Microsoft Sidekick Debacle & the Cloud: Lessons Learned
When Microsoft's storage service for Sidekick users broke down, cloud computing questions sprang up -- both fair and unfair.
When Microsoft's storage service for Sidekick users broke down, cloud computing questions sprang up -- both fair and unfair.
Nag, nag, nag is what I feel like sometimes when talking about backups, but I'm compelled to help people in spite of themselves. The bottom line is simple: lose data, lose dollars. When you talk about some type of disaster, such as fire or theft of your computer hardware, the survival rate for stricken companies without disaster recovery tools and good backups drops into the “hope and prayer” realm of IT management. So lets talk about ways to insulate your company from disaster by playing like the Boy Scouts and being prepared.
Just about everyone has heard the hype surrounding solid-state drives, but only now are we starting to see SSDs get a foothold as a storage alternative for everyday use. The market is flooded with options, and the performance we've seen from several of the latest drives in our tests back up some of the claims that SSD supporters have made about the technology's advantages.
Managing storage technology is an oxymoron these days. It seems like the more tools you add to manage your increasingly complex environment, the more convoluted the environment becomes. Nirvana is within sight, but your budget prevents you from getting there. Even worse, the budget shrinks but the demand on your resources grows. What's a storage area network (SAN) guru to do?
It's pretty much a given that solid state drives (SSDs) are the future of PC storage, and that hard drives are on the way out. But if you're buying a laptop today, which option is best?
Mention Shakespeare and everyone spouts "To be or not to be." Mention backup, and the question becomes, "To tape or not to tape?" Is tape dead, or do tape-based backup systems still have a place in the modern small business?
Capitalizing on the buzz around green IT, Seagate and Western Digital have released new "green" hard drives designed to use less power (in part by spinning more slowly than the latest generation of drives) and produce less heat (thus requiring less cooling).
OCZ has had its share of problems out of the gate with its low-end, consumer solid-state disk drive, the Apex Series SATA II. But its most recent economy SSD, the Agility Series SATA II 2.5-in., appears to be a successful effort to correct old problems with fresh technology. The Agility has ample cache to boost write performance and, most important, uses a higher-end controller. Yet it is only slightly more expensive than the Apex, which is still being sold.
Samsung on Monday introduced solid-state drives (SSDs) for netbooks that are smaller than traditional SSDs and consume significantly less power.
Solid-state disk (SSD) drives are all the rage among techies. The drives use non-volatile NAND flash memory, meaning there are no moving parts. Because there is no actuator arm and read/write head that must seek out data on a platter like on a hard disk drive (HDD), they are faster in reading and, in most cases, writing data.
Just off the North Sea coast in the United Kingdom, Hewlett-Packard Co.'s <a href="http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9085019">EDS unit</a> has built a data center that largely relies on cold sea air to keep servers chilled and -- by doing so -- cut the center's cooling power needs in half.
"Where did all my space go?" This question has been asked by every computer user since the days of the 5.25" floppy (probably since the days of the ENIAC), and SpaceSniffer is a fast, free, easy, way to answer it. While SpaceSniffer in itself does nothing to reclaim space, it does provide you with a very good overview of what's occupying the nether reaches of your hard disk.
The U.S. government says it's lost - yes, lost - an entire hard drive full of sensitive data. The external drive, stored at the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, held personal data from the Clinton era, including information about White House staff and visitors and electronic storage tapes from the Executive Office of the President.
Online storage sites, the toast of the Internet circa 2006, are shutting down in droves, putting the data and images of their users in jeopardy.
The recent revelation that Intel Corp.'s consumer-class solid-state disk (SSD) drives suffer from fragmentation that can cause a significant performance degradation raises the question: Do all SSDs slow down with use over time?