Top IT mistakes
Infoworld has
compiled a list of 20 IT mistakes to avoid.
Some good info here -- some of these can be skipped over for small businesses but it's all well thought out.
Here are a couple specific for small businesses:
2. Dismissing open source -- or bowing before it
For better or worse, many IT shops are susceptible to “religious” behavior -- a blind, unyielding devotion to a particular technology or platform. Nowhere is that more true than with open source.
On the one hand, the most conservative IT shops dismiss open source solutions as a matter of policy. That’s a big mistake: Taking an indefinite wait-and-see attitude toward open source means passing up proven, stable, and scalable low-cost solutions such as Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. On the other hand, insisting on open source purity in your IT operation can delay progress, as developers are forced to cobble together inferior or unwieldy open source solutions when more appropriate commercial software solutions already exist.
Open source software is not inherently better than commercial software; it all depends on the problem to be solved and the maturity of the solution being considered.
13. Throwing bandwidth at a network problem
One of the most common complaints addressed by IT is simple: The network is running slower than normal. The knee-jerk reaction is to add more capacity. This is the right solution in some cases but dead wrong in others. Without the proper analysis, upgrading capacity can be a costly, unwise decision. Network Instruments’ Smith likens this approach to saying, “I’m running low on closet space, and therefore I need a new house.”
Capacity aside, common root causes of slowdowns include unwanted traffic broadcasting over the network from old systems or apps, such as IPX traffic, or misconfigured or inefficient applications that spew streams of packets onto the network at inconvenient times.
According to Smith, one of Network Instruments’ banking customers was considering upgrading its WAN links due to complaints from tellers that systems were running slow. The IT team used a network analyzer to determine that increased traffic levels were being caused by a security app that ran a daily update at 3 p.m. When the IT team reconfigured this application to make updates at 3 a.m. instead, they were able to quickly improve traffic levels without making the costly WAN upgrade.
18. Underestimating PHP
IT managers who look only as far as J2EE and .Net when developing scalable Web apps are making a mistake by not taking a second look at scripting languages -- particularly PHP. This scripting language has been around for a decade now, and millions of Yahoo pages are served by PHP each day.
Discussion of PHP scalability reached a high-water mark in June, when the popular social-networking site Friendster finally beat nagging performance woes by migrating from J2EE to PHP. In a comment attached to a Weblog post about Friendster’s switch to PHP, Rasmus Lerdorf, inventor of PHP, explained the architectural secret of PHP’s capability of scaling: “Scalability is gained by using a shared-nothing architecture where you can scale horizontally infinitely.”
The stateless “shared-nothing” architecture of PHP means that each request is handled independently of all others, and simple horizontal scaling means adding more boxes. Any bottlenecks are limited to scaling a back-end database. Languages such as PHP might not be the right solution for everyone, but pre-emptively pushing scripting languages aside when there are proven scalability successes is a mistake.
Lots more at the article.
Posted by DaveH at December 16, 2005 2:46 PM