When it comes to keeping your network running smoothly, there are a number of
tweaks and small investments that a business can make to obtain significant
network performance gains. This IT World report outlines 10 ways, from switching
to a fiber provider to building an inexpensive staging server for testing, that
can help make your network sing.
"For the cost of a single server, you can build a monster IT test lab. A
cheap, dual-CPU, 12-core AMD Istanbul-based 1U server can run several dozen
virtual machines in a test scenario for about US$1,500. Using VMware Server on
Linux or VMware ESXi, you can avoid software licensing fees, while maintaining a
perfectly valid platform for testing anything, from software upgrades to new
packages, new operating systems, or even network architectures.
"Combine a virtualized server lab with tools such as GNS3, and you can build
and test just about any planned network or system infrastructure you want.
There's no easier way to determine where resource bottlenecks reside than in a
test bed, and if that test bed is as easily constructed as it is in a virtual
lab, there's no reason not to find them."
