The Latitude Z on wireless charging station, and wireless dock adapter on the right.
(Credit: Erica Ogg/CNET)That Dell is releasing a new laptop for business customers is the opposite of surprising. But the fact that it contains notable features not seen in any other laptops certainly is.
Most everything about the new Latitude Z is expected: It's yet another very thin notebook (a metric which PC manufacturers keep using to try to one-up each other), with a different kind of exterior finish (soft-touch, in this case), and comes in a black cherry. It measures 16 inches across, and is 14 millimeters thin at its most narrow point.
But you probably wouldn't guess that the Latitude Z charges wirelessly. And as far as we can tell, it's the first laptop to do so. Surprised that this is coming from Dell? You're not alone.
The wireless charging is handled elegantly enough. An inductive pad that's built into a laptop stand can accomplish a full recharge in "about the same amount of time" as a standard-issue cabled charger, according to Dell. While smartphone maker Palm has a similar (albeit smaller) wireless charging system for the Pre, and companies like Visteon and Wild Charge have debuted wireless charging accessories for phones, no PC maker has incorporated the idea until now.
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(Credit:
Western Digital)
Western Digital has been busy customizing its hard drives.
A month ago, the company introduced what it called the first green 2TB enterprise hard drive aimed at data centers. Now it's making another drive specifically for audio and video applications, and also the surveillance market.
The company announced Tuesday the new 2TB WD AV-GP. It incorporates Western Digital's AV Intelligent Drive Technology, which makes it a good choice for AV applications such as DVRs, media centers, media servers, and surveillance video recording.
The drive is designed to better withstand high temperatures for long periods of time while remaining quiet during operation. The new drive's features also include:
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To boldly go in a top-down perspective.
(Credit: Paramount Digital Entertainment)Haven't had enough of your "Star Trek" fix now that the J.J. Abrams reboot has sent America into a Trek frenzy? Has the week rolled around only to have you cry out in despair, "more, more?" Well, Paramount Digital Entertainment is there for your desperate cries. Its movie-based multiplayer shooter, Star Trek: D-A-C, hits Xbox Live Arcade Wednesday, exclusively for the 360, costing you a cool-as-Spock 800 points.
What does D-A-C mean? We don't know. And you don't get to know that until you play through the game (we're serious). Set across a series of self-contained top-down arenas, you pilot the U.S.S. Enterprise (or one of five other ships, two more Federation and three Romulan) in one of three different battle games along with Trek-minded others on Xbox Live. Imagine if Geometry Wars and Star Control II had a child, and that child was half-Romulan.
No, this game does not have local multiplayer, making this an online-only affair (which, considering you've downloaded this on Xbox Live Arcade, shouldn't be too much of a problem). Matches can be arranged between two teams with six players each in three different game modes: Deathmatch, Assault (a base-capturing game), and Conquest (a turn-based attack/defend mission). Gameplay is smooth and full of parallax as you glide over vast 3D planets and asteroid belts, with dual-stick controls feeling much like Geometry Wars. The size, speed and weapon variations across ships was very Star Control II - but, unfortunately, you only have two races represented here, and three ship types (Flagship, Fighter, and Bomber).
Ideally, some future game will have a host of races and ships. Romulan versus Federation just doesn't cut it long-term. But if you want a Trek-infused quick shooter fix with pretty graphics, this only costs as much as movie ticket.
Known for offering one of the biggest wireless mesh networks for regular hot spot users and being the first that brought Wireless-N to the outdoors, Meraki on Monday showed that it can also mean serious business with its new enterprise class wireless local area network (WLAN) solutions.
WLAN is nothing new. Buy a wireless router to set up at home and you have one. However, it's a lot more complicated and expensive when it comes to the enterprise-class WLAN, where both large coverage and high performance are needed.
What Meraki introduced offers just that, plus lower price points. For less than $3,000, you can get a Meraki Enterprise Wireless LAN system that covers an office of approximately 20,000 square feet. The price, of course, increases with the area of coverage. For example, for an area of 500,000 square feet, the price would be up to $75,000. This makes the new solutions work for any business between 50 to 5,000 people.
Meraki's Enterprise Wireless LAN consists of two new Wireless-N access points, including the single radio MR11 and the dual-radio MR14. Both are high-end, high-speed wireless access points with the MR11 having the cap speed of 300 Mbps and the MR14 boasting 600 Mbps. These speeds are significant as most businesses still use the regular 100Mbps wired network.
Other than that, the new WLAN solution is also easy to use, thanks to Meraki's Enterprise Cloud Controller. According to Meraki, setting up an enterprise wireless network can be as simple as plugging in the access points and watching them self-configure over the Internet. Meraki's new solution also offers IT personnel the capability to manage multiple geographically distributed networks from a central location.
Meraki's new enterprise-class products will be available for purchase by June but the company will start taking the preorders as early as May 12.
Western Digital has been using its GreenPower technology in most of its consumer-grade hard drives, including those in the My Book World Edition NAS server and the My Book Mirror Edition external hard drive.
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Western Digital)
The company turned its hard drives' green levels up a notch on Monday with the new WD RE4-GP hard drive. The drive is designed to work best for data center and digital video production facilities.
According to Western Digital, these are the two applications where a big number of hard drives are used and therefore would show a significant improvement in energy savings.
The WD RE4-GP uses Western Digital's next generation of GreenPower technology with IntelliPower, which regulates the spinning speed of the platters and caching algorithms based on usage. This makes it the first hard drive that doesn't have rpm specifications.
The drive also supports IntelliSeek and IntelliPark, which allows for reducing the seek time and intelligently parks the drive head to further reduce power consumption and improve the drive's resistance to shock and vibration.
Unlike other enterprise hard drives that employ the SAS interface, the new WD RE4-GP supports the popular SATA interface, which is used in most consumer hard drives. This means you can also use it in your desktop at home. It comes with a whopping 64MB of cache memory (as opposed to 16MB or less found in most consumer hard drives) and provides 2TB of storage capacity. This is the largest capacity (for now) among enterprise-class hard drives.
According to Western Digital, the WD RE4-GP is also designed with technologies to make it work especially well with RAID configurations and better withstand environments that are prone to constant vibration than other hard drives. The WD RE4-GP's reliability is rated at 1.2 million hours mean time before failure in high-duty cycle environments.
The 2TB WD RE4-GP is available now with the suggested price tag of $329.
ParaScale Cloud Storage's interface.
(Credit: ParaScale)Cloud storage is getting a lot more feasible for the enterprise.
ParaScale, a start-up that develops cloud-storage solutions, announced Monday the availability of its ParaScale Cloud Storage (PCS) software. The software, once installed on any standard Linux platform, enables the server to be linked with others to act as one massive file repository that offers high parallel throughput.
... Read moreThough the new 6Gbps SATA standard that Seagate demonstrated awhile ago hasn't been available in any products yet, if you want to get that speed now, there's another option. But only enterprise customers need apply.
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Hitachi)
Hitachi introduced on Tuesday its second-generation of the 10,000rpm Ultrastar hard drive, the C10K300. The new drive uses a dual-port attached SCSI (SAS) interface that offers data rates up to 6GBps (or about 300MBps), about twice the speed of the previous model. It has average seek times as low as 3.9 milliseconds.
The 2.5-inch drive has a low-power-consumption design with Hitachi's Advanced Power Management that lets the drive deliver an idle power specification of 3.4 watts and 6.1 watts in active operating mode. These specifications are lower than most drives in its class.
The Ultrastar C10K300 also uses halogen-reduced components to support the green computing initiatives getting popular in data centers nowadays. The drive features Hitachi EcoTrac classification, meaning it belongs in a category of products that minimize environmental impact in the areas of product design, manufacturing, operation, and disposal.
The new 10,000rpm Ultrastar C10K300 is available now in 147GB and 300GB capacities. Their cost has not yet been disclosed.
