Ten crucial server attributes
Servers are the workhorses of business IT, but what are their most important features?
Latest from Manek Dubash
AVM Fritz!Box 7590 review: Flagship wireless router with VDSL supervectoring and MU-MIMO
The Fritz!Box 7590's ease of use places it at or near the top of the list of broadband routers for anyone seeking a fully-featured home/small office networking device.
AVM Fritz!Box 4040, First Take: A fast and reliable dual-band Wi-Fi router
This well-featured wireless router continues AVM's tradition of high-quality hardware and usable software.
Pogoplug
Few devices make it easier to share data on USB-connected drives over the internet, or offer as much functionality for the price. The Pogoplug is also highly extensible, thanks to its open-source software.
Iomega StorCenter ix4-200d
This neat 4-drive NAS box will fit in pretty much anywhere and, if you need the added enterprise-level features, is good value for money.
HP ProCurve 1410-24G
There's nothing not to like about the ProCurve 1410-24G, which will prove a highly useful addition to any SME network that requires a zero-admin device.
Apple nails the service providers
It may not surprise you to know that Apple plays hardball when it negotiates with service providers over the iPhone. It may surprise you to know that Apple doesn't negotiate at all, at least according to an informal discussion I recently had with a representative from a mobile comms provider.
Parallel computing takes a step forward
Is there a shift towards parallelism going on? You could fairly argue that, obviously, with multi-core CPUs and GPUs now standard fare on desktops and in servers, the answer is yes.
Are high-speed disks on the scrapheap?
In blog last year, I had a bit of a pop at SSDs following a failure. I do not as a rule draw general conclusions from specific cases so I didn't assume that SSDs were bad, although there's certainly a warning to be gleaned from the sudden failure I experienced.
Are we in a datacentre building bubble?
Big data is back on the agenda of enterprises, according to a new survey released by Oracle, the eponymous database company. The survey of 949 datacentre managers in Europe and the Middle East was commissioned from analyst firm Quocirca and suggests that datacentres are running out of space for data -- fast.