Issue #8

The 4 Series

Issues - Issue #8

Rumors of "the death of the desktop" may be a bit premature. We see wave after wave of negative headlines, but reality is often a matter of interpretation. For example, ChangeWave recently released a pair of surveys attempting to track U.S. PC buying in the face of the 2008 slowdown. Of 4,427 consumers surveyed, 6% planned to buy a desktop in the next 90 days, the lowest level in 12 months. Of 2,204 corporations polled, only 70% planned to buy a desktop, also marking a 12-month low. But these percentages only lag notebook buying plans by 2% and 3%, respectively, meaning the laptop/desktop gap isn’t exactly a yawning chasm.

Little, Green, Different

Issues - Issue #8

Most of us would agree that proprietary is bad. If not for industry standard components, we wouldn’t have a system builder channel. While there have been many proprietary SFF products over the years—some of them, like Shuttle’s XPC, very successful—these have been costly and difficult to service compared to industry standard components because of their lower volumes.

For years, the smallest mainstream form factor has been microATX. This is a 9.6" x 9.6" design that’s small enough to fit in a slightly oversized "cube"-style chassis (the XPC is the quintessential example) yet big enough to accommodate multiple expansion slots. In terms of footprint, though, even a cube chassis remains pretty close to most mini towers.

Breaking Down Bandwidth

Issues - Issue #8

We hear so much about speeds in storage products that it’s easy to lose sight of potential bottlenecks that could cripple an otherwise strong solution. Plenty of new technologies have come into the market recently that can give customers not only vast amounts of storage capacity but also the ability to achieve mind-blowing throughput speeds. Of course, storage solutions had better deliver that sort of performance. Otherwise, the more users who try to access their data, the more congested and crippled the system will become. Let’s dive into the factors that can build a strong storage solution for your clients and make sure you know how to avoid potential pitfalls.

SAS Infrastructure

Don’t Judge a Tech By Its Connector. SATA and SAS may look the same when it comes to the cable connection, but SAS comes with a slew of enterprise-slanted technologies and protocols that SATA lacks.

If your main client base is consumer and/or microbusiness, you may not be familiar with the details on Serial Attached SCSI (SAS). Just as parallel ports and ATA interfaces have given way to serial-based USB and SATA replacements, the old workhorse of server storage, SCSI, is now shuffling aside for SAS. The new technology takes the command set and protocols that made SCSI powerful for so long, mixes in the frame formats from Fibre Channel, and plants them all into a more scalable interface that is also plug-compatible with desktop-class SATA drives.