Have you heard of QoS? The first time I heard of this terms was about months ago when our company implemented QoS.

At first I didn’t know what its all about on QoS, what I learned from my colleagues is that it will give priority of bandwidth to certain predefine applications over the Corporate network environment; mainly is for those critical production applications, so that the applications traffic will not be affected even when there is a high peak on Corporate network traffic.

Here is the detail explanation from Wiki:

In the fields of packet-switched networks and computer networking, the traffic engineering term Quality of Service, abbrivated QoS, refers to resource reservation control mechanisms rather than the achieved service quality. Quality of Service is the ability to provide different priority to different applications, users, or data flows, or to guarantee a certain level of performance to a data flow. Quality of Service guarantees are important if the network capacity is limited, for example in cellular data communication, especially for real-time streaming multimedia applications, for example voice over IP and IP-TV, since these often require fixed bit rate and are delay sensitive.

I just know that it’s call QoS…but I’m not sure what it stands for until this morning when I read on an article from PC World on how to secure your Wi-Fi network. It’s called Quality of Service in full.

My initial understanding is that this feature only application to those high-standard and expensive Cisco routers in the Corporate, but I was wrong. This article show that we can even apply this cool feature over our house wireless router.

With this, you can give priority to your VOIP application like Skype and set a lower priority for online games.

If you have multiple users running multiple application over your house network which consume a long of network traffic, do give it a try it your router support this feature.

Tags: server technology wireless qos networking

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For anyone who own a business, the ultimate goal is to stay competitive among its business competitors while maintain their technology expenses in a healthy level.

Personally I do think that server virtualization will helps your company to stay competitive. If your are a software based company, you will need a numbers of servers for your code simulation and testing, code version control as well as your database server. Each server will easily cost you around USD 5-20k depends on your server specifications.

However, if your analyst your server performance and utilization in details, you may been shock and realize that each of your server may be only utilizing 10-20% of the total server’s CPU and memory usage. The remaining 30-70% of your server resources are remain idle in most cases.

Will it be nice that you can fully utilize your server resources and you will most probably needs 2 out of 5 servers running in your company. What you will get in returns? Here are the 5 main reason that you shall always make use of server virtualization:

1. Saves money $$$$$

The is the main important in any business case as it keep your products competitive and saves $$$ on buying too many servers that you actually not needed. Of cause, this will not saves you on your Microsoft Server OS licenses but it saves on your server hardware in the long run.

2. Saves spaces on your data center (server room)

As you do not have to maintain so many servers, you can fully utilize the spaces in your office for other purposes, additional office space for more staff as your company growth? Further more, Server racks is also an expensive equipment to locate all your servers, you save space and save $.

3. Save on server maintenance

You will need specified professionals in fields like System Engineer/ IT Engineer to take care of your servers. Windows Security Patching, hardware monitoring, performance monitoring on hardware failure as well. If you cut down the numbers of server you actually needs, you can saves man power in this area and may be they can focus on other area which will improve your business competitive further.

4. Save the environment

Less servers = less power consumption. With lesser servers, you need less power cable, less high power air con to maintenance the server room temperatures; and at the end, it’s more environmental friendly and you play your part in saving the environment from Global Warming.

5. Improve your product build time/time to market

During coding implementation and testing, you may crash your own coding and causing the testing environment stop working. With virtual server, you can actually create a snapshot of the ‘working’ version prior to your new release or testing. If anything happens to your coding, you can just ‘playback’ your previous ‘working version’ in no time. It will definitely improve the time to market of your products.

Above are just some of the examples and reasons that I recommended for virtual server.

You can google it for the virtualization software in the market and make good comparison to math your business needs. Meanwhile, VM Ware and Microsoft Virtual Server are some of the BIG players in the market.

Tags: Virtual Server VMWare Virtualization Global Warming Energy Saving

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