In attempt to continue upgrading IT Knowledge Exchange’s capabilities, features and speed, we will be completing a server move from hosted to in-house. This move will support the continuous growth that we’re experiencing in traffic and activity–all thanks to your efforts!

This move will take place tomorrow, Wednesday, December 8, 2010, after 5pm EST. You should experience a couple hours of downtime, but don’t worry because we’ll be back and better than before!

If you have any questions or notice anything strange, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

Thanks to everyone who participated in the Xbox 360 contest. We randomly withdrew 5 names from our top 10 contributors list and came up with the following winners:

The 2 Xbox 360 Slims went to Mattmather and RichS
The 3 $50 Amazon.com gift cards went to Carlosdl, Mrdenny, and Technochic

Congratulations to the winners! The rest of you, keep asking questions and provide feedback in the 2010 ITKE Member Survey, and you’ll continue to earn points. You never know when they’ll come in handy!  

-Em

That’s why we’ve created a new weekly contest called ‘Freebie Fridays.’ Every Friday we will be posting a freebie of the week in the Community Blog that you can win, simply by answering unanswered questions. The blog post will detail the rules for that Friday’s contest and highlight the 3 winners. You’ll see a link to the blog post on twitter as well as a link in the “What’s New” box on the homepage. 

So let’s get started…

Freebie Friday, July 16, 2010:
The first 3 ITKE members before 3:00 pm ET to answer 3 unanswered questions and to either re-tweet them with the tag #itkefreebiefriday and @ITKE or post the links to those 3 questions in the comment section of this blog post will receive a t-shirt or 50 knowledge points.

Clock starts now…4:00:00

Microsoft Business Ready Security – Secure Endpoint
Join us on July 13th from 11:00am-2:00pm EDT for Microsoft Forefront – Are Your Endpoints Secured? to learn how Microsoft Forefront solutions protect client and server operating systems from emerging threats and information loss, while enabling more secure access from virtually anywhere. Click here for a reminder email for this expert live chat.

Microsoft Business Ready Security – Identity and Access Management
Join us on July 20th from 11:00am-2:00pm EDT for Identity Access Management: Is your IT Infrastructure Secure? During this live chat you’ll learn about Microsoft’s solution to enable more secure, identity-based access to applications, both on-premises and in the cloud. Click here for a reminder email for this expert live chat.

We hope to have you there!

-Em

Aguacer0 has hit a lucky streak, taking home the grand prize of the Dell Precision T7500 Tower Workstation Desktop Computer with the Quad Core Intel Xeon Processor.

Carlosdl goes home the winner of a $100 Amazon Gift Card.

jmorris74 takes the $50 Amazon Gift Card.

labnuke99 won the $25 Amazon Gift Card.

Thanks again to everyone who participated. Keep the contributions coming, you never know who will be the next big winner.

-Emily
Community Manager

The next Microsoft Live Chat, Drive Your Business Forward with SharePoint 2010, takes place on Tuesday, June 1 at 11 am ET. Sign up for a day of email reminder.

I hope you’ll join us.
Emily

Increase your chances of winning by

• 5 Points: Asking a Question
• 10 Points: Discussing a Question
• 10 Points: Accepting an Answer
• 15 Points: Answering a Question
• 100 Points: Retweeting the Scavenger Hunt
• 200 Points: Completing the Intel Open Port IT Scavenger Hunt 

Good luck!

Learn how System Center can benefit your IT environment with integrated solutions from the desktop to the data center, management of physical and virtual IT environments, knowledge-driven management, and rapid time to value. Join IT Knowledge Exchange for a Microsoft System Center LIVE chat hosted by Microsoft System Center experts Sacha Dawes and Kenon Owens.

Visit the chat page now and submit your questions ahead of time in the comments. We look forward to seeing you there!

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Yes that is correct, performance equals availability, along with the inverse, availability equals performance also holds true. The two are very much intertwined yet seldom discussed, so let’s take a quick look at how they are interrelated.

Here’s why, if you do not have availability how do you have performance, if you do not have adequate performance to meet QoS or other time sensitive needs, how do you have availability?

Given current economic conditions and the pressure to do more with less, or, do more with what you have, IT Data Center infrastructure and storage optimization are popular topics. In the continued quest to optimize IT infrastructures including storage to achieve more efficient use and effective service delivery, a focus has been on space capacity utilization. However the other aspect of boosting efficiency and productivity is identifying, isolating and addressing bottlenecks in IT data center infrastructures including storage.

A simple example of how performance and availability are related is in the form of RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive/Independent Disks), you know, the 20+ year old technology that some have declared as being dead. Yet, RAID continues to be commonly deployed and is ubiquitous from consumer to soho to SMB to SME to enterprise in all of its different forms (See figure 1). Various RAID levels (Figure 1) allow different levels of performance and availability along with capacity options to be aligned and meet specific needs.

Figure 1 – Impact of RAID levels of performance and availability

Other impacts on performance and availability include failed adapters, controllers or other components include automatic disk drive rebuilds in RAID sets using hot spares. Background tasks including parity scrubbing or data consistency checks, snapshots, replication, deferred or post processing for data deduplication, virus and other tasks can also manifest themselves as performance or availability impacts.

Availability and performance issues are not limited to storage systems; they also apply to servers and I/O network or data paths including switches and routers. Keep an eye on alternate pathing configurations for I/O adapters along with error counts. On switches or routers, monitor error counts, retries along with how they compare with normal baseline performance profiles.

Some general tips and comments:

• Establish baseline performance indicators during normal periods of time
• Compare normal baseline performance and other indicators to problem times
• Review RAID storage system configuration for low cost near-term opportunities
• Fast servers need fast I/O paths, networks and storage systems
• Align tiered storage to meet performance, availability, capacity and energy needs
• SSD attached to slow or high latency controllers can introduce bottlenecks
• Look beyond IOPS and Bandwidth keeping response time or latency in focus
• Keep availability in perspective as errors or failures can cause performance issues

Hopefully this helps to put availability and performance as being interrelated into perspective providing food for thought. Learn more in my Storage Decisions New York City fall 2009 talk titled “The Other Green — Storage Efficiency and Optimization” as well in my books, “The Green and Virtual Data Center” (CRC) and “Resilient Storage Networks” (Elsevier) at www.serverandstorageio.com.

Cheers,
Greg Schulz

About the author
Greg Schulz is founder of the Server and StorageIO Group, an IT Industry Analyst and Consultancy firm who can be found at www.storageioblog.com and twitter @storageio.