EDITOR'S LETTER: Hardware isn't enough - To find infrastructure performance killers, you've got to know where to look.(Editorial)

IT buyers live in a golden age of commodity hardware. Processors, servers, networks, storage, you name it: Every segment of the IT stack keeps getting faster, cheaper, and more commoditized. No surprise, then, that IT managers often resort to a checkbook-waving strategy, throwing hardware at every IT problem, from a balky WAN to an application speed bump.

Not so fast, contend Senior Contributing Editors Maggie Biggs and Paul Venezia, who co-wrote this week's cover story, "15 IT performance problems and remedies." It's tempting to look at the IT universe through a hardware lens, but that first impulse can mask the real problem. Take your typical network slowdown. You …