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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."
once I told a coworker about emule. He downloaded and installed it. The next morning the CFO comes to me.... "Have you ever heard about emule"...the infastructure was screwed up, but instead of fix it they waited for p2p to bring the network to it's knees. The best way to test a network is to see how many simultaneous p2p connections it can handle before crapping out. Needless to say there were some consequenced for that employee.
For our US offices all we can get with a decent SLA is Factors of T1, we get Fiber/Ethernet service in Canada 10x faster for the same cost and SLA.
EA David Gardner -"... but the consumers have proven that actually what they want is fun."
It depends, we have some sites that have done very well with cable providers on business class accounts (I assume those that have separate channels for business class), and less so with others. Our biggest problem has been the lack of any teeth to an SLA when we did have problems, which is why I would never move our HQ which has nearly half our people and which hosts remote access for the rest. For a remote office where they can always fall back to 3G tethering if they have an outage for a day or two and use our Citrix farm it's a great way to get bandwidth on the cheap.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Nice informative post, interrupt moderation sure sounds interesting. Link aggregation, however, is not as useful as it sounds for the following reasons:
1. Hardware link aggregation (link aggregation supported in silicon) works by hashing, not by distributing packets evenly across all links that are aggregated. If you can spare some time to ponder about this for a moment, you will be able to see why hashing is used. In real life situations, 4 x 1Gbps links aggregated together never equals 4Gbps throughput.
2. If link aggregation is handled by the software (which is most likely the case if aggregating multiple NICs on a server) then all it really provides is redundancy. It is very difficult for an average server to process 1Gbps of incoming traffic, let alone generate 1Gbps of worths of traffic. Not to mention the read/write speed of the storage device(s) used in the server.
(Unless it's using PCIE SSDs in RAID configuration, which would be very interesting and I am dying to find out the throughput of such a configuration!)
For once I actually know what I am talking about, so maybe I should have created an account before posting this one.
...and that's why offline HDD storage should equally be in RAID format.
That said, I worked for a D2D disaster recovery provider, and one time only we had issues recovering data from an archive drive due to disk failure. Suspicion was the drives were pulled before the job actually finished.
Now, HDDs sitting idle have a bit failure decay measured in years. Worst case, if the drive mechanism failes, the platters are still fully readable and easily recovered. Data being pulled from legal hold usually has no timeframe recovery requirements (unlike disaster recovery, there's no SLA for court requests of data), and worst case, HDD repair is a viable option.
Tapes have a bit failure rate measured in days, typically 30 for most tapes, and once data decays from the tape, it can not be recovered. Also, most typically, a tape recorded on one set of drives can not be read by another set of identical drives. often, the very same drive has trouble reading its own tapes if they've been shuffled out of the building and back in months later. I used to do an experiment in a classroom teaching DR methods where I'd perform a backup and bit-level verify (and only 3 in 10 pass verify at the bit level, but assuming it passed I'd continue, then I'd take the tape out of the drive, drop it just 6 inches to a table, flat, then put it back in the drive and repeat verify, and it would predictably fail 100% of the time. I'd repeat that with a hard disk backup of the same data set, let each person in the room drop the drive from shoulder height to the floor, then repeat the verify, and I never once had a failure (though once I had trouble getting the drive back in the tray slot).
There is no contest in life for which the unprepared have the advantage.