Test Center Daily | InfoWorld Staff » TAG: Small arrays

April 07, 2008 | Comments: (0)

Test Center Tracker: Packeteer sizzles at CIFS; RIA development heats up

TAGS: Endpoint security, Green IT, Rich Internet applications, Small arrays, Wide Area Networks

WAN speed record: For several years running, our testing of WAN acceleration appliances has served mainly to chronicle the superiority of the Riverbed Steelhead, whose approach to byte- or segment-level caching and CIFS optimization has made it the perennial performance leader and our annual Technology of the Year Award winner. Only Silver Peak Systems, which inched closer year by year, could give Riverbed a run for its money. Last week we discovered that speedy wide area networking, or at least the branch of WAN acceleration concerned with file transfers, is a three horse race. Packeteer's iShaper may not be a better overall solution than Riverbed just yet, but it registered the best CIFS performance in our testing to date. See Keith Schultz's review.

Adobe AIR is the answer? Adobe AIR is not yet widely known or implemented, but it solves all of the major issues keeping the browser from being a common front end for applications, says Tom Yager. Read AIR's praises in Tom's "Ahead of the Curve," then weigh Martin Heller's counterpoint in "Strategic Developer."

RIA for the enterprise: Curl's longtime focus on creating rich, Web-based business applications has paid such dividends as excellent performance, smooth handling of intermittent connections, and support for large data sets. Version 6.0 of the InfoWorld Technology of the Year Award winner advances with skinnable controls, more sophisticated graphics rendering, a Macintosh runtime, and the ability to add a Curl applet to an AJAX page, and vice versa. See Martin Heller's review.

Beat the heat: "In many cases, a datacenter can generate enough heat to heat a building 10 to 30 times its size," says says Steve Sams, vice president of IBM Global Site and Facilities Services. Instead of casting that heat to the winds, some companies are using it to keep other buildings warm, and even to generate electrical power. See Ted Samson's "Sustainable IT."

It's the applications, stupid: Thanks to today's more secure operating systems, remote attacks, where the end-user is not involved at all, are becoming almost a rarity. That means educating end users is the key to client security. See Roger Grimes's "Security Advisor."

Smaller disks, lower power: Mario Apicella tackles a new twist on the old speed versus capacity question: the advantages of arrays built around larger capacity 3.5-inch drives versus those that leverage newfangled, lower-power 2.5-inch disks. See "Storage Advisor."

Posted by Doug Dineley on April 7, 2008 09:14 AM

June 05, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Micronet ships portable eSATA box

TAGS: Small arrays

Micronet ships portable eSATA box

eSATA may not be the first protocol that comes to mind for direct attached drives, but this clever extension of the SATA (serial ATA) technology offers affordable and fast connectivity that leaves in the dust competing solutions based on USB and FireWire.

Probably the best Web spot for a refresher on eSATA is the influential SATA-IO where you can also find diagrams and benchmarks that help positioning this technology and its products.

The latest addition to this interesting line of products for SMB comes from Micronet, with the eSATA version of the Platinum RAID Pro array that offers the most common RAID levels for its 5 SATA 2 drives, a 128MB cache and capacity ranging between 2.5 TB and 5 TB.

According to Micronet the Platinum RAID Pro plays nice with recent Apple, Linux and Microsoft OSes but older versions may not be able to see capacity past 2TB.

Micronet Platinum RAID Pro
Availability: Shipping
Pricing: $2349 for a 2.5TB - $4499 for 5TB
Verdict: At a price of less that $1 per GB many small companies with large repositories will probably find that the Platinum RAID Pro is a more flexible and affordable backup alternative than most tape solutions. I don't like that RAID 6 is not supported but with that in mind the array can play well also as primary or second tier storage.

Posted by Mario Apicella on June 5, 2007 03:47 AM