miércoles, 17 de septiembre de 2008

eb 2.0 Drives Adoption of Direct-Attached Storage


Despite all the talk about iSCSI, Fibre Channel and 4/10GB Ethernet connectivity, industry experts estimate that DAS still comprises about 70 percent of the entire data storage market.

Good old direct-attached data storage, the original digital storage model that dates back to IBM's original spinning desk platter in the mid-1950s, doesn't make a lot of news these days. Like a shy boy or girl on the sidelines at a junior-high sock hop, it prefers to let other newer and fancier technologies grab attention on the dance floor.

But this oh-so-basic storage form, in fact, is what's making most of the business world go 'round. In addition to its common use in small businesses and home offices, many larger enterprises—including Web 2.0 companies—are rediscovering DAS and are starting to add it as an adjunct layer for specific mission-critical applications.

DAS is storage that is physically connected via cable or other wired connection to dedicated servers, desktops, laptops, thin clients or handheld data origination terminals.

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Despite all the talk about iSCSI, Fibre Channel and 4/10GB Ethernet connectivity, industry experts estimate that DAS still comprises about 70 percent of the entire data storage market. This, of course, includes the millions of simple, USB-attached external drives individuals use in homes or in remote corporate offices, but it also includes DAS as an integral part of a growing number of enterprise storage systems.

bye bye , GAby Menta

martes, 9 de septiembre de 2008

PDF on Google Chrome, So Far, A Shiny, Happy Experience

There may be strategic and technical reasons to dislike Google's new Chrome browser, but the way it handles PDFs isn't one of them.

We're always looking for a better widget to view PDFs more efficiently. Google Chrome might be it.

How sweet it is. Google Chrome's handling of PDFs, that is.

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Don't take our word for it, take it for a test spin. Go to the Government Accountability Office and pop off a couple of hundred-pagers on any topic you'd like, such as pork belly futures. Download some IRS forms, or open your latest credit card statement. Magnify it, poke it, prod it. Surely someone will quickly figure out how to break Chrome, the new Web browser from Google--and someone else will find a way to make it display a graphics-heavy document poorly--but it won't be easy.

Unencumbered by 15 years of bolted-on code and other historical software-engineering artifacts, Chrome tames PDF documents on the everyday, average machine, nimbly slicing through words and pictures that slow other browsers to a crawl.

Lord knows people who earn their living via work done on Windows could use a little more speed and a little less hang time. The key is, Chrome knows about Adobe Reader and Acrobat already installed on your system—which is good, considering one or both live on most of the computers on earth.

It also understands how to tap into those resources without pestering us with 50 clicks' worth of how we feel about the price of tea in China as well as how we want documents of different stripes handled when we download them.


That's the upside. The downsides, as of today:

• The different interface and slightly different look will take the technophobes among us time to get used to.

• Firefox has been neither hot nor new for years, but only about 20% of us use it as of today. Even if it were somehow provable that Chrome is 4,000% better than the status quo, migration would make glaciers look fast.

• Chrome is open source software, and some businesses see "open source" as synonymous with "big hassle," despite the fact that some open source apps and utilities outperform their commercial counterparts in both speed and stability.

In the conservative realm of the office world, it's likely that many companies will pass on this interesting new browser for the time being. And Windows folks are the only ones who have the choice: People on Linux and Mac--many of them early adopters who aren't willing to settle for the status quo and who are probably more open to using alternative browsers in the first place--will have to wait for their versions, which Google promises to deliver "as soon as possible." as the site puts it to Mac visitors.

Imagine the IRS--which sometimes waits to upgrade a majority of its computers to the current version of Reader until that version is no longer current--flipping a switch and going to Google Chrome. Maybe, in 2015. If Google's lucky. This massive government agency is perhaps the single biggest purveyor of PDFs on the planet, and by necessity it must crawl like a turtle through new tech implementation.

Yet, having used many alternative browsers, PDF viewers, and open-source solutions (including dumping Vista on my lapper and installing Ubuntu), my own experience indicates that any document that touches Adobe's browser plug-ins, Acrobat, or Reader seems to slow life down, regardless of what operating system you're using.

To overcome these slowdowns, many have turned to using alternate viewers such as Preview on the Mac, Evince on Linux, and Foxit (which, by the way, Larry Page advocated putting in the Google Pack instead of Adobe Reader, but his team decided to go with Reader anyway after months of debate), or web sites like Google Docs, Issuu, and Scribd, which accelerate the consumption of long PDFs online.

There are times, however, when Adobe software is the best--or only--solution for a PDF. For instance, when collaborating on a PDF or filling in a form that requires Reader. Or when working with a secure document locked with Adobe DRM. Or when printing those infernal files the U.S. Postal Service chucks out for its Click-N-Ship Priority Mail labels, whatever they are. You're stuck, sometimes.

Google Chrome shows promise, appearing to give us access to the Adobe browser plug-in, but with the speed of its nimbler competitors. At this writing, it's only been out a few hours, and we've only had time to crunch a few sample documents, long and short. But so far, so good.

— Saludos, GAby Menta... SAn Acrobat