A free lunch may not exist, but sometimes if we’re lucky we can find a free ride. After all, if someone provides a free service, why not use it? Firms are beginning to integrate their web sites with those of industry leaders such as Google and Yahoo. I’m not talking about providing better search facilities, […]
Entries from May 2008
Put Flickr to work
Comment 27th May
Intel drops dual core server chips
News 15th May
Chip giant Intel is pushing server makers to drop dual core products in favour of quad core alternatives, according to Andrew Bailey, a consultant with specialist server maker Stratus Technologies. The Intel move means firms like Stratus will struggle to differentiate their mid-range and high-end server offerings, at least until Intel begins shipping 6 core […]
Virtual desktops take over
Comment 14th May
Virtual desktop infrastructure is set to be the next growth area for IT organisations using virtualisation. The idea is to host users’ desktop systems on virtual server farms, and deliver the desktops using thin-client protocols such as Microsoft RDP or Citrix ICA. The advantage of VDI architecture is better management of the desktop environment. For […]
Data dedupe for 98% less storage
Lab Notes 13th May
We’ve heard reports of one user that is seeing a 50x reduction in the amount of storage space needed for backups of their virtual machines thanks to data de-deplication, or dedupe, technology from DataDomain. In this case the DataDomain dedupe tool was integrated with Vizioncore vRanger Pro backup software, so the user simply needs to […]
Replication replaces server backups
Comment 3rd May
Judging by some of the virtual machine (VM) management tools we evaluated recently, server backup software could soon be replaced by server replication tools. The trouble with backups is they spend most of their life archived on some tape or disk storage system. Even if you test the tape as soon as you’ve made it, […]
Printing Google maps
Lab Notes 2nd May
You may have noticed that printing full page Google maps in portrait mode is often impossible. With most PCs the best you can hope for is to be able to print around half a “letter” or “A4” sized page (see image). Well, Hypervisor Lab technicians have been hard at work on the problem and have […]