Perhaps the previous discussion of spindles left you exhausted, imagining a spindly-legged centipede of a storage system, trying and failing to run on stilts. The Rule of Spindles would be the end of the story were it not for the second horseman: Cache. He stands in front of the spindles, quickly dispatching requests using solid state memory rather than spinning disks. Cache also acts as a buffer, allowing writes to queue up without forcing the requesters to wait in line.
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How To Make TimThumb Play Nicely With TanTan’s WordPress S3 Plugin
I’m loving the Woo theme for this blog, and especially love that they integrated the cool TimThumb script to automatically resize thumbnails for the main page. But everything stopped working when I added TanTan’s Wordpress-S3 plugin to store my images on Amazon’s servers. Luckily, I found a fix!
Review: DroboPro FS is Data Robotics SMB NAS
Data Robotics today launched their sixth product, the business-oriented DroboPro FS file server. Combining the 8-drive chassis from the direct-attached DroboPro with the Linux-based file server engine fro the Drobo FS, the DroboPro FS (or “Pro FS” for short) gives small businesses and remote offices a simple networked location for their shared files. Although it is a bit more expensive than some of the competition, the Pro FS promises to be as easy to set up, use, and grow as previous devices from Data Robotics.
Stephen’s HP Product Line Decoder Ring
HP has always been an alphabet soup company, assigning just about every item in their bewildering array of products a unique product number. Like Mercedes-Benz cars, even the product names are a mix of letters and numbers that can be off-putting to browsers. Now that they have grown to supersize proportions through internal expansion and acquisition, just about everyone outside the company seems to have trouble decoding the product line, so I decided to take a stab at decoding the enterprise lineup in plain english.
Review: DefaultCase, The 1¢ iPhone Case
You know what they say about things that sound too good to be true. But when your friends start getting excited, it’s harder to ignore a deal. Such was the case (if you pardon the pun) with DefaultCase, the company selling iPhone cases for a penny. I decided it was worth my time and small change to investigate the claims of this curious product. My summary: DefaultCase cases are easily worth 1¢, but probably not the $4 you have to pay to get one.
