IT Expert Voice

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

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

After several years of trying, graphics processing units (GPUs) are beginning to win over the major server vendors. Dell and IBM are the first tier-one server vendors to adopt GPUs as server processors for high-performance computing (HPC). Here’s a manager’s view of the hardware change and what it might mean to your data center. (Hint: faster servers.)

GPUs are normally used in desktop PCs, where they serve as high-speed graphics accelerators, primarily for games. But it’s slowly dawning on both server makers and end-users that GPUs make great math co-processors for more tasks than just gaming.

In May, IBM announced plans to offer a pair of Tesla M2050 GPUs in its iDataPlex dx360 M3 scale-out servers. Dell followed with an early June announcement that its PowerEdge M610x blade servers would come with a pair of Tesla GPUs. The M610x, equipped with an Intel Xeon 5500 or 5600, can generate up to 400 gigaflops of performance. READ MORE

If your Windows 7 systems need half an eternity to boot up, there’s clearly something odd going on. Dealing with slow boot problems is annoying and – let’s face it – is mostly guesswork. Guesswork that costs money and time. We have got you covered: Learn how to analyze the startup process, find the cause in no time, and get rid of bottlenecks once and for all!

Windows 7 is a fast beast, especially when it comes to its startup process which was optimized dramatically compared to Windows Vista. No wonder, as Microsoft has a dedicated team focusing strictly on startup performance. And it shows: On one- to two-year-old hardware, Windows 7 usually takes only 20 to 40 seconds to boot up. Even the performance-wise challenged netbooks rarely need more than a minute to be ready for work!

Certainly, boot times vary significantly from one computer to another. This is nothing new. But if Windows 7 clients need way longer – and we’re talking way over one or two minutes – then you’re looking at a resource hog. So what could be causing the problem?

• You just installed a new driver, which hasn’t been WHQL-certified and delays the boot up process. It could be a simple driver bug!
• You installed a piece of resource-intense software that initializes a process or a service during startup.
• You updated existing software or Windows 7 itself. Yes, it’s not unheard of that some updates cause a significant boot delay.

READ MORE

Usually, tuning up a PC requires a lot of work, spending much money on new components, or both. ReadyBoost can speed up slow or overwhelmed PCs without either one.

There’s no such thing as a fast-enough computer. No matter how hot your CPU runs or how much RAM you have, eventually you’ll run out of performance — usually, just when you need it most. Fortunately, Windows 7 comes with a cheap and easy way of improving system performance: ReadyBoost.

Windows 7’s ReadyBoost is Microsoft’s latest take on a very old idea for improving computer performance: caching. With a cache, you gain speed by keeping frequently accessed data as close as possible to the CPU cores. The faster the cache, the closer it should be to cores. That’s why high-end processors, like the Intel i7 quad-core CPU, have their own on-board cache.

Caching used to be easy. You used caching on uniprocessor, single user systems to free yourself from the slow I/O jail, whether that I/O was from the system bus to the processor or from the hard drive to the bus. As multiple-CPU and core systems became more common, simply placing fast RAM between system components with varying I/O throughputs was no longer enough. System designers had to contend with making sure that the available data to the processor was the real, newest data. READ MORE

The lesson in the frustrating Pull Me-Push You approach of multiple teams working on SQL Server virtualization is that old mindsets and turf protections can kill any project. Beyond that key realization lays a number of real technical issues to solve. Here’s what to look out for and what to ignore.

Cloud buzz aside, virtualization chatter still dominates in IT circles. The primary discussion is two-toned: “Why should we bother?” and “How would we do it?” Among the first of the follow-up questions is “How well will our Microsoft SQL Server databases work with virtualization?” It’s a legitimate, straightforward question that, unfortunately, is often met with an onslaught of contradictory answers.

Varying technical opinions are common among database administrators (DBAs) and software developers. However, in this case the variation in responses is usually determined by the answerers’ perspectives rather than by actual database server performance metrics.

Take DBAs, for example. “DBAs don’t want to change their server environments,” says Brent Ozar, a Microsoft SQL Server expert with Quest Software, and a Microsoft Certified Master for SQL Server 2008. “They’re probably unhappy with their server performance today on physical hardware, and in their minds, things can only get worse.” READ MORE