Server Performance & Security
Server Performance is one of those areas that is often overlooked.
“The server is there, and has been running solid for years. Nothing is wrong with it.”
Nothing may be noticeably wrong with it, however, there are many things that can potentially be improved upon to make things faster, thereby increasing the office’s productivity and reducing costs.
As your company grows, the hardware in your server should be upgraded as well. “For example, a typical file server may contains anywhere from 8GB to 512GB of RAM onboard. The base amount of RAM required for a server is 4GB, but it is recommended that at least 32GB be used at the very minimum. In addition, 0.25GB of RAM should be allocated for each active user. Therefore, for a company with 10 users, 36GB of RAM would be the absolute minimum you would want to use.”
- Using faster drives – as a system ages, the technology for the devices installed in that system improves. Among the improved functions are drive speed, drive size, drive latency, etc. These can often result is tremendous performance increases.
- Change the RAID architecture – RAID is a storage technology that combines multiple physical drives into a single virtual drive for data redundancy, server performance or both. RAID1 (or mirrored) is the slowest of all RAID technologies. Being mirrored, it writes and reads from both drives simultaneously, thereby having a slight performance drag on the server. Striping (combined with Mirroring) is the quickest RAID technology, and currently RAID10 is the configuration of choice as it offers both redundancy and performance.
- Use a faster CPU – as with any technology, one thing is certain. It will improve over time. Leveraging this improved technology only stands to make your hardware perform faster, and more efficiently.
- Improve your network – Improving your network speed from 10Mbps to 10GBps means your data arrives on your computer (from the server) 1000x faster. Who wouldn’t benefit from that?
- Keep your server up-to-date with all software patches
- Do not install software that is not used
- Don’t store backups of old software on the server
- Restrict access to directories with proper permissions
- Make sure logs are working properly
- Ensure you use a firewall
- Disable unused services
- Maintain Backups (onsite & offsite)
- Test Backups
- Conduct regular security scans
- Conduct regular password audits
- Use encryption when appropriate