Americans have terrible mobile broadband network infrastructure, yet our service providers make it sound awesome. Now that 2 of our 4 national wireless providers now offer 4G service, one might conclude that the United States is awash in mobile broadband. But neither of these supposed 4G offerings is anywhere near fast enough to meet the ITU standards for 4G, and even our 3G networks woefully under-perform vendor promises. With no teeth in “truth-in-advertising” laws, it begs the question of what these supposed standards really mean.
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How Fast Is It? A Storage Infographic
How fast is a hard disk drive? How about the various flavors of SATA and Fibre Channel? Check out this handy Pack Rat infographic to answer the question, “how fast is it?”
Microsoft Office 2011 for Mac Is (Finally) Here!
Microsoft just released Office 2011 for Mac, and power users stuck with Office 2008 are really excited to upgrade. Pretty much anyone in a corporate setting has to use Office (sorry Apple and Google) so the Office 2011 upgrade is a Big Deal. I’ve been looking for the best deal on Office for Mac, and it’s hard to beat Amazon. They’ve got free shipping, and are already discounting the suite around 10%.
Flexible IT “Twitterview” With NetApp
I’ll be tweeting about Flexible IT today at the invitation of NetApp. I’d like to open this “Twitterview” up to anyone else who wants to join the conversation, lest this become a useless exercise in talking to ourselves. We’ll get online at 1 Eastern/10 Pacific (that’s 10:30 PM for my friends in Kolkata) and will be using the #FlexibleIT hashtag.
The Four Horsemen of Storage System Performance: I/O As a Chain of Bottlenecks
It is tempting to think of storage as a game of hard disk drives, and consider only The Rule of Spindles. But RAM cache can compensate for the mechanical limitations of hard disk drives, and Moore’s Law continues to allow for ever-greater RAM-based storage, including cache, DRAM, and flash. But storage does not exist in a vacuum. All that data must go somewhere, and this is the job of the I/O channel.
