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Achieve Breakthrough Performance in Your Microsoft Environment
The art of database management can be tricky. Brandon Shopp, group vice president of product strategy at SolarWinds, gives come great advice in this blog post excerpt about using artificial intelligence and machine learning to enhance database performance across your entire Microsoft data estate. In a world where 1.145…
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Hacking For Regular IT People - Why Do We Hack?
Previously, I discussed the origins of the word “hacking” and the motivations around it from early phone phreakers, red-boxers, and technology enthusiasts. Today, most hackers can be boiled down to Black Hats and White Hats. The hat analogy comes from old Western movies, where the good guys wore white and the bad guys wore…
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What You Should Know When Converting an On-Prem Windows Application to Cloud
Since long before Steve Ballmer chanted "Developers, developers, developers!" a key part of Microsoft's strength in the enterprise has been the installed base of custom line-of-business applications built on Windows technologies like .NET Framework, IIS, and SQL Server. If you’re responsible for supporting or maintaining…
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December Writing Challenge Wrap-Up: Week 4
For many of us who make our career (if not our emotional home) in IT, this week was the beginning of a two-week respite from constant changes. Holiday vacation combines with a generate end-of-year risk-aversion when it comes to change and means we can take a moment to catch up on tasks, and maybe reflect a bit on the year.…
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3 Ways IT Teams Can Manage Tool Sprawl
“Tool sprawl”—particularly in edtech—is an increasing challenge. My colleague Brandon Shopp (@bshopp), group vice president of product strategy at SolarWinds, has some great advice on how to keep edtech tool sprawl in check. Since schools transitioned to remote learning, districts have added or upgraded their IT education…
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Enterprise Cost Containment
H.L. Mencken once famously wrote, “…there is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong.” More than just a pithy way to frame the entire concept of “cost containment” (whether network-specific cost, the broader category of IT, or the cost of anything else, to be quite honest), it’s an…
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Geekly World News: October 2021
I’m excited for October! Here in Texas, October brings the Texas Renaissance Festival [Ed. note: HUZZAH!] in addition to our usual Halloween shenanigans. I’m happy to once again be working on costumes, and looking forward to my annual watching of Hocus Pocus. I hope you’re all looking forward to some fun in October as…
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International Podcast Day With the Head Geeks
International Podcast Day began in 2015 to celebrate the audio medium around the world. The day is meant to acknowledge and appreciate all who make podcasting possible—from the hosts to the fans, podcasts wouldn’t be possible without audio enthusiasts of every shape and size. To commemorate this international holiday,…
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How to Avoid Monitoring Overload: Syslogs and SNMP Traps
If you’re using network monitoring solutions (regardless if it is an enterprise size or designed rather for smaller environments) to digest log messages from your network devices, sooner or later you’ll likely notice some performance issues caused by the hundred-thousands (or even millions) of syslog messages and SNMP…
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McCrory's Law: Data Gravity
I was fortunate enough to be in the audience for my friend, Dave McCrory's presentation at Interop during the Future of Data Summit. Dave is currently the CTO of Basho, and he famously coined the term "data gravity" in 2010. Data gravity, or as friends have come to call it, McCrory's Law, simply states that data is…