You know how well your data center works, but haven’t you always wanted to know how your data center compares to other companies? The problem, of course, is that breaking into Fort Knox might be easier than finding out what’s what at another company’s data center. Fortunately, Google is willing to share information. READ MORE
Monitoring an enterprise environment need not be expensive, or lock you into a single vendor. Open source enterprise monitoring systems stack up favorably next to proprietary solutions – for free or at a much lower cost.
There’s a score of open source monitoring applications, but sifting through the options can be daunting. In this article, I focus on a few standouts that have widespread adoption, an active community, or corporate support. They each have a healthy set of monitoring features that help an enterprise network ensure uptime and reliability. READ MORE
The Apache Software Foundation, best known for the self-named popular open source Web server, has a variety of other technology that can help enterprises with databases, search, development, and more. Here’s an overview of the best. READ MORE
Much of performance improvement, security, and troubleshooting work is reactive. While there’s no avoiding this fact, implementing a Daily Log Review policy puts IT staff in a more pro-active position, using each day to build a set of rules that alert you to potential problems before they become serious.
How often does your team find, while troubleshooting an issue, that were small warning signs leading up to the incident but no one had noticed, or there had been no context to make it clear that they were seeing a real problem? Hopefully you don’t encounter such situations very often, but it happens. A daily log review policy can help to catch some of these issues earlier before they bog down or, worse, break your servers.
One advantage to allocating time for daily log review into your staff’s routines is that they become more familiar with the day to day workings of your systems. This knowledge in turn makes unusual occurrences stand out even more than they would have before. READ MORE
KVM stands for “keyboard, video, and monitor” and describes hardware devices that enable IT professionals to interact with and operate remote devices (servers, mostly) that may lack all of these items. A virtual KVM extends the concept further and uses remote network access so a desktop or notebook PC provides the keyboard, video, and monitor inputs and outputs for network attached devices.
Real KVMs cost money, sometimes substantial sums; virtual KVMs are cheaper, if not free. Savvy CIOs and IT professionals find them useful, functional, and affordable. READ MORE
Test end-to-end service assurance from your transport network to your applications.
For IT decision-makers supporting their mobile workforce, understanding the benefits and complexities of the technologies used by their chosen service providers or mobile carriers can make all the difference in delivering a robust mobile implementation at reasonable cost to the enterprise. READ MORE
After a lengthy gestation period, the third generation of the Universal Serial Bus is making its way to the market. But is it already obsolete? READ MORE
In just seven questions you can narrow down the candidates for that network administrator job to those with true talent and passion.
Interviewing candidates for network administrators is a bit like opening up the door to a herd of Chihuahuas. Sit them down and start talking and all you hear is Yip! Novell? Yip! VPN services? Yip! MCSE? Yip! CCNA? Yip! Yip!
IT managers need to bring on the best talent to run their networks; the company’s infrastructure relies on productive, capable staff. How do you cut through all the Yipping? What questions do you ask to find that stately Shepherd amidst the dog pack?
Whether you are a technical hands-on manager or a business-centric CIO doing that final “check for a fit with the company” job interview, the questions you ask a network admin candidate should check on seven aspects of what makes a good employee: Knowledge, Tinkering, Honesty, Ethics, Community, Discretion, and the all important Sanity Check. We asked network specialists to share their favorite questions (and best answers) to help you eliminate those annoying Yippies.
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The Internet is running out of network addresses, which will force the switch from IPv4 to IPv6. But IPv6 has other advantages as well, such as improving network performance and making network administrators more productive (and cheerful).
It isn’t a pretty thought to consider migrating an enterprise to a new Internet addressing scheme. Any change to the network can be time consuming and expensive to deploy. But in addition to the technical forces making the move a necessity there are good technical reasons for making the switch. READ MORE
Like it, or lump it, we’re going to have use both IPv6 and IPv4 on our corporate networks and the Internet for years to come. Here’s how we can do it.
It would have been so easy if the early Internet and TCP/IP network designers had made IPv6 backward compatible with IPv4. They didn’t. And, while Leslie Daigle, Chief Internet Technology Officer for the Internet Society, admitted at a June 2009 meeting that IPv6’s “lack of real backwards compatibility for IPv4 was [its] single critical failure,” crying over spilt standards isn’t going to help us now. No, instead we have to make the best of using IPv6 in an IPv4 world. READ MORE
Have Dell contact you to learn more.
Dell has undergone a dramatic transformation through standardizing, simplifying, and automating much of its own ... Read More
With virtualization comes a simple, automated infrastructure that leads to a dynamic, efficient enterprise. Over the ... Read More
Moving from Windows XP or Windows Vista en masse to Windows 7 across the enterprise ... Read More
All the IT world is abuzz about moving services and software to the cloud. Every ... Read More
What has changed for the better and worse with Windows 7 when it comes to ... Read More
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