detailed contingency plans to stay connected to their applications and data if a disaster occurs. Companies should take the time to plan and configure disaster recovery services so they don’t miss a beat if and when problems arise. Continue reading

Hyper-V Failover Clusters – What You Need to Know and How 5nine Can Help

Building a Hyper-V failover plan is a critical step for any organization wishing to maintain 24/7/365 availability of their Microsoft Cloud. However, configuring Hyper-V failover clusters and managing Hyper-V hosts has its own set of unique challenges, nuances and steps. This article provides an introduction to Hyper-V failover challenges, discusses its benefits and shares some resources where virtualization administrators can access more information. Continue reading

The Benefits and Limitations of Running Linux on Hyper-V

Choice is good.

In my 20+ years of experience in the IT industry, I’ve seen few—if any—clients who use a Windows environment exclusively. It’s a heterogeneous world. The reality is, most organizations prefer to choose from a variety of operating systems, software, hardware and hypervisors; depending on what best suits the information needs of the organization. In this day and age, it’s necessary to have a cloud solution flexible enough to support it all.  Continue reading

7 Azure Cloud Myths Put to Rest

Microsoft’s Azure Cloud continues to gain enterprise users in the growing cloud marketplace amid competitors such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud and IBM, yet it is also often the target of rumors, myths and erroneous information about its capabilities and features.

To battle those myths, this article looks at some of the most egregious claims about Microsoft Azure to help IT professionals get the right information when making cloud infrastructure decisions. Continue reading

Azure vs. AWS: Determine Which You Need

Looking to take your on-premise data center or private cloud to the next level? Maybe you’re looking for a better way to allocate your infrastructure resources based on changing workload requirements. Or maybe you want to extend your data backup and recovery capabilities, or need a resiliency solution that is more cost-effective than the system you’re currently using.

Whatever your reasons, migrating to the public cloud has lots of advantages, including substantial cost savings, elasticity, and easy scalability. If you’re ready to take the next step, the question to consider is this: What cloud service should you go with? Continue reading

Azure Stack 101: What It Is and How It Can Help Your Datacenter

Microsoft’s Azure Stack allows enterprises to run a hybrid cloud right in their own datacenters, giving them additional cloud options.

Cloud computing continues to expand in use for a wide variety of enterprises, but it all doesn’t have to happen outside your company’s datacenters. Continue reading

Joining 5nine Software as Director of Product Management

Today, I am excited to announce I will be joining the awesome team at 5nine Software as Director of Product Management. My primary job responsibilities will be for the product strategy and direction of 5nine’s security and management solutions.
5nineSo, you ask, why Product Management? It’s been a lifelong dream to be part of shaping the direction of a technology solution.  By joining 5nine, I hope to simplify IT, Cloud and beyond, because there’s always a better way 🙂

“What prepared me for this was very surprising looking back.”

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