For the average end user, email is the heart of day-to-day business, and easy to take for granted. Your average systems administrator, though, has to put a little more thought into it. A common question is whether managing your own mail servers in-house is best for your business, or whether [...]
Are you choosing between cloud vendors, but not sure where to start to make your decision? Take a look at this short checklist to ensure your potential selections can perform satisfactorily on all five points. Whether you’re seeking the right provider for storage, applications, or testing, these are key considerations [...]
If you’ve made any storage upgrades lately, you’ve probably found yourself asking whether solid state drives (SSDs) or hard disk drives (HDDs) are your better choice. As we’ve written in a previous post, there is often a business case for using both. Even more recently, a new player has entered [...]
Network attached storage (NAS) is a great choice for many small-to-midsize companies looking for an on-site storage system that balances flexibility and cost. While NAS may not offer the speed of direct attached storage (DAS) or storage area networks (SAN), what it makes up for in budget, simplicity, and scalability [...]
Server monitoring is critical to maintaining uptime on your network. Staying on top of key stats like your servers' response time, hardware, temperature, power usage, memory, and disk space lets you predict and remediate problems before they happen. You have a choice as to whether you run software directly on [...]
Preventing problems before they happen is one of the goals of good network management. From bottlenecks to overheated servers, there are a lot of moving parts in your environment that require continual monitoring. Fortunately, you have tools available to help you stay ahead of potential problems or quickly identify an [...]
Simultaneous multi-threading, known as Hyper-Threading Technology (HT) when referring to Intel's technology specifically, is not something well understood by many networking professionals. But used in the right way, it can speed up performance for your servers and work stations. If you think of a processor as a highway and the [...]
Storage migration can be tricky for a lot of reasons. Researching and choosing the right storage system, predicting storage needs, managing downtime, testing, and scheduling each have their own set of important considerations and potential pitfalls. Give Yourself Enough Time for Your Migration Project One of the most common mistakes [...]
There was a time when solid state drives (SSD) were not a technology within reach for small and medium-sized businesses. But SSD performance has dramatically improved in recent years thanks to flash technology. As the performance improves and the price drops, increasingly, companies now wonder whether they should move away [...]
In its early days, your business's storage needs may have been pretty straightforward. But as teams, data, and computing demands grow, most companies find that they require a more flexible and systematic approach to data storage, backup, and file sharing. If you've done a bit of research on your options, [...]
