iPad Pro

Ranting and Raving About the 2018 iPad Pro

November 11, 2018 by Stephen Leave a Comment

I remain enthusiastic about the iPad Pro, despite getting a scratched screen and my concerns about durability. It’s a worthy successor to the original and offers enough improvements that I’d recommend the upgrade for just about anyone who uses their iPad for serious work. It’s still not yet a laptop replacement, but this is due more to a lack of desktop-class software for iOS than anything in Apple’s control.

The 2018 iPad Pro is a Beast!

November 9, 2018 by Stephen 1 Comment

The third-generation iPad Pro is a great machine but also a bellwether of change at Apple. It will be very hard for the rest of the mobile and client computing industry to keep up with this kind of progress!

Apple Packs PCIe SSD Alongside PC-Fast CPU and Graphics in iPhone 6s and iPad Pro

September 28, 2015 by Stephen 3 Comments

We all knew that the iPhone 6s and iPad pro would boast CPU and graphics performance to challenge mainstream PC’s, but it has now been revealed that the storage layer packs revolutionary NVMe/PCIe connectivity and performance. Although the iPhone 6s doesn’t need this kind of performance, the forthcoming iPad Pro ought to rock!

GPS Time Rollover Failures Keep Happening (But They’re Almost Done)

This is week “1111111111” in the GPS system. Tomorrow morning it will roll over to week “0000000000”. How well will various systems handle this change? Not well, judging by what we’ve seen so far!

Go Get a ProtonMail Account and Protect Your Online Life!

It’s an easy decision: Get a free ProtonMail account and use that as your verification address for important financial and social media accounts. Keep using whatever email account you like for regular communication, but don’t mix security and communication!

United Boeing 787 Dreamliner: Butt-In-Seat Economy Plus Review!

November 13, 2012

Most of my readers know that I love getting my hands on the latest high-tech products. But, last week, I spent a few hours insideï»¿ one of the latest and greatest products on earth: United’s latest Boeing 787 “Dreamliner” composite jet! Here’s my “butt-in-seat” review!

The Rack Endgame: A New Storage Architecture For the Data Center

September 3, 2014

Top-of-rack flash and bottom-of-rack disk makes a ton of sense in a world of virtualized, distributed storage. It fits with enterprise paradigms yet delivers real architectural change that could “move the needle” in a way that no centralized shared storage system ever will. SAN and NAS aren’t going away immediately, but this new storage architecture will be an attractive next-generation direction!

The Fat Middle: Today’s Enterprise Storage Array

August 31, 2014

Ask any project manager if it’s possible to deliver something that is fast, good, and cheap, and they’ll laugh. The phenomenon known as the Iron Triangle limits just about everything in the world from meeting all three conflicting requirements. Yet, for the last two decades, enterprise storage array vendors have been trying to deliver just this. How’s that working out?

Why I Am Biased Against FCoE

October 21, 2011

I am biased against FCoE because it’s too new to be blithely and broadly recommended for production enterprise use. That’s all. Yes, the standards are standardized and there are products extant. But that’s not enough for me.

Deduplication Coming to Primary Storage

September 16, 2008

Although deduplication of storage is nothing new, with Data Domain and other making hay with the technique for years, it has never been ready for prime time – reduction of active primary storage applications like email and databases. Instead, deduplication has been relegated to second- or third-tier status, deduplicating archives and backup data. But change is in the air, and deduplication vendors are starting to bustle towards the bright lights of primary storage.

Generation 3 drobo: Fall In Love All Over Again

April 9, 2015

I remain a huge fan of drobo generally, and the third-generation drobo remains the best choice for home storage. It’s the perfect storage device for the long haul, and the performance improvements make it a no-brainer. Get one.

Scaling Storage In Conventional Arrays

November 19, 2013

It is amazing that something as simple-sounding as making an array get bigger can be so complex, yet scaling storage is notoriously difficult. Our storage protocols just werenâ€™t designed with scaling in mind, and they lack the flexibility needed to dynamically address multiple nodes. So my hat is off to these companies and others who have come up with clever ways to maintain compatibility while scaling out beyond the bounds of a single storage array.

The Rack Endgame: Converged Infrastructure and Disaggregation

September 19, 2014

As Iâ€™ve written about what Iâ€™m calling the â€œRack Endgameâ€, the specter of converged infrastructure hasnâ€™t been far from my thoughts. As others have pointed out, disaggregation of servers, networks, and storage doesnâ€™t require a rack-sized stack; it can exist in a rack-mountable chassis and is already on sale!