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During the last VMworld Europe we met and interviewed Robbie Wright, Commonvault Senior Manager Product Marketing, who was there with the full team in charge of the development of the products of the american company. We had a nice chat with him.

How would you define your product line? Isn’t it reductive to talk about just backup solutions?

Yes, lots of people identify us with backups, but Commonvault’s solution is so broad and advanced that we can define it better by using three terms: data protection, management and compliance. In particular, we believe that the idea of backup itself is obsolete, here at VMworld we are speaking of Workload Portability, the opportunity of transferring the entire workload among different cloud services. The whole infrastructure becomes a single thing for us.

We tried the GravityZone suite available both in the cloud and on premises and ready for MSPs and resellers seeking for a complete and strong tool to keep under control the computers fleet of their clients.

The number of IT attacks is ever growing and the target in most cases are professionals and companies. The goal of these attacks has changed too: not just causing damages but also committing a scam, asking for ransoms, stealing information, passwords and money. In such a scenario an antivirus is always important even though it’s often taken for granted.

The real added value in a business environment, or for a consultant, a sysadmin or an MSP is not the simple protection with whichever engine based on signature, rather the use of a complete suite that can monitor all the client computer and servers protected, also visualizing immediately any problem and risk.
Bitdefender has gained an excellent reputation thanks in particular to a sophisticated antivirus engine, always in the first places in the tests of the most prestigious labs. Its engine is also sold to several third parties that use and resell it with different brands.

The GravityZone suite by Bitdefender is, in our opinion, still quite unknown, although it’s been for a while on the market and offers many advanced capabilities that can fulfill the needs of small and Enterprise companies. So we’ve tried it -just after the restyling that ended last month- to understand the main features and to evaluate its behaviour.

We’ve talked with Ditlev Bredahl, OnApp founder and CEO, during VMworld 2015 in Barcelona. This is what he told us.

Tell us about how the OnApp adventure began.

I founded OnApp in 2010. Before 2010, I was personally managing a Service Provider, i was providing several companies with hosting services and I decide to sell mine and dedicate to a new project. As Amazon Web Service continued to grow, I wanted to realise something that could compete with such colossus. No small cloud provider can compete with Amazon: it cannot provide the same global coverage, it’s not able to build an infrastructure that scales the same way and it can’t include in the offer all the services that Amazon proposes.

OnApp is a revolutionary service because it allows all the Service Provider of this world to ally creating a sort of federation, making a competition with Amazon possible.

After October’s issue dedicated to VMworld, GURU advisor returns with a rich cover.

This month we will focus on storage with the tests of HP MSA 2040, one of the most complete and scalable solutions in the professional tier to couple with two or more vSphere or Hyper-V hosts, and the shiny brand new VMware Virtual SAN 6.1.
We also gathered information about the ever more feared Cryptolocker -the correct term is Ransomware, a software that demands for a ransom- : getting secured from this treat is a must for every good sysadmin.

Starting with this issue you’ll find two columns: one dedicated to OpenStack with a series of introductive articles, and one dedicated to VMware, with a section of the site specifically dedicated to a vSphere user guide. We believe that they will be useful for those -like you- who work daily with these two powerful, albeit complex, technologies.

GURU advisor is growing extremely fast and we hope to help you in your work. If you haven’t done it yet, subscribe here to be updated when the next issues will be published. We’d like to hear your feedback on these first issues, you can write us at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..
Obviously as a mean of communication you can use our social channels, in particular Twitter where you can find our reports from the events we’ll attend.
This week, for instance, we will be (as guests) at the Festival ICT in Milan, if you’ll be there, we’d be glad to meet you!