Nothing is worse than having a powerful NAS for your business needs to only have the bottleneck manifest itself in the network. Synology has a quick and easy fix for this with its network AIC, the E10G17-F2 Ethernet Adapter. The E10G17-F2 easily adds dual 10GbE SFP+ ports (there is also a single port option, E10G15-F1) to

There is nothing more certain in a datacenter than End of Life product management, where old equipment needs to be cycled out and replaced with newer hardware. This is especially true with battery backup systems, where the core component is generally a sealed lead acid (SLA) battery, which has a usable life between 3-5 years. While you

VMware just released their first update to ESXi 6.7, aptly named ESXi 6.7U1. This latest update brings a number of patches and updates, although as someone sitting in front of a vCenter Client window most of the day, you really only care about that awesome new Dark Theme people have been talking about. In this

With the recent launch of VMware's vSphere 6.7, we used some time last night to upgrade our main testing equipment. This included many of our Dell PowerEdge R730s and Dell PowerEdge R740xds which received firmware upgrades at the same time. To make all of this as painless as possible, we leveraged Dell's Lifecycle Controller for

As the StorageReview networking fabric overhaul continues, an important but unsung member of the family includes the Dell Networking S3100 Series Switch. While not as glitzy as the 25GbE networking cards or as fast as the S4048 and Z9100 workhorses soon going into place, the S3100 provides a critical role for the lab. Though our

We previously reviewed the Dell Mellanox ConnectX-4 rNDC 25Gb NIC, which is a custom form-factor card designed to slot into Dell EMC PowerEdge servers. This card is unique compared to traditional PCIe edge-cards, in that it is designed to integrate with the server in the same way as any other OEM part and not take up

In the StorageReview Enterprise Lab we use a variety of power management tools and battery backups. If a data center is not generating their own power or has sufficient backup generators, an interruption in power supply is inevitable (in the cases above, interruptions are still a possibility). For our testing environments we use Eaton gear

When talking about virtualization, we spend most of our coverage on the enterprise application and infrastructure sides of the business. However, the end-user content we produce does very well also; there's a growing interest in the enterprise when it comes to enabling users to take advantage of maturing technologies to deliver a PC-like experience via thin

Lowering power usage is a hot-button topic for anyone operating a lab or datacenter these days. Utility costs are always increasing, servers and storage keep growing and there are few signs that "the cloud" is going to do much to help. Regardless of the size of operation, power costs make up a huge portion of an OPEX budget (#4 at