by Michael Sheehan on February 1, 2012
in Consumer Electronics, Fix It, Gadgets, General, Hardware, how to, HTD Tech Tip, Opinion, Review, video
I have an Ultrabook and a MacBook Air and my non-SSD traditional laptop is getting jealous. It told me that it wants to be more like them, faster booting up and able to launch applications more quickly. “Why can’t I be like those super slim laptops you are always using?” it always asks me. Obviously there is no way for it to compete from a weight or thin-ness perspective, and since there was already a 500 GB hard driving powering it, I could replace that drive with an expensive SSD (Solid State Drive). A 500 GB SSD would cost upwards of $500, which would be more than 1/2 the cost of the laptop. If I went with a smaller drive, I would have to ditch some of my data or applications on the drive – that doesn’t sound that much of an upgrade to me.
That is where the new Seagate Momentus XT SSHD comes into play. If you were reading carefully, you saw that this is NOT an SSD drive, there is an added “H” in there which stands for Hybrid. In my mind, hybrid means the best of both worlds. In the case of the Seagate drive, you get near-SSD performance, but with the capacity and price of a traditional hard drive. That is a hard bargain to beat.
Seagate kindly gave me a 750 GB Momentus XT SSHD to replace the stock 500GB Western Digital drive in my Acer Aspire Timeline X. A side note here, the Acer Timeline is a stellar laptop with an incredible battery life, so I was hoping that after this upgrade, it would be even more useful!
But I’m always a skeptic when it comes to a “flashy” name like hybrid SSD (sorry, I couldn’t resist that one). The advantages of SSD is that they are flash-based/solid state drives that don’t have any moving parts, unlike traditional hard drives. You can get traditional hard drives that spin at 5400 RPM or 7200 RPM and that have larger cache sizes (16 MB or 32 MB). The larger the cache, the better as the drive will store blocks of data into the cache and be able to send that data to the computer – the more data it can send, the faster is can move the data.
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Cloud computing can be very confusing. It can be abstractly discussed but also detailed to intricate levