data

Judging by the heavy interest in last week's look at Google's previously secret server and data center design, I thought it would be useful to note that Google has now put much of the information on YouTube.

The disclosures came at a Google-sponsored conference on data center efficiency, which boils down to getting the most computing done with the least electrical power. The idea is core to Google's operations: the company operates at tremendous scale, tries to minimize its harm to the environment, and has a strong financial incentive to keep its costs low.

There are a number of videos from the conference online, starting with the tour of a Google data center. Google's servers, which the company itself designs, are packed 1,160 at a time into shipping containers that form a basic, modular unit of computing.

Also worth a look is the tour of Google's water treatment facility. Google uses water to cool the hot air the servers produce. Most Google data centers use chillers to cool the water by refrigeration, but one data center in Belgium is experimenting with the use only of the less power-hungry evaporative cooling.

Finally, Google published the proceedings of the conference itself--part one, part two, and part three. … Read more

I reviewed the Drobo awhile ago and was very impressed with Data Robotics' proprietary BeyondRAID technology used in the device.

Basically, it lets you mix hard drives of any capacity together into a volume that's well-balanced between the largest possible amount of storage and maximum data redundancy. While the Drobo's performance didn't meet our expectations, its technology offers a lot of potential.

Data Robotics on Tuesday expanded that potential into an all new product for the business environment, the DroboPro.

This is the company's first foray into the business sector, and it calls the DroboPro the "business class storage array that manages itself."

Much like the Drobo, the DroboPro also allows for mixing hard drives of different capacities, and you can hot-swap any of them without having to restart or interrupt the data access. This translates into no-downtime expansion of the storage volume. Moreover, unlike the Drobo, the DroboPro now includes protection against multiple concurrent drive failures.

While the Drobo is a pure external direct attach storage (DAS) device with USB 2.0 and FireWire 800 connections, the DroboPro also includes the iSCSI interface (via a Gigabit Ethernet connection). This makes the DroboPro one of a few hybrid devices that support both network attached storage and DAS. As you need to buy the DroboShare to make the Drobo work with a network, personally, I think the addition of the network port is the most welcome feature of the DroboPro.… Read more

In just two weeks, the annual RSA Conference takes place in San Francisco. What can we expect as the "hot topics" at this annual security love fest? I'm sure there will be plenty of buzz about securing virtual servers and cloud computing infrastructure, but this topic will likely focus on blue sky vision describing the safeguards we will need in 2012 or so. Rather than this hyperbole, I am looking forward to discussions focused on the marriage of identity and security.

Haven't these two areas been linked forever? Well, yes and no. Security folks think of … Read more

Earlier Friday, we brought you news that AT&T had made some fairly narrowing changes to its terms-of-use policies for wireless data. One such change would prohibit users from watching non-AT&T video services, such as Hulu, on their AT&T devices. Users around the Internet, of course, didn't much care for the change.

Since the story broke, though, AT&T has sent out a message to blogs and news outlets saying that the video-streaming portion was an error that has been deleted. Great for you, AT&T. But a quick check shows that … Read more

DataViz announced on Thursday that it is now offering Documents to Go Standard Edition version 1.0 and a beta version of RoadSync through the Android Market. The two applications will give T-Mobile G1 and HTC Magic owners the capability, for the first time, to work with Microsoft Office documents and get support for Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync.

Documents to Go has long been available for Windows Mobile and Palm devices, but now Android users can finally have the capability of viewing, editing, and creating Word and Excel documents through the productivity suite. The suite's editing capabilities are vast, including … Read more

Encrypting and decrypting important files is a cinch thanks to this program's easy-to-navigate user interface. Users of all skill levels will appreciate its solid performance. However, you'll need to obtain a trial key to extend the trial period from a short 10 days to the standard 30.

Ashampoo Magical Security's user interface is extremely basic, but functional. A tree-menu on the left side of the window displays your files and folders for easy browsing. Command buttons at the top of the window offer different means of encrypting and decrypting files. You can encrypt files as self-decrypting EXE … Read more

I'm a confirmed pack rat. I've got stacks of old utility-bill statements dating back to the 1980s. Alongside the boxes of ancient paper records in our attic are about a half dozen old PCs. The jewel of my "collection" is an original 60-MHz Pentium PC, complete with the famous floating-point bug. Well, it was famous in 1994.

One benefit of holding onto these PC relics is not worrying about their data falling into the wrong hands. (OK, I suppose a determined thief could break into our attic and walk off with the computer antiques, but I … Read more

Dell beat IBM to the PR punch, but does it really have the technology jobs to beat Big Blue in the server competition?

On Wednesday, Dell made a splash with a massive introduction of servers, workstations, storage arrays, and yes, even services. The message to corporate IT buyers was that yes, Dell understood their needs and could supply a variety of sophisticated hardware and software for the modern data center.

Has Michael Dell finally figured things out? Is this is the start of a dramatic assault on what has been the near-exclusive preserve of Hewlett-Packard and IBM? I wish him … Read more