The underlying cause of today's outage is still a real head-scratcher.  We pay people at Microsoft and Dell a ton of money for equipment and software that should never slow down out-of-the-blue, but that's pretty much what happened today to one of our database machines.  It is a very simple server too - nothing fancy at all in terms of configuration - and has been rock solid for several years.  For reasons that only Microsoft or Dell would know, it simply slowed to a crawl today. Well, regardless of the underlying cause, it's my job to prevent these problems.  Clearly Read More