August 24, 2005
IBM Needs 20,000 Mainframe People
I seems that IBM needs to hire 20,000 people over the next few years to service their mainfram computers and they don't know where to get them. Although I remember the IBM Mainframe 360 computer, I never really worked with like I do PC's. I just rather amazed by this. Information Week has all the details.
Posted by Ted at 03:17 PM | Comments (0)
May 12, 2005
Spyware/Adware
Information Week has a post on their survey of readers results in killing off Spyware. They seem to favor five programs.
Here’s a salient quote . . .
Readers said that anti-spyware products aren't accurate; they need to use two, three or even four products in combination to detect all the spyware on a system, and even then they're not sure if they got everything. Many systems managers are forced to go into the Windows Registry and Task Manager by hand and edit out rogue processes and settings.
Posted by Ted at 11:17 AM | Comments (0)
May 10, 2005
What the heck is a LifeDrive?
I read this cryptic post in Information Week and am very curious. I am a surprisingly enthusiastic Palm Pilot user. I have been carefully eyeing the Dell Inspiron 700m. It weighs only 4.1 Lb and has a 12” screen. I know that’s small, but I want something very portable, when the Palm is just too small.
Now I see this Palm LifeDrive, if that’s what it’s really call and I am intrigued.
Posted by Ted at 05:03 PM | Comments (0)
May 02, 2005
IBM Sells its PC Division
I see that IBM has finalized the sale of their PC division to Lenovo, a Chinese firm. IBM will still sell and market PC’s under the IBM logo. It will make Lenovo the third biggest PC maker behind Dell and HP.
I have rather mixed feelings about this move. I suspect these people were probably making IBM’s PCs all along so it may just codify a situation that already existed.
Posted by Ted at 11:32 AM | Comments (0)
April 15, 2005
What is RAID?
What is RAID? In the computer world RAID is not an insecticide. It is an acronym that stands for Redundant Array of Independent Drives. In this little blurb I will describe the most commonly used RAID versions which are RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 1+0, and RAID 5. There are other RAID configurations, but I just don’t come across them. All instances of RAID involve the use of multiple hard drives to improve computer performance and reliability.
RAID 0
RAID 0 uses two or more drives. In a RAID 0 configuration the data is “striped” across two or more hard drives. As an example, let’s pretend you have a Word document stored on a RAID 0 disk array that consists of four hard drives. Let’s further pretend, for the sake of my little example, that your Word document is four pages long.
Then the RAID array would store one page on each hard drive. The advantage here is speed. If it normally took two seconds to load your Word document, in the example above it would take half a second.
The downside is reliability. Should one hard drive fail, then it is likely that all the data in the system would be lost. How would you reassemble your Word document from the above example if one page was missing, but you don’t know which page? Only the disk subsystem knows how the data is stored.
RAID 1
In an effort to improve reliability, RAID 1 developed. This is also called disk mirroring. In this case two hard drives are used and both hard drives have exactly the same information. Should one hard drive fail, all the information still resides on the other drive?
RAID 1 configurations are faster than a single hard drive when reading data. Since data is stored on both drives, both drives will feed the user, when data is requested. When data is saved, however, both hard drives must be updated and performance suffers.
RAID 1+0
This is a combination of RAID 1 and RAID 0. In this case you have two RAID 0 arrays and they mirror each other. Let’s take my RAID 0 example from above. If this was converted to a RAID 1+0, then I would have two four-drive arrays or eight hard drives. This gives you excellent performance as well as security in that the data is being duplicated on to drive arrays. It is, however, rather expensive. You have a lot of hard drives to buy.
RAID 5
In this situation you use a minimum of three hard drives and you can have as many as you want, after that. In a three-disk arrangement, RAID 5 uses data striping on two of the disks and the third uses some kind of data integrity algorithm to ensure data integrity.
To be frank with you, I don’t understand all the gory details of how it works; only that it does. In the RAID 5 configuration you always lose the storage capacity to one hard drive. So if I have three 50GB hard drives in a RAID 5 array, I can only store 100GB of data. RAID 5 arrays can grow to as many drives as you want. The more hard drives in your array the better your performance as your stripping your data across more hard drives.
There is a point of diminishing returns for data striping. If I go from one hard drive to two hard drives, I have nearly doubled my speed. To double again I have to go to four hard drives. The next double takes me to eight hard drives. I think you can see from this example, that you reach a point in which it is uneconomical to add more drives.
Most installations I encounter use either RAID 1 or RAID 5 or some combination thereof.
Posted by Ted at 09:32 AM
March 22, 2005
I'm not sure this is good news
Information Week reports that Dell Computer is opening its third call center in India. The new call center will be in Mohali.
So the next time you’re online with Dell Tech Support, ask them how the weather is in Mohali.
I rather hope Microsoft Great Plains doesn't go this route.
Posted by Ted at 02:46 PM
Best Buy for Business?
I just received a catalog from Best Buy. They call it Best Buy Business. It looks like Best Buy has a site specifically for businesses.
The catalog highlights HP hardware, but the web site seems to have a wider selection. I don’t know if I’m going to buy anything from them, but I did find it interesting that they’re trying to go after the small business market.
Posted by Ted at 12:17 PM