SolarWinds has recently introduced a change, or rather a payment option to pay on a monthly basis.

I have seen Nagios, PRTG and ManageEngine These are all appropriate tools. Just adding my own experience as having the opportunity to have worked with all. Nagios , easy to implement, agents easy to install, interface management for alerts: good PRTG , easy to implement,…

Security starts within the enterprise first with strong security policies that the product should comply to. Examples are centralized administration, passwordless authentication. Two-factor authentication. Also, one question is whether to provide the same level of…

The type of usage has first to be taken into consideration. Most work can be done on a NAS as disks have grown faster. However, high performance DB should be on SAN. In the longerterm, NAS can suffer as some users have the tendency to put DBs there because of the…

Some words about ransomware first. Ransomware has become much more targeted these days, so that ordinary users are less likely to suffer from it. Also, avoid the free tools as with the degree of sophistication and the way they target companies, most of them will not…

Cisco is a traditional networking play and has successfully transformed from pure hardware to now software defined products. Many network engineers already use the product and makes a lot of sense for a company with Cisco history to go towards Cisco just like a company…

Many insightful answers already provided. I would just add the following based on my experience. With so many employees an located in different places, its important for you to list the issues being encountered with the present setup, in addition of the need to upgrade,…

While the VMWARE part itself is stable, other common issues with Horizon include users unable to authenticate in the Horizon client & getting errors like " no desktop is available"

I have seen a number of replies. Just clarifying. There are 3 storage Tiers with NVMe, SSD and SAS /NL SSD is a disk that doesn't have moving parts like SAS and NL Now, Flash is the implementation of SSD. SSDs are made mostly of flash memory

My experience guys: (a) For urgent remote trouble-shooting, use TeamViewer, can be set up rapidly but I would avoid it as I have not seen the accountability part ( record of whom has accessed so that when there is some malign act, you as the admin are not held responsible.…

Here are the specs/details which you should request from your supplier. This is in an Excel file & I just copied and pasted here. Please send me an email or is there some way I can send it? Item Specification Details 1 Number of users customer to specify, e.g…

If you're looking for just a basic meeting tool, Zoom will do just fine. You can also share your screen as well as choose the option to share presentations ( in your case, its the Digital manual). Cisco Webex is more for making video calls but some use it for training as…

Citrix, despite evolution of VMWARE view and Microsoft RDS , Citrix Xendesktop available as part of the workspace suite is still now the reference among most IT professionals and should benefit from the work-from-home move as companies, especially utilities and telcos have…

Question 1 : Its not only the storage make which is important but more are the type of disks being used. Now, most companies, because users are so unpredictable go for two tier or three tier storage. Automatic Tiering distributes the loads where the need is. Now,…

(a) To avoid language barrier, best is to have email exchanges preceding oral communications/ conf calls. Please make sure that you fill in the fault docket ( TAC Excel form) providing all necessary info (b) As for problems with the storage controller, you can do regular…

(a)Makes sense to have the 6400 and 6800 is as flash in our private cloud and the slower 5400's as backup , but please make sure that you have an offsite copy as well, both for compliance and peace of mind! (b)Also, when implementing those higher Tiers (Tier 1 : NVME),…

Great to hear that you are using HP blade and Huawei Oceanstor and all being managed by VMWARE. We used it before and it works. As for the storage, afterwards, have a look at the Dedup features , it will help you to save on disk space Also, you may want to do a quarterly…