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...

Used less than 4 months and carrying the full remainder of DELL's factory warranty, these servers come from a clean-room datacenter environment and are ready to be deployed into your datacenter or office environment. They are 1-unit rack mountable systems offering tremendous web, file, database, or ...

Best Practise BIOS patching for Sun Intel and AMD x86 systems ( a follow on from the SPARC firmware blog ) History For many Solaris system administrators BIOS didn't exist because the vast majority where on SPAR systems and they had the OBP ( I'll not bore everyone with the long version of how simpl...

Hey all, My name is Tim and I am currently the guy supplying our friend Hemant with a server for his website. Problem is, his website is HUGE, and we need to look at upgrading him. He says that some of you are pretty tech savvy (which I don’t doubt, with close to 5,000 daily visitors on averag...

I'm finally getting ready to install my new Server and after some back and forth and testing on Windows 2008 I decided to go ahead and bite the bullet and go with the 64 bit version of Server. I've had mixed feelings about installing 64 bit given that I have had exactly zero experience running under...

It's time to retire my existing Web Server which is going on 7 years now. The box that this site is running on currently is an old style 2ghz Pentium 4 box with 1 gig of memory and it's starting to creak at the edges pretty hard with a few off and on failures to power and the system board components...

In part 1 of this series I explained the reasoning and background on why I'm building a virtualization rig. In that post I included my experience with trying to get an OOTB Dell PowerEdge 2900 III. In this post I want to cover parts. The next part will be more about setup and installation of the vir...

Early last year Scott Hanselman & Jeff Atwood set out to build the "Ultimate Developer PC" for Scott. It was an entertaining series of posts on both blogs (check out this post for links to all the other posts). As someone who works exclusively out of a home office (except when onsite or teaching...