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Skills Expanded

Understanding Server Hardware

by Glenn Berry

Learn how to identify your current servers and processors, evaluate different servers for performance, choose the most appropriate new server for your budget, and maintain server hardware; applicable to anyone who uses servers or is responsible for evaluating and choosing new servers

What you'll learn

How do you know what the capabilities of your server are? How do you choose a new server? Which processor should you select? How can you avoid having to pay exorbitant amounts for licenses, or wasting money through over-provisioning a server? This course answers all these questions and more. The course begins be explaining basic server terminology, and then explains how to decode Dell and HP server model numbers, along with Intel and AMD processor numbers so you can figure out what current servers and components you have. It then describes and demonstrates the common application, processor, memory, and disk benchmarks you can use to evaluate the performance of your current and new servers. After that, it explains all the choices you need to make when choosing a new server so that you make the best use of your hardware budget, considering the anticipated workload plus OS and application licensing limitations. Finally it covers how to maintain your servers, including how to limit maintenance downtime using high-availability technology, and then how to maximize your hardware budget through negotiation tactics, consolidation, and virtualization. This course is perfect for beginners with little knowledge of server hardware, through developers, DBAs, managers, and other IT professionals who need to understand how to successfully evaluate and provision new servers

Table of contents

About the author

Glenn works as a Principal Consultant at SQLskills.com. He has been a SQL Server MVP since 2007, and he has a whole collection of Microsoft certifications, including MCITP, MCDBA, MCSE, MCSD, MCAD, and MCTS, which proves that he likes to take tests. His expertise includes DMVs, high availability, hardware selection, and performance tuning. He is also an Adjunct Faculty member at University College - University of Denver, where has been teaching since 2000. He has completed the Master Teacher P... more

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