GURU Blog - Page #4

Terms and useful tools for IT professionals

Details: Category: GURU blog; Published: Thursday, 11 February 2016 15:36; Written by Filippo Moriggia

While waiting for the special issue dedicated to the Mobile World Congress, here’s another issue of GURU advisor.

During the last few days, two important news saw the light of day in GURU advisor: we’re talking about the two sections dedicated to the word of the day and to the download of the day.
In the former section we’ll present, each day, terms and acronyms (the IT world is full of these!): you can widen your vocabulary by discovering new terms or by improving your knowledge of what you already know.
With the download of the day section, we’ll show with useful software and tools, quite often essentials for an IT technician or professional.

With the February issue, our Virtual Private Server (VPS) series comes to an end. The amount of available information is quite important and spans from the choice of the best offer to performances evaluation and basic troubleshooting in Windows and Linux environments.

Our journey in the ZFS world continues, and this month we’ll talk about one of the most widespread and appreciated system that support it: FreeNAS by iXsystems.
Lots of you love to experiment and toy around, in particular with the VMware platform. Instead of using another whitebox, why don’t use a real server, provided being cheap, quiet and compact? We tried for you the Primergy TX 1310 M1, the tower server entry level proposal by Fujitsu.

2016, what to expect

Details: Category: GURU blog; Published: Monday, 18 January 2016 16:30; Written by Filippo Moriggia

GURU advisor's predictions for the IT sector in 2016

2016 has already been here for a couple of weeks and lots of predictions have been made. We too decided to think about the promises 2016 will bring with itself, in particular regarding the themes we follow, like small business and Enterprise IT.

Talking about Cloud Computing is quite predictable, we’ve seen a consolidation of this trend in the previous years with a significant growth of those players that are the strongest in this sector.
In particular Amazon with its AWS Web Services kept on riding the wave being a few steps ahead of competitors: who has seriously implemented such solutions has powered off datacenters and on-premises server and now totally -or almost- relies on these technologies.

Before rushing headlong into a fleeting enthusiasm, it’s worth to clearly remember about two concepts that, in my opinion, will get even more important through 2016.

Happy holidays with GURU

Details: Category: GURU blog; Published: Tuesday, 15 December 2015 12:01; Written by Filippo Moriggia

Only a handful of months have past since issue zero of GURU advisor, but I’m happy to say that the site is growing rapidly and there is even more content to read and products to discover with this month’s issue.

We tried GravityZone, the antivirus solution developed by Bitdefender: lots of you are evaluating, or have already adopted, the logic of Managed Service Providers and look for managed solutions with which keep under control the computers of the clients without having to spend entire afternoons to remote control into server and PCs to check that there are no problems.
Gravity Zone by Bitdefender goes straight into this direction, so we hope you’ll find it interesting, also considering the aggressive price policy they are adopting.

VMware’s been talking of Cloud Native Apps and Containers for a long time: a lot of products that use these technologies are still in the development phase, however we decided to introduce you the new architecture. We’ll start with a little bit of theory in this number, but we’ll get more practical with January’s issue.

Apart from price and performances, when we talk about storage we know that obviously nobody wants to renounce to data integrity. We’ve seen in more depth the SATA and SAS technologies and the typologies of disks available on the market to help you to better understand the differences and evaluate with carefulness your choices.

You’ll enjoy for sure the other reviews, like an HP switch, the very interesting ProxMox project and SecurePass, a strong centralized authentication system. We’ll continue with the OpenStack and VMware columns, in addition to our guide in the choice of a VPS.

We’d like to wish you happy holidays and don’t forget that the January issue will be even richer!

Storage and Hyperconvergence in GURU advisor issue number 2

Details: Category: GURU blog; Published: Monday, 09 November 2015 17:33; Written by Filippo Moriggia

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!

GURU Advisor: a new challenge

Details: Category: GURU blog; Published: Wednesday, 16 September 2015 11:57; Written by Filippo Moriggia

GURU Advisor: a new challenge

How many reviews have you read before booking your hotel room? And before buying your smartphone? You maybe relied on the brand, your own good sense or the the trust inspired by the seller when buying servers, infrastructure and services that you resell to your clients or use for your company, instead.

GURU advisor is a completely new project on both the Italian and the international scenario and arises because of the need to fill a gap. A lack -baffling, severe in some ways- of reviews, detailed information, opinions and points of view in a sector so important and rich like IT. An information that has to go beyond the surface, to aim at technicians, system integrators, IT managers, professionals that aren’t satisfied with a few technical sheets and pictures found on the Internet.

GURU advisor is and will remain completely free and accessible without registration. We’d like to let it remain free from traditional advertising, the one that pops up a banner on the article that you are reading or the one that changes the background of your newspaper in a car or insurance banner.
We’d like the attention to remain on contents and their quality. Who writes on these pages has experience, on the field, not just as journalist, but also as sysadmin, engineer and technician that daily deals with these activities.

Today the issue number zero of the magazine is online: it’s rich in content that spans on most of the topics we’d like to talk with you. You’ll also find a brief preview of some articles of the next number. You should just subscribe: you’ll then receive an email for each number and you’ll always remain up to date.

Note for the english readers: we're a little bit slower on publishing the articles in your language: today the main part of the magazine is written in italian and then translated in english, so it takes a little more time. We hope to improve that but for these early days please be patient.