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If you are a network administrator, you really want to get a handle on your network. But even laymen sometimes need to figure out what’s going on. There are some basic tools that will help you do that. Let’s have a look at some simple pieces of software that can be accessed from nearly any […]
Businesses take risks. It comes with the territory. But that doesn’t mean that an enterprise should push blindly forward, ignoring the potential threats to availability and ultimately its success. Risk assessment is essential to understanding the territory and blazing the trail ahead. And risk mitigation is the key to controlling those factors that endanger IT […]
“Houston, we have a problem…” For NASA, the disaster aboard Apollo 13 required a systematic approach. And that’s what they got thanks to the Kepner-Tregoe methodology. The decision matrix developed by Charles H. Kepner and Benjamin B. Tregoe was employed at NASA to help bring the astronauts home. It is a step-by-step approach. And it is […]
Availability · WAAP / WAF / Firewall
Server hardening is a necessary process. And it’s a never-ending one. From the moment you pull the machine out of the box (or create it in the virtual environment), it pays to be thinking about security. But server hardening can do more than keep your machine safe. It will help with performance, and it can […]
Service providers do everything they know how to avoid downtime. Generally the best practice is not to touch a live network. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. But change is inevitable, and eventually every network or system will need improvements. The trick is to handle these changes with little to no disruption of running […]
Roughly, a decade ago, VMware released their ESX virtual hosting platform that literally changed the datacenter, as we know it. It came at a time when datacenters were inundated with server sprawl as every new application request resulted in the purchase, racking and configuration of a new server. The arduous hardware purchasing process for servers […]
One of the mantras for today’s enterprise could be, “living on the edge.” With the proliferation of the cloud and the digital services and mobile apps that it hosts, today’s enterprise is all about the edge. Chances are your company or organization has a web presence on the Internet thanks to Web 2.0, which gives […]
ADCaaS / Load Balancing · Availability
One of the biggest trends in data center infrastructure is convergence. Actually it has been happening for some time. Equipment footprint has been getting smaller for years. Functions that used to be handled by huge dedicated machines are now accomplished by modular cards. Specialized servers, switches, routers, and other network devices have been combined into […]
ADCaaS / Load Balancing · Outages
“The website is down again!” That can be pretty frustrating. In the heat of the moment, most of us don’t really care why it is down — we just want back online. But the curious user may want to know more. What could make a web server unreachable? Why do they go down in the […]
“I am looking for implementations of TCP/IP for UNIX systems, including an interface for an IMP.” That was the start of the TCP/IP Digest on the ARPANET UNIX-Wizards mailing list on October 2, 1981. Mike Muuss was the researcher who got the conversation started. And look how far we have come since then. The Birth of the […]
