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40 Ways to Make Your Data Center More Efcient
This content was adapted from ServerWatch.com. Contributor: Kenneth Hess.
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10 System Administrator Tasks Ripe for Automation 10 Free Server Tools Your Organization Needs Uncover Your 10 Most Painful Performance Bottlenecks
3. Design Flaws Design aws of a standing data center are difcult to overcome, but a redesign is less expensive than a fresh build. A 20-year-old data center still looks good, but it doesnt perform up to todays greener standards. Youll also have to retrot your electrical apparatus to handle blade systems. Youll probably need to toss that old cooling system as well, since contemporary servers run cooler and more efciently than their predecessors did. 4. Limited Expandability 640K of RAM ought to be enough for anybody. How many times have you heard that quote thats attributed to Bill Gates, circa 1981? Whether he said it is of little importance now. The lesson to learn is that when you build anything, pretend youre converting a Celsius temperature to Fahrenheit: Double the amount you think you need and add 32. Using the Celsius-to-Fahrenheit equation will allow for some expandability in your data center. Two thousand square feet of oor space isnt enough? Try 4,032 feet instead. Poor planning is no reason to run out of oor space or any other capacity. 5. Relaxed Security Enter any data center and youll see card readers, retina scanners, circle locks, weight scales or other high technology security systems in place. But, next to those extreme security measures, youll see a key entry access
Back to Contents
40 Ways to Make Your Data Center More Efcient an Internet.com Server eBook. 2011, Internet.com, a division of QuinStreet, Inc.
Back to Contents
40 Ways to Make Your Data Center More Efcient an Internet.com Server eBook. 2011, Internet.com, a division of QuinStreet, Inc.
groups, but when it comes down to real management, you probably havent found the right tool. The one you want might have to be the one you create yourself via scripts. In UNIX, its simple to create scripts to prompt you for the accounts that you wish to remove, have the system copy the users les to a new location, change the permissions, search all systems for any les owned by that user, change permissions on those les, or move them and complete the process by removing the user account from the directory service. Check out some of the add-on modules for your user management tool of choice. Microsoft, for example, offers its Active Directory Resource Kit Book and CD that includes utilities for automation scripting. 3. Security Sweeps You should perform regular, automated security sweeps on your entire network to expose and x any wire-borne vulnerabilities. The frequency and intensity of the scans depends on the complexity of your network. Through scripting magic, you can set up scheduled scans, send the output to a database, extract a post-scan report from the database, and email it to yourself or create an HTML version of the report suitable for online viewing. One such tool, available for every modern operating system, is Nmap. Nmap is a free network security scanner designed to rapidly scan large networks and report vulnerabilities. 4. Disk Usage Scans There is a constant turf war raging between users and sys
Back to Contents
40 Ways to Make Your Data Center More Efcient an Internet.com Server eBook. 2011, Internet.com, a division of QuinStreet, Inc.
Back to Contents
40 Ways to Make Your Data Center More Efcient an Internet.com Server eBook. 2011, Internet.com, a division of QuinStreet, Inc.
3. Nagios Nagios is an enterprise infrastructure monitoring suite. Its free, mature and commercially supported. It has grown from a niche software project to a major force in contemporary network management. Its used by such high-prole companies as Citrix, ADP, Dominos Pizza, Wells Fargo, Ericsson and the U.S. Army. 4. Wireshark If you run a network of any size or topology, Wireshark is a must-have application. It is a network packet capture and analysis program that assists you with your ongoing quest for a trouble-free network. Wireshark wont prevent network problems, but it does allow you to analyze those problems in real time and possibly avoid failure. 5. Apache The Apache project isnt just a web server. The project, ofcially known as the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), consists of almost 100 different projects under the Apache umbrella. Yes, the famous and wildly popular HTTP server, Apache, is the projects namesake and mainstay, but it isnt the only nymph in the forest. 6. IP Plan IP Plan is a little-known project that has potential in any size environment. Its not a DNS service, but it is a Webbased, IP tracking application. The reasoning behind a tool like IP Plan is that DNS tracks systems that are in use. But to whom do you go when an IP address conict, and
40 Ways to Make Your Data Center More Efcient an Internet.com Server eBook. 2011, Internet.com, a division of QuinStreet, Inc.
Back to Contents
40 Ways to Make Your Data Center More Efcient an Internet.com Server eBook. 2011, Internet.com, a division of QuinStreet, Inc.
other system aws that manifest themselves as memory issues. The key to solving memory performance problems is to nd the root cause of the symptom before adding more RAM. 3. Storage Disk speed, RAID type, storage type and controller technology all combine to produce whats known as disk I/O. Disk I/O is a common source of performance angst for system administrators and users alike. There are practical and physical limits to performance even when using the best contemporary disk technology. Use best practices when combining and separating workloads on disks. As attractive as leveraged storage is, local disks are still faster than the fastest SAN. 4. Network The network is a commonly blamed source of performance bottlenecks, but it is rarely found to be so. Unless there is a network component hardware failure, such as a damaged switch port, bad cable, jabbering network card or router conguration problem, you should look elsewhere for your network continued performance bottleneck. A perceived slowness on the network usually points to one of the lists other nine entries. 5. Applications Although no application developer wants to hear it,
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40 Ways to Make Your Data Center More Efcient an Internet.com Server eBook. 2011, Internet.com, a division of QuinStreet, Inc.
Back to Contents
40 Ways to Make Your Data Center More Efcient an Internet.com Server eBook. 2011, Internet.com, a division of QuinStreet, Inc.