Guide
Effective Log Management
IBM’s customers are turning to Power VM virtualization to consolidate multiple workloads onto fewer systems increasing server utilization and reducing cost. However a virtualized server landscape on several different IBM platforms (IBM Power Systems™, IBM System x®, and IBM BladeCenter®) may reduce hardware complexity but this puts a strain on supporting the entire lifecycle of analysis,...
Guide
Download “How IT Professionals Can Navigate PCI DSS Compliance” Guide
The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) applies to every organization that processes credit or debit card information. This includes merchants and third-party service providers that store, process, or transmit credit card data.The launch of PCI DSS helped expose serious security shortcomings, failures to follow security best practices, and a...
Guide
Self-Audit: Checking Assumptions at the Door
Sysadmins, devops engineers, and cybersecurity personnel are often kept awake by a number of questions.
How should I monitor my monitoring to be sure it will alert me when there is a security issue that needs my intervention? How can I be sure that the servers and processes in the environment haven’t been rooted already?
In the quest to get better sleep, it is a good idea to self-audit your...
Guide
How to Manage IT Resource Consumption
At an application level with Vityl Capacity Management
In this guide, John Miecielica of Metavante, provides a step-by-step example showing how he uses Vityl Capacity Management to analyze IT resource consumption at an application level. This key capability is especially important in today’s environments where multiple applications run on a server or multiple servers might be required to...
Guide
Commercial Clusters and Scalability
In this paper we present an introductory analysis of throughput scalability for update intensive workloads (such as measured by the TPC-C or TPC-W benchmarks) and how that scaling is limited by serialization effects in the software-hardware combination that comprises any platform.
Guide
UNIX Load Average Part 1: How It Works
In this online article Dr. Gunther digs down into the UNIX kernel to find out how load averages (the “LA Triplets”) are calculated and how appropriate they are as capacity planning metrics.
Guide
UNIX Load Average Part 2: Not Your Average Average
This is the second in a two part-series where we explore the use of UNIX load averages in performance analysis and capacity planning.
Guide
UNIX Load Average: Reweighed
This is an unexpected Part 3 to the discussion about the UNIX load average metric answering the question of where the weight factor comes from.
Guide
How to Get Unbelievable Load Test Results
This article is about delusions that arise from incorrect interpretation of load test measurements.
Guide
Capacity Calculations: Handle with Care
This paper discusses avoiding calculation results that are more precise than is justified by precision of corresponding measurement input data.
Guide
Evaluating Scalability Parameters: A Fitting End
This is the final online article concerning the concept of application scalability. Here, you will learn how to determine value of the parameters that control scalability.
Guide
The “LA Triplets” Quiz
This is a little quiz to test your understanding of the triplet of numbers that appear in the UNIX® load average (LA) performance metric.