rootninja

10 tips, each summarized in a sentence or two.[1]

1: Speed up that WAN

Increase site-to-site bandwidth while saving money by switching from a multiplicity of T1, MPLS, and Frame Relay to fiber. With the speed increase, you may choose to run your own VPN between sites.

2: Lose the leased lines

Unless you’re in a very remote location, ditch the leased T1’s. Modern business class service is usually quite readily available.

3: Let auld acquaintance be forgot

Migrate from antiquated systems. The upfront cost may be more, but the long-term savings are more than worth it.

4: Build a lab

Servers are cheap and VMware, Sun VirtualBox, and other virtualization products can help you construct a myriad of system configurations in a virtual test lab.

5: Watch everything=

Graph, observe, tweak, repeat. Take advantage of network monitoring and system monitoring open source tools.

6: Know your apps

Insist on testing new applications because its your problem to fix when the network crawls to a halt.

7: Terabytes and spindle counts, oh my

Disks have gotten huge, but you still fast access. Pick more smaller faster disks than less larger slower disks, especially for database and email servers.

8: Beware the 10-pound server in the 5-pound bag

Keep disk and network access in mind when virtualizing a bunch of servers. Don’t just look at cpu computation and memory capacity.

9: To dedupe or not to dedupe

Deduplication means sorting out redundant data and only saving one copy. This saves storage space for backups and DR, but it can get complicated and isn’t cheap.

10: Accelerate your backups

Don’t skimp on your backup servers’ performance. If you’re still backing up disk to tape, consider backing up to disks before going to tape. Many storage engineers refer to this simply as disk-to-disk-to-tape backup.

Credits:
1. http://infoworld.com/print/125220