If you spend any time on the SQL Server Magazine discussion forums or Microsoft SQL Server newsgroups, you'll see a lot of questions about hardware setup and configuration. In fact, many of the performance problems that IT professionals encounter result from simple ignorance of good hardware design. I've spent many years as a DBA and developer, but it wasn't until I was specifically tasked with configuring enterprise-class servers that I learned to resolve many of the key difficulties in building well-tuned SQL Servers from the bare metal on up.

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