Understanding the accumulation of data
Apple unveiled their new line of MacBook Pro laptops today, complete with “Thunderbolt”, the trade name for a production packaging of Light Peak and Mini DisplayPort. After much speculation, we finally have some concrete information about Light Peak, and perhaps a peek into the next generation of I/O technologies!
Today is the big “coming out” day for Thunderbolt (nee Light Peak), courtesy of Intel and Apple’s new lineup of MacBook Pros. Next week is the introduction of another “Magical and Revolutionary” Apple product, the iPad 2. Inevitably, pundits are putting 2 and 2 together and deducing that the future iPad will include this new I/O port. But this makes little sense. The iPad 2 won’t include Thunderbolt.
Apple and Intel introduced the impressive new Thunderbolt interconnect last month on the MacBook Pro line, but folks like me who bought one have nothing to connect to yet. It was exciting to see the wide variety of Thunderbolt peripherals on display at the NAB show in Las Vegas last week, but none of these will ship to end-users before the middle of the summer. But evidence is mounting that Apple will be the first out of the gate with a Thunderbolt peripheral, it just won’t be the sort of peripheral you might expect. I am hearing rumors that the new iMac, to be introduced this month, will be both a Thunderbolt host and peripheral in one! Read on for what this means in the real world.
Thunderbolt is important not because it is fast but because it extends the PCI bus outside the computer chassis. The next iteration of the Mac Pro could be as tiny as the Mac Mini, as long as it has two or more Thunderbolt ports and an expansion chassis for video and I/O cards.
The Sonnet Echo ExpressCard/34 Thunderbolt Adapter demonstrates the power of Thunderbolt to bring flexible, high-performance connectivity to compact computers. But we are still in the first generation of devices like this, and it will be a while before prices drop out of the stratosphere.
It seems that hardware vendors are finally answering the call of Mac users seeking to use Thunderbolt as a generic interface for expansion cards. Last week, Magma, best known for its line of PCI express expansion chassis, announced a three board Thunderbolt version, the ExpressBox 3T. Although the company has not yet released timing and pricing, they are signing up prospective customers on their website.
We’re taking my Building Virtual Infrastructure presentation to Columbus Ohio at the end of the month. Cool! I live in Ohio, and don’t get much opportunity to speak at events here. There’s also Backup Central Live! with W. Curtis Preston the next day, if you want to go to both!
I’ve always loved my Wi-Fi iPad, but the Verizon LTE iPad (third-generation) is too awesome to overlook. Apart from the “retina” display and voice dictation, the killer app is unlocked roaming on just about any carrier network. Yes, you can use your Verizon iPad Verizon iPad on AT&T, Vodafone, or even Verizon!
The mobile phone network landscape is incredible confusing. I pulled together the following overview to help myself make sense of it, and I thought it might benefit my readers, too.
I don’t get much chance to read for pleasure, but two things I’ve been reading recently spurred my imagination. After reliving the advent of modern transportation in the solid non-fiction Jet Age by Sam Howe Verhovek, I stumbled upon two pieces of speculative fiction from an unlikely source that predated everything presented there.
Even though I grew up on the other side of the great baseball divide, I have always loved going to New York City. Next week, I return again, but this time I’m bringing a whole new event to the city: This is the first time the New York audience gets to see my Building Virtual Infrastructure presentation!
I’m really thrilled about the improvements Microsoft is making to the core SMB protocol in Windows Server 2012. But it won’t really matter if nobody but Microsoft supports the new protocol. So I like to call out to all the enterprise storage vendors: Let me hear your support for SMB3.0!
Microsoft is about to release the third major revision to their ubiquitous network storage protocol, SMB. Windows Server 2012 and Hyper-V 3 will really highlight this technology, and I predict it will transform the way people think about networked storage for Windows systems. But SMB 3 is big in another way, too: there are tons of new features, and not all will be implemented by everyone.
If you’ve traveled much, you’ve probably run across “unlocked” mobile phones and devices. If you own an Android or iPhone smart phone, you probably also heard about “jailbreaking”. It seems like lots of people are confused about these two things, so I decided to write down a quick post explaining them.
IBM has really stepped up their game this year, and they will highlight all this at their upcoming storage technology conference, Edge2012. I’m really looking forward to seeing what IBM Edge is all about, and I’ll be attending and speaking at the event in June.
I am thrilled to return to speak at Interop next week, though not so much about returning to Las Vegas for the third time already this year. This time around, I’ll be on two Interop panel discussions in Mike Fratto’s storage track. If you will be at Interop and would like to meet up, let [...]