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10 Tips For Boosting Network Performance
snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Paul Venezia and Matt Prigge provide hands-on insights for increasing the efficiency of your organization's network. From losing the leased lines, to building a monster IT test lab on the cheap, to knowing how best to accelerate backups, each tip targets a typical, often overlooked IT bottleneck."
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
What reason is there to run T1/T3 anymore? I know, by definition, the regulation over T1/T3 guarantees reliability. I have dumped T1's and switch to 2Base-TL (aka Metro Ethernet) and it is extremely reliable. For me, the "more reliable" argument doesn't hold much. The latency is very, very good -- often below 10ms. Even if the network goes down, I can afford some sort of backup link. I'm paying under $1,000/month for 10mbit (symmetrical). The footprint for 2Base-TL is pretty good because it is based on DSL technology. It doesn't have the reach that T1's have, but it isn't bad. The big difference is that is spreads the signal over multiple pairs of wire (in my case, 8 pairs) instead of a single pair.
If your company has T1's, shed yourself of the "regulated" links and check out 2Base-TL. You will be glad you did.
Get rid of fat clients, that will do wonders to reduce your network bandwidth needs out to the customer. Then beef up the datacenter network.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
i think you misunderstood.
Know your apps means knowing their bottlenecks and how to alleviate them.
Some apps have high sustained disk reads, some writes.
Some have high amounts of random reads, some randoms writes, some both.
Some apps are I/O bound, some memory bound, some CPU bound.
The source of the app has nothing to do with your ability to monitor the operation of the app and determine its infrastructure needs.
It frightens me to think that there are people getting paid to take care of enterprise systems that would not already know everything in this article. Mostly, it reads like a thinly veiled ad for VMWare products.
Ask Slashdot: Where bad ideas meet poor googling skills.
No the best way is to see if p2p is already blocked.. Tossing bandwidth at the problem is not always the best solution.
EA David Gardner -"... but the consumers have proven that actually what they want is fun."
unless they are physically damaged, or get too much voltage applied to them, and fry the boards, etc.
Tape is designed to be a long term, shelf stable investment. How many old MDF hard drives can you access now? You can go to IBM right now, and order tape drives that work with mainframes from the same era. You will pay out the nose, but they are available.
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
I haven't priced tapes lately
That's too bad. If you did, you'd know why many of us still use tape...especially in times like this where every penny matters.
You sound like someone who has never been responsible for long term backup storage. Stuff isn't just thrown on a tape and stored offsite for years. Responsible DR requires you to constantly be shifting all your long term storage onto new methods, constantly. You wouldn't have MDF hard drives with valuable data on them, or even legacy data as all that data should have been MOVED and VERIFIED onto current media.
--- I do not moderate.
... and if you think it is about latency you are mildly retarded, as are the writers of this general knowledge article.
Leased lines in general have better SLAs but that isn't even much of a point anymore as they cheaper products "claim" to have similar ones. The difference here is how good is that business class dsl/fiber support at 2am? What are the odds they are actually going to be willing to send someone out to the telco closet right away if there is an issue? You buy leased lines because you need *real* support of the SLAs... not this, "well we were down for 5 hours, so how about we credit you a day off!" bullshit.
It's really scary for what passes for "good advice" these days.
--- I do not moderate.
That is almost exactly five 9's of up-time. Sounds like they met the standard guarantee.
Learning about brewing beer, by brewing beer.
Indeed. Take it from someone running a web site on a "Business Cable" connection, it sucks ass. It runs over the exact same system as residential traffic. The only difference... I pay more (a lot more) but get almost exactly the same service. Sure, it says 1M up on paper but they (TW) start dropping traffic at half that -- and that's how they have the network configured.
We switched to a T1 from Speakeasy (resold Covad.) It's 1.5M in both directions all the time; no traffic ever gets dropped. It doesn't drop everytime the power flickers (TW's too cheap and lazy to put(replace) batteries out in the field.) I'll agree it's slow by modern standards, and it's about 3x as expensive, but it works all the time -- and when it doesn't people move their ass to fix it.
Plus, you'd be in deep sh*t when you got a drive back from storage to find it 100% completely unusable. HD are fine for online storage when coupled with periodic scrubbing, but for offline storage they are the most unreliable thing in the universe. (well, maybe not the worst, but pretty high up on the list.)