After some time focusing on 2.5-inch hard drives and sort of neglecting the 3.5-inch segment, Seagate announced on Tuesday its new Cheetah 15K.7 and Cheetah NS.2 hard drives.
These high-speed drives are geared toward enterprise storage environments by offering speed, capacity, and reliability, along with low power consumption.
The inside of a Cheetah hard drive from Seagate. The line has just gotten a boost.
(Credit: Seagate)Both drives offer up to 600GB of storage and feature second-generation PowerTrim technology, which dynamically optimizes drive power consumption at all levels of activity. However, the Cheetah 15K.7 is geared toward the highest possible performance, while the Cheetah NS.2 focuses on power savings. Seagate claims the NS.2 uses upward of 20 percent less energy than its predecessor.
Note that these are high-end enterprise-grade hard drives. In this area, capacity is still much lower than in the consumer sector. Seagate released a 1.5TB SATA hard drive for desktop computers a while ago.
The main differences between the two drives are their spindle speeds and seek time. The 15K.7 spins at 15,000 rpm, while the NS.2 spins at 10,000 rpm; their respective seek time specs are 3.4 and 3.8 milliseconds. Other than that, both feature:
- Capacity : 300GB, 450GB, 600GB
- Interface: 6Gbps SAS-2.0, 4Gbps FC
- Reliability: 0.55 percent AFR / 1.6M hours MTBF
- Cache: 16MB
The Cheetah NS.2 drive is available to customers immediately, while the Cheetah 15K.7 drive is currently available only to OEM vendors and will start shipping in the second quarter of the year. It's unclear how much these drives cost.
I recently blogged about people in Japan getting new Eee Box PCs that came with a virus on their hard drives. Now, the opposite: a new thumb drive that comes with antivirus software.
(Credit:
SanDisk)
SanDisk, a maker of USB flash drives, and security giant McAfee, teamed up Tuesday to announce the SanDisk Cruzer Enterprise. The USB thumb drive comes with antimalware protection from McAfee built in.
SanDisk's Cruzer Enterprise USB flash drives have been known for being thumb drives with mandatory security for corporate users. Now, in addition to preventing data leaks by utilizing advanced hardware-based 256-bit AES encryption and complex passwords, the new thumb drive includes the McAfee Scan Engine, which offers advanced heuristic analysis for comprehensive detection of both known and unknown threats.
The McAfee security protects the thumb drives from infection with an automatic antimalware scan that prohibits file transfers to the secure USB drive when it detects infection on a host PC. The scan engine examines every file saved or copied to the USB flash drive.
The new SanDisk Cruzer Enterprise will be available later this year. Currently it's unclear how much it costs and how much storage it will offer.
Sun Microsystems and Fujitsu have announced a quad-core version of the Sparc64 processor and servers to that will use the chip.
Fujitsu--which manufactures and designs the Sparc64 processor--along with Sun unveiled the M4000, M5000, M8000, and M9000 enterprise servers that use the new quad-core Sparc64 VII chip. The two companies claim the processor delivers 80 percent better performance using 44 percent less power than the previous Sparc64 VI processor.
Sun Sparc road map
(Credit: Sun Microsystems)The Sparc64 VII is made on a more advanced 65-nanometer process than the Sparc64 VI chip, which used a 90nm node.
Sun is no stranger to multicore--putting many processing cores on one chip. Its UltraSparc T2 processor can place up to eight cores on a single piece of silicon. This allows the UltraSparc T2 to run up to 64 threads--parts of a program that can execute independently--or eight threads per core. It's a feat processor giant Intel still hasn't accomplished.
Sparc Enterprise servers using the Sparc64 VII processor are targeted at high-availability, mission-critical enterprise applications, including large-scale databases, data warehousing, and enterprise resource planning.
Current Sparc Enterprise servers can be seamlessly upgraded by swapping out older processors with the new Sparc64 VII chips, the two companies said. Sparc VI and Sparc VII chips can also be mixed and matched within a "single domain."
Pricing and availability information is here.
