Posted by timothy (80% noise) View Skip An anonymous reader writes “After being down for a couple of hours, the Apple store reopened this morning. All of the speculation has turned out to be a reality with Apple dishing out many new products and among them are; iMac 20”, three iMac 24...

Back in January at the Macworld keynote, Phil Schiller stated that the day was going to be all about the Mac. But it turned out to be more about the inner workings of the Mac with the release of the new iLife suite (and its sweet updates to iPhoto and iMovie) with a paltry offering of new hardware w...

I've been playing around a bit with file compression again, as we generate some very large backup files daily on Stack Overflow. We're using the latest 64-bit version of 7zip (4.64) on our database server. I'm not a big fan of more than dual core on the desktop, but it's a no brainer for servers. Th...

Today, EMC announced several major enhancements for the Celerra platform.  Taken individually, they're interesting. But taken together, I think this announcement shows just how far NAS technology has evolved in the past few years.  If you haven't been paying attention to what the...

If you haven't properly leveraged compression in IIS, you're missing out on a lot!  Compression is a trade-off of CPU for Bandwidth.  With the expense of bandwidth and relative abundance of CPU, it's an easy trade-off.  Yet, are you sure that your server is tuned optimally?  I wa...

Quake Wars Met the Ray Tracer" / Posted by timothy (52% noise) View An anonymous reader writes “Intel released the article ’Quake Wars Gets Ray Traced’ (PDF) which details the development efforts of the research team that applied a real-time ray tracer to Enemy Territory: Quake War...

  Servers are the backbone of enterprise computing today, most websites for example run on either Apache or IIS and will be running on a server of some description. Perhaps because of servers ubiquity it is easy to become complacent about them especially as they are rarely seen but understanding wh...

Our customers or prospective customers often ask us how we do a performance audit (it's our most popular service). I thought I should write a blog post that will both answer their question, so I can just reply "read all about it at this URL" and share our methodology with readers a little bit. This ...

I did some research on storage-system performance for my QConf San Francisco preso and have numbers for your delectation (pictures too). Now is a good time to do this research because the hardware spectrum is shifting, and there are a bunch of things you might mean by the word “disk�. I managed ...

These DELL servers (3 available) are configured to be some of the fastest file, web, or database servers that can be bought. They feature 4 (four) 73 GB hard drives that run at 15,000 revolutions per minute (RRM) and are connected via serial-attach SCSI. That's almost 300GB of the fastest served dat...