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Sunday, August 22, 2010

SHOPPING FOR PHYSICAL SERVERS

As an IT specialist, Choosing the right Server hardware that would service your clients,with high availability, fault tolerance,scalability, recovery...and all that good stuff is one of the hardest decisions you have to make. Most times for Us its a matter of trading off between choosing what's good for the company, what allows you the opportunity to research and learn new technologies and also choosing something that wouldn't be too expensive whilst ensuring good ROI(Return On Investment).
Server in their broadest of categories, like houses differ in shapes and sizes, a few notable ones are:

Small, floor-standing towers or rack-mounted 1U and 2U servers.
 Medium-sized, floor-standing towers or larger rack-mounted servers.
 Blade centers and blade servers.
 Large floor-standing servers, includingmainframes.
 Specialized fault-tolerant, rugged and embedded processing or real-time
servers.

 Virtual servers or virtualmachines (VMs) running on physical servers.
Cloud servers (essentially a VMservice offering).


Functionally, servers could be further classified as follows:


TIER 0:
•Mission critical
• Business cannot function without
• Time sensitive
• Highly available
• Low RTO & RPO
•Must be secure
• Time ismoney
• Downtime is a lost opportunity




TIER 1:
• Business essential
• Some impact to business
• Good availability
• Low to medium RTO and RPO
• Some downtime can be tolerated



TIER 2:
• Business important
• Little impact to business
• Some delay OK
• Basic availability
•Medium RTO/RPO
• Downtime is tolerated



TIER 3:
• Business optional
•Minimal disruption
• Delay tolerable
• Some availability
• High RTO/RPO


These means of classification still barely scratch the surface of the store of servers available in the IT market.Physical server manufacturers such as Apple Inc., Cisco Systems Inc. (Unified Computing Systems), Dell Inc., EMC (Vblock), Fujitsu, NEC Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co., IBM, Oracle Corp./Sun, Silicon  Graphics International Corp.and SuperMicro Computer Inc. are represented by a mix of direct sales, direct touch markets and technical support, as well as channel value-added resellers (VARs) and solution providers tha tbundle their applications with different hardware offerings.So we can see that today's IT infrastructure department have their jobs picked out for them whether they are designing a new server infrastructure from scratch or integrating/consolidating a new server into an existing infrastucture.

three steps are key in making the decision as to what physical server  to buy:

MUST KNOW YOUR NEEDS AND REQUIREMENTS
what kind of services are to be hosted on the server?what are the virtualization /cloud needs? what are the storage needs? what are the availability needs to meet service level agreements(SLAs)? what are the existing Failover/clustering solutions(if any..)?amount of physical space available in the data center? what are your forecasts for growth requirements?

UNDERSTAND YOUR OPTIONS
consider the server categories and tiers talked about earlier.whether it be blade servers or just plain old rack servers or mainframes.talk about processors  if you'r buying a single socket,single core,single threaded processor then you know that that computer will at best execute one instruction in a cycle,single socket,dual core-2 instructions,dual socket,quad core-8 instructions then you start to wrap your head around 32-bit and 64-bit machines.talk about memory,Main memory or RAM, also known as dynamic RAM(DRAM) chips, is
packaged in different ways, with a common form being dual inline memory modules. DRAMmemory access
speed is referred to in terms of older DDR2 (667MHz) or newer DDR3 (1333MHz). RAMmain memory on a server is the fastest form of memory, second only to internal processor or chip-based registers—L1, L2 or local memory. In general, more memory is better; however, the speed of the memory is also very important.



Take a look at what functionality is built into the server or provided on server blades for general-purpose
networking along with attachment of disk storage. What is there in terms of 10 Gb Ethernet (10 GbE), and how many ports as well as 3G (3Gb) or 6G (6Gb) Serial-Attached SCSI (SAS) for disk storage attachment
(internal or external), along with serial, video and USB ports? Also look at expansion capabilities for additional mezzanine cards for blade servers, or PCI-E cards for networking, storage and other peripherals.
PCI SIGMulti-Root IO Virtualization (MR-IOV), a relatively new and emerging feature for servers, enables
advanced connectivity, including adapter sharing.MR-IOV will enable multiple, physically separate adjacent
servers to share a PCI-E adapter card, allowing the virtualization of servers that otherwise could not be
consolidated.MR-IOV can also boost scaling capabilities beyond normal physical limits in high-density servers by placing adapter cards in shared external expansion slots.


FINALLY,PUT IT ALL TOGETHER RIGHT
simple, install the softwares that would optimize your server hardware.(e.g don't plan to install 32-bit software on your 64-bit machine)
Know your requirements,know your wants, stay within budget whilst ensuring high ROI. Have fun Buying!

Wednesday, August 11, 2010

TIPS FOR MANAGING YOUR COMPUTER HARDWARE

Ever entered into an examination hall ill? you have all the right answers to the questions,you want to elaborate, illustrate, exemplify, ...  but you just dont have the energy. Thats analogous to having the right software,  that has passed every available benchmark, but is being run on  poorly managed hardware.the following tips would keep your hardware happy with your software:

1. Keep  a dust-free PC environment. dust particles that get into the system unit(what non computer proffessionals would call C.P.U) totally mess up the entire heating-cooling-heating-cooling .. cycle of the system unit's design.Dust is also unfriendly and clogs up most of our input/output devices.In addition to keeping the environment dust free, you should vaccum-clean(BLOW-OUT) your system unit say once a year.

2. Computer Hardware are brought to life by electrical power. They are therefore rated to function withing certain electrical supply limits.Make sure you check Power ratings of purchased hardware before connecting them to AC power supply especially when the device was shipped in from another country.This would save you some time, money(MORE IMPORTANTLY), and quite frankly, save the environment some oxides of carbon.

3. Install proper device drivers for your hardware. Device drivers are what translates the instructions you issue via your application software or operating system to a language the device can understand.using an improper device driver is like visiting China to deliver a speech and taking an Italian speaking translator along to help you translate  your speech to your Chinese audience.

4. Keep a close eye on your hardware vendor for release of  firmware and BIOS updates.firmware updates to hardware are what ervice packs are to the Operating system.

5. Be Vigilant. Notice changes in behaviour of your hardware such as humming noises, over-heating, changes in tone,brightness or contrast(in the case of display hardware).Alert a proper engineer when noticed (especially when these behaviour are accompanied by loss of performance or quality of computer output.

After all said and done, your computer harware is still driven by software. Follow the tips in my 12th of july article, combine thpse with these 5 and your computer usage would be stressfree not to mention predictable.