Paul Venezia

Gigabit Ethernet to the desktop isn

Just a few years ago the cost per gigabyte and the expertise necessary to implement a storage area network (SAN) exceeded the resources of midsize businesses. That has changed thanks to SATA, iSCSI and the setup software some vendors have for their hardware. Today, you can get a terabyte of storage for less than US$10,000.

The AMD Opteron x86_64 platform was first available only from smaller server vendors, but now Opteron-based boxes are available from nearly every major seller, with the notable exception of Dell Inc. Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP) was one of the first big boys to play in the x86_64 pond, and so far it

If a network is like a car, then DNS is the ignition key. To extend that analogy, DHCP might be the battery. These two services are among the lightest available on any network, but no network can function without them. Without DHCP, address management becomes a nightmare. Without DNS, no one can access much of anything at all.

Most applications for four-processor servers are heavy. Big databases and high-performance computing (HPC) implementations can make the most of the horsepower provided by the bigger iron, whereas lighter-weight tasks, such as Web serving, file serving and application servers, are best suited to dual-processor systems. Appro International Inc.

Log files alternate between extremely valuable and extremely irritating, depending on the task at hand, but the real effort involves analyzing the data. ...