Hardware

The original Asus Eee PC took the hardware world by storm. Small, lightweight, inexpensive, yet running a full-fledged OS, this tiny device offered laptop capabilities at near-PDA pricing. Asus has since expanded its Eee PC line with models of varying capabilities, and competing devices are now arriving from other manufacturers, including Acer, Dell, HP, and MSI, among others. Collectively, these devices have come to be called "netbooks."

While your current digital camera may be OK for ordinary photos and videos, do you have an underwater camcorder to capture your kids swimming with dolphins or to take snapshots of those beautiful coral reefs that you're snorkeling through?

Web-based applications and products like Apple's iTunes have made it easy to turn a laptop or a desktop into a music player. At the same time, thousands of radio stations are re-broadcasting their audio over the Internet to anyone who wants to listen. But what if you want to listen to, say, modern jazz from Mali or pop from Paris without dragging around a laptop? Enter the Internet radio: an appliance that looks like a radio and has an antenna -- but connects over Wi-Fi to the Internet, and streams audio to speakers.

Hewlett-Packard's 2133 Mini-Note may end up as the premium choice among the entire mini-laptop, or netbook, category of devices announced so far.

It often takes high-tech vendors three tries to get a product right. Microsoft is the best example of this rule of three. (Think of how buggy and insecure Windows XP was until 1Service Pack 2 came out. Upstart mini-laptop maker Asustek Computer, it turns out, is another.

Recently, Western Digital has come to market with three drives aimed at increasing the performance of both 2.5- and 3.5-in. drives: the Caviar Black, the Scorpio Black and the VelociRaptor. Nothing about them speaks to "green power." Rather, the "black" lineup is aimed at enthusiasts who want performance and let their power supplies be damned if they can't handle the load.

There's no such thing as too much protection for your valuable files. Although external hard drives can provide backup copies of files on your hard drive, what if you use external drives for primary storage? Sure, you can use yet another external backup drive, but a better solution might be a RAID array with two drives. Western Digital offers such a system with its new My Book Mirror Edition ($AUD699).

These days, you never know what connections you'll need to add to an older system -- or, for that matter, to a new one. (How many ports does that Macbook Air have again?)

Cisco take note: Juniper's new EX 4200 switch not only fills a hole in a leading competitor's product line, but also represents a credible alternative for enterprise access switching.

There are enough smartphone choices to make you dizzy. Yet in the business world, it arguably comes down to RIM's BlackBerry and select Windows Mobile-based devices -- with the strong possibility of Apple's 3G iPhone stealing some of their thunder.

Taiwan's Asustek Computer (Asus), the leader of the mini-notebook category due to its early launch of the Eee PC, launched two new models of the family last month, the 901 and 1000, the first Eee PCs that use Intel's Atom microprocessor.

Solid-state drives (SSDs) have been around for many years. Their high cost, however, has limited their deployment to special environments, such as the military, where their rugged, shock-resilient design, coupled with extremely fast performance, justifies the expense.

The SilverBack folks introduced us to Servprise, a young company headed by a young CEO. But for all its youth, the Servprise WebReboot product line addresses an old sore spot in datacenters far and wide: Namely, the need to safely reboot server hardware via remote access. Typical server rebooting solutions, even from companies as experienced as APC, generally involve power cycling. That makes for messy reboots at the OS level and unsafe power outages at the hardware level. The WebReboot solution is literally like pushing the server's power button, allowing for pillow-soft power downs.

One of the most important vendors behind our project's success brought no hardware to the party at all. SilverBack Migrations Solutions, based in the US, is a datacenter build-out and migration consultancy staffed entirely by large-stomached ex-corporate IT and facilities geeks. You may recall that, in the main part of this story (see "Five lessons of a datacenter overhaul"), we lamented our inadequate planning and stretched-thin human resources. Both of these are common problems for a project of this scope, and they are exactly the issues that a company like SilverBack can go a long way to mitigate.

It's funny. Sometimes the products that have the greatest impact are the most difficult to write about because they simply work. That's the case with Universal Electric's Starline Track Busway, a straightforward solution that takes an impressive leap forward in the basic task of providing electrical power to the equipment in the server room.