N2WS Backup & Recovery v3.0 – A big step forward

6th of March, 2020 / Jason Wood / No Comments

N2WS Backup & Recovery v3.0 has now gone live. Below is my review of a late beta version.

For those that have been following, you’ll know that Telstra Purple use N2WS Backup & Recovery (I’ll call it BaR from now, not as good as CPM, but I’m not going to type the whole thing). I was lucky to get a beta preview of N2WS BaR v3.0 and have been very impressed. The new UI is a massive improvement, but there are also a number of small things that have been fixed too.… [Keep reading] “N2WS Backup & Recovery v3.0 – A big step forward”

Quick Intro to Azure Backup Explorer

10th of February, 2020 / Jesse Loudon / No Comments

Here’s what you need to know about Azure Backup Explorer which has been released in public preview as of 5th Feb 2020.

What is Azure Backup Explorer?

It’s currently available for use with Azure Virtual Machines
A single pane of glass for monitoring backups of your Azure Virtual Machines
Removes complexity and manpower associated with monitoring backups using Azure Log Analytics Workspaces

How do I access it?

TLDR = Azure Portal > any RSV > Overview > Backup Explorer

… [Keep reading]

A look into CloudFormation resource import

14th of January, 2020 / Jason Wood / No Comments

Just before re:Invent, AWS launched a new feature for CloudFormation … Create Stack with existing resources! This gives a lot of options to start to manage existing resources as code, if they were created via GUI or CLI. Apart from that though, it now gives you the ability to move resources between stacks, rename stacks, etc.

There is a pretty good AWS blog, but there are some things the blog really didn’t cover too well.… [Keep reading] “A look into CloudFormation resource import”

Zero-Touch BitLocker with PowerShell

7th of January, 2020 / Jesse Loudon / No Comments

The majority of IT engineers and architects traverse various forms of security on a daily basis ranging from our complex alphanumeric corporate logon passwords to the increasingly common MFA prompts on our mobiles. You could say that we have become experts in navigating modern security measures required to stay protected. But perhaps you’re not familiar in planning and rolling out that same security, at scale, to your organisation’s Windows laptops in the form of disk encryption.… [Keep reading] “Zero-Touch BitLocker with PowerShell”

Diary of a re:Invent newbie

30th of December, 2019 / Jason Wood / No Comments

Wow, so the end of the year has quickly run up and I’ve finally found some time to write this up. While re:Invent was a few weeks ago, I took a few days vacation on my way home and then it’s been busy busy busy since. So, in the lead up, I’d watched the “How to re:Invent” videos and had advice from our senior AWS guy, Matt. I’d say the advice was pretty good and I made the most of my time.… [Keep reading] “Diary of a re:Invent newbie”

A tale of two products (don’t expect Dickens)

30th of January, 2019 / Jason Wood / No Comments

At Re:Invent and just after, AWS released several new products. Included in those were AWS FSx Windows and AWS Backup. Both of these products had a lot of interest for me, for various reasons, so I thought I’d give them a try. None of my experience was under work conditions, but the following are my experiences. Note: Both are only in a small number of regions, currently.

AWS FSx Windows

Pros:

Easy setup (by itself)
Fully compatible Windows file server
DFS support
Has backups
Works as expected

Cons:

Requires AWS Microsoft AD in each VPC
Can’t change file share size
Some features can only be changed from CLI
Throughput can only be changed through restore
Minimum share size is 300GB

First out of the box, and released at Re:Invent is AWS FSx Windows.… [Keep reading] “A tale of two products (don’t expect Dickens)”

Backups? Doesn’t Amazon handle that?

20th of December, 2018 / Jason Wood / No Comments

For many, the cloud is a magical place where servers just appear and your cloud provider looks after everything, or, if they at least have a concept of the servers, they just assume that the provider will also back them up. Lots of people never bothered to think about protection in a VMware environment, so why start now?

Unfortunately, while your cloud provider probably supplies the tools, you still need to do the configuration and management.… [Keep reading] “Backups? Doesn’t Amazon handle that?”

Disk Space Reporting through Lamba Functions- Windows servers

4th of September, 2018 / Syed Naqvi / No Comments

Solution Objective:

The solution provides detailed report related to hard disk space for all the Windows Ec2 instances in the AWS environment.

Requirements:

Mentioned below are the requirements the solution should be able to fulfil.

Gather information related to all mount points in all the Windows EC2 instances in the environment.
Able to generate cumulative report based on all instances in the environment.

3. Assumptions:

The following assumptions are considered

All the EC2 instances have SSM agent installed.

… [Keep reading]

IT Service Management (ITSM) & Operations – Overview of the Availability Management Process

25th of August, 2018 / Athavan Natkuna / 1 Comment

Background

In many cases ITSM Availability Management Process is overlooked due to other frontline processes such as incident, problem and change management. I have provided a summary of this availability management process and significance below. I hope that the information is useful for your organisation in order to define and implement the process.
Objectives:

Availability management has to ensure that the delivered availability levels for all services comply with or exceed the agreed requirements in a cost-effective way and enables the business to satisfy its objectives.

… [Keep reading]

The Present [and Future] Landscape of Data Migrations

17th of August, 2018 / Mike Yee / 1 Comment

A rite of passage for the majority of us in the tech consultancy world is being a part of a medium to large scale data migration at some stage in our careers. No, I don’t mean dragging files from a PC to a USB drive, though this may have very well factored into the equation for some us. What I’m referencing is a planned piece of work where the objective is to move an entire data set from a legacy storage system to a target storage.… [Keep reading] “The Present [and Future] Landscape of Data Migrations”