Stories by: Paul Venezia

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Small business storage finds a new gear 16 February, 2010 05:29

I continue to be very impressed with Synology's small business storage products, and the new DS1010+ is no exception. In fact, it elevates my opinion even more. This feature-packed, speedy, and remarkably affordable five-bay storage array supports just about every file sharing protocol available, can scale up to 20TB of raw storage, can be expanded on the fly, and has a great GUI. It can be purchased for $1,750 with 5TB of raw storage, and it can push 100MBps streaming writes and 110MBps streaming reads. Sure, it's not an enterprise-class device, but look at the price. What's not to love?
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HTC Droid Eris, the under-Droid 11 November, 2009 06:05

It's apparently not common knowledge that there are actually two Droids: the Motorola Droid and the HTC Droid Eris. They're both Android-based phones, but significantly different in form and firmware. The Motorola Droid is a slider phone with a large screen and a physical keyboard that runs Android 2.0. The Droid Eris is cheaper, with a slower CPU and no dedicated GPU, but it's also far slicker than the Motorola Droid.
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Cisco UCS wows 11 November, 2009 05:55

Revolutionary. Cutting edge. State of the art. These are words and phrases that are bandied around so very many products in the IT field that they become useless, bland, expected. The truth is that truly revolutionary products are few and far between. That said, Cisco's Unified Computing System fits the bill.
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Citrix XenApp 5 Feature Pack 2 01 October, 2009 10:13

The leader in application virtualization shows us why with the addition of VM-hosted applications, plus usability and manageability enhancements, in XenApp 5 Feature Pack 2
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The cheat sheet for small business networks 29 September, 2009 08:57

It's a great time to set up a small business. The Web gives even the littlest operation enormous reach, while vendors now sell small-business technology that delivers unbelievable bang for the buck.
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Review: Citrix XenApp 5 extends the reach 23 September, 2009 03:53

Used to be, when you thought of thin client computing, you had only two choices: Microsoft Terminal Services and Citrix MetaFrame. Microsoft Terminal Services sufficed for smaller installations, while Citrix MetaFrame was the pick for big jobs, offering many enterprise-level features, including the ICA protocol, which is still a far better transport than RDP.
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Sun Fire X2270 server 24 August, 2009 13:18

The new Sun Fire X2270 and Sun Fire X4270 servers are the fastest x64 servers Sun has ever produced.
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HP BladeSystem Matrix 07 July, 2009 15:50

During the Big Dig, the city of Boston erected a sign saying, "Rome wasn't built in a day. If it was, we would have hired their contractor." That's a good way to describe the general state of affairs regarding the ideal of divorcing services from hardware and pushing server management away from the physical layer.
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Are sealed-in laptop batteries a good idea? 30 June, 2009 13:40

When Apple introduced its new MacBooks recently, it touted a doubled battery life -- but noted that the laptops' batteries were sealed into the case, not user-swappable as is the norm on laptops.
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VMware vSphere 4 25 May, 2009 12:15

VMware vSphere 4, out today, is a big release, with plenty of new features and changes, but it's not your run-of-the-mill major update. The new features, which range from VM clustering to agentless VM backup, are especially significant in that they may mark the moment when virtualisation shifted from the effort to provide a stable replica of a traditional infrastructure to significantly enhancing the capabilities of a virtual environment.
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VMware View 3.0 21 April, 2009 10:50

VMware's VDI solution makes virtual desktops real, but not particularly easy to manage