No. 6: Use VMware server memory smartly.
Without spending a dime, you may be able to boost the amount of memory available on virtualized Windows 2003 physical servers, thereby improving performance of the virtual machines. If all the virtual machines on the same physical box need the same memory-resident code, such as a dynamic link library (DLL), you can load the DLL once into the physical server's main memory and share that DLL with all virtual machines, says Wendy Cebula, COO at VistaPrint, an international online printer with U.S. operations headquartered in Lexington, Mass. "We've gotten big memory usage benefits by caching once per physical box rather than once per usage," she says.

No. 7: Move applications to a Linux grid.
If you have compute-intensive mainframe applications, don't shy away from lower-cost alternatives such as grid computing because the applications were written in COBOL, says Brian Cucci, manager of the Advanced Technology Group at Atlanta-based UPS, which has such a grid. The application will likely have to be redesigned somewhat for the new hardware platform. But vendors can be counted on to help, as they'll want to ally on the new technology.

No. 8: Recognize WAN links may degrade VoIP QoS.
This is particularly true in areas of the country where the public infrastructure is aging, says Bruce Bartolf, principal and CTO of architecture firm Gensler, in San Francisco. Having completed VoIP installation at seven of 35 sites, Bartolf found unexpectedly high error rates or complete failure on many links. To provide the kind of uptime and quality demanded of phone service, you need to design with alternative failover paths on the WAN. Cable may not be much better, but Metro Ethernet, if available, could work well, he says.

No. 9: Ease IP management with an appliance.
Although the tasks that appliances perform can be done with each vendor's gear, "with something as important as IP management, if you don't do it well, you can really hurt your five-nines," Gensler's Bartolf says. He chose Infoblox appliances, which manage numerous tasks, including Trivial File Transfer Protocol (TFTP) firmware upgrades. "Rather than dealing with Microsoft distributed file system, loading a TFTP server on a Microsoft server, running DHCP on a Microsoft server, running SMS on top of that, and managing it all, I have an appliance," he says. "I put it in, and it works."

No. 10: Shelve the fancy visuals.
"We found it highly impractical to make our monitoring visual," VistaPrint's Cebula says. VistaPrint relies on remote monitoring to manage its data centers, including one in Bermuda. It uses homegrown tools to track everything from CPU usage to event correlation. Visual graphing of events slowed down detection and analysis, taking network operations staff an average of five to seven minutes per event to use, Cebula says. When the tools used simple red, yellow and green lights, detection and correlation dropped to one or two minutes per event, she says.