Resource Center

Find out how IT pros can save time in managing help desk tickets and support tasks. Learn some easy and effective ways to allow IT pros to simplify the manual and time-consuming process of providing IT support to end-users.

Most organizations today are evolving toward a hybrid IT enterprise architecture, meaning their operations are split between the cloud and the traditional on-premises network. Many important enterprise applications are moving to the cloud, along with some more basic infrastructure such as storage and application development platforms. When cloud services falter, you need to know why – but often lack visibility beyond the firewall.

In this white paper, Tom LaRock, Technical Evangelist and SQL Server MVP, demystifies query tuning by providing a rigorous 12-step process that database professionals at any level can use to systematically assess and adjust query performance, starting from the basics and moving to more advanced query tuning techniques like indexing. When you apply this process from start to finish, you will improve query performance in a measurable way, and you will know that you have optimized the query as much as is possible.

Having a storage I/O bottleneck is perhaps one of the biggest threats to performance in a virtual environment and also one of the more challenging issues to identify and resolve. Bottlenecks can happen as the result of many things, from simple configuration settings to improper storage architecture designs.

Storage Switzerlandʼs article “Storage Management First Steps – Inventory and Capacity Control” covered how to quickly gain control of the storage environment through a better understanding of what is present (inventory) and how to reduce costs by increasing utilization (capacity control). The next step in storage management is to maximize performance through a better understanding of the storage infrastructure and how to maximize I/O utilization.

As discussed in Storage Switzerlandʼs recent article “Why Bother Managing Storage?” one of the challenges when selecting a storage management application is knowing what to do with the solution once itʼs installed. The goal of that article was to motivate data center managers to deploy a storage resource management solution prior to storage problems arising. This allows for a more balanced approach to the use of the solution.

When IT managers talk about doing more with less and increasing efficiency, they often focus on improving resource utilization. The first step in that process is to find tools that will enable staff to save time. In this whitepaper, learn about tools that enable quick collection and analysis of critical system data in order to optimize efficiency in data center management.