At last, the answers to your IT problems

Special report: Chief technologists don’t get their wrinkles from spending too much time in the sun. Those are worry lines from addressing complex data center performance questions. Senior Contributing Editors Maggie Biggs and Paul Venezia tackle some of the toughest issues facing technology leaders in this week’s cover story, “15 IT performance problems and remedies.” By flagging common speed killers across IT disciplines, they impart some valuable information to create high-performing infrastructure.

Columnists’ corner: Steve Fox salutes Biggs and Venezia in Editor’s Letter. “Venezia and Biggs know whereof they speak,” Fox writes. “When not writing for InfoWorld, both are IT pros working in corporate environments with beefy infrastructures. During the course of their careers, they’ve seen just about every configuration – and problem – imaginable.”

Struggling Novell has brought in Jeffrey Jaffe as executive vice president CTO to help steady the company’s course. Neil McAlister spoke with Jaffe and says he can help the company get back on the road to success, although the final outcome is not settled. “So far he (Jaffe) gets top marks from me,” McAlister says in Open Enterprise. “What’s less clear is how Jaffe intends to tackle the broader technical challenges Novell currently faces – for example, how to unify the disparate Suse and Ximian open source development teams.”