Improving our articles with help from the IT community
by Liz van Dijk on January 9, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- IT Computing general
As some of our regular readers might have noticed, at Anandtech IT, we have been trying to spice up our articles and benchmarks by taking them a bit further than the usual rundown of standardized tests.
Instead of limiting ourselves to tests that can be found anywhere on the net, we are always eager to figure out how an application or technology will perform in a real-world situation, since in the end, that is what really matters. To this effect, we use a range of applications in combination with our in-house developed suite of benchmarking software (vApus), to get an idea of how a real application would interact with and benefit from whichever technology we're testing.
This is a strategy we have adopted during our lab work for several small to medium enterprises (SME's), since these companies usually want to see clearcut results in realistic situations and solutions they can apply for immediate profit. Giving them the opportunity of being able to test their very own specific application on their very own specific hardware has allowed us to provide them with the most relevant results possible, while giving us access to a plethora of software types that stress every part of a server.
As our IT community grows here at Anandtech, now and then we'd like to see some input for our articles as well. For example: One of our upcoming pieces will be a comparison between the possibly underestimated container-based virtualization solution and the popular hypervisor-based one. To make sure that we're not simply comparing apples and oranges, we will be performing tests with several types of applications on different VM-densities. Though we have several reliable database tests laying around, we're currently still looking for a solid, "realistic" web application to run on a Linux-based system. For it to be usable in our testing setup, we would prefer the actual web application to be mostly autonomous (e.g. backed by a database, but independent from a host of other external services), but large enough for there to be varied usage patterns.
Rather than just coming up with our own, we would like to learn from your experiences as well. If you, as IT professional, have any suggestions that might point us in the right direction, or happen to have the perfect site for us to test on hand, feel free to post a comment with your ideas or mail me directly. Our goal is to turn the IT section of Anandtech into a truly professional community for IT'ers, where contributions of regulars help set the course of our research and journalism. Now is your chance to help us start that dynamic!
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StraightPipe - Friday, January 9, 2009 - link
I'd love to see some articles on Virtual Storage solutions.I love all the virtualization articles.
Brovane - Friday, January 9, 2009 - link
You need to have a IT Forum area under the main forum area. The current IT forum is buried and not really well visited. There is more IT stuff being posted on the normal forums however it can get buried between people asking for assistance on building a computer. IT Forums should have its own category under the main forum page. Just my two cents.JohanAnandtech - Sunday, January 11, 2009 - link
Would you feel that integrating these comment boxes (of the articles and blogposts) into the IT forum would be make the IT forum more attractive? (I am thinking of running a poll on this)Brovane - Tuesday, January 13, 2009 - link
I am not sure about that. You really need to move the IT forums over to the main Anandtech forums and have it under its own category. There is more active IT discussions on the main anandtech forums than there are here under the IT forums that are completely separate.