Dmitry Sotnikov

With Dell’s acquisition of Quest and all the IT reorganization that followed, it is actually not that easy to find these two popular free PowerShell tools any longer. So here are the links that work today (January 30, 2015): PowerGUI The download is freely available from Dell’s PowerGUI community. The community itself also got moved from http://powergui.org to http://en.community.dell.com/techcenter/powergui. Dell Software is still maintaining the product – as I am writing this the latest version is 3.8 released in April 2014. Quest / QAD cmdlets This one is a little more tricky to find: https://software.dell.com/register/71110 If this link for some reason changes, all Dell’s freeware and trial links can be found in this catalog: http://software.dell.com/trials/ Happy PowerShelling! ... (more)

Microsoft’s First Step Toward Cloud Computing

Azure Session at Cloud Expo Pundits talking about how Windows 7 is all about Microsoft competing against Apple, recovering with Vista consumer adoption disaster, or getting people off of XP, are missing one other – extremely important – part of the Windows 7 story. Windows 7 and its server counterpart – Windows Server 2008 R2 – are actually the first real step in Microsoft’s Windows Cloud Story. Before Windows 7 Microsoft could offer some services (such as Exchange Online) from the cloud – but could not provide full enterprise directory, security and so on – now they can. Micros... (more)

What Satya Nadella Means to Azure's Future

With the recent changes in the leadership of one of Microsoft’s key business units – Server and Tools – from Bob Muglia to Satya Nadella one can’t help speculating what this means for the business unit and how it will affect Microsoft’s cloud strategy, specifically Windows Azure – Microsoft’s platform as a service. Here’s my uneducated guess based on the assumption that given a new task humans tend to use the same approaches which worked well for them last time, and that Satya definitely got this post as a recognition for successfully rolling out Bing and transforming Microsoft’... (more)

Quest Software and Cloud Computing

It’s probably about time for me to provide a quick overview of what we at Quest Software are doing in the cloud computing area. There are two main “cloud” directions for us: Using the cloud for our own offerings. Enabling public and private clouds. 1. Using Clouds Using Cloud means providing our products as a service. Most of these efforts are not public yet, but you can get some of the information on what is coming if you see the recording of my TechEd session. Also, Quest has one of the best virtual desktop (VDI) solutions in the market – vWorkspace. And a growing number of servic... (more)

Case-Study on Secure SaaS

Security at Cloud Expo Security and data protection are key concerns for any cloud solution. I truly believe that this is also one aspect that you cannot just improve over time. No matter how agile you are security needs to be there by design. Unfortunately most cloud vendors/SaaS-providers still don’t tell enough about the way they protect customer data – which we know is a bad idea. From that perspective you might find this case study which Microsoft has just posted worth reading: Systems Manager Offers Security-Enhanced, Hosted Solutions with Programming Framework. The case st... (more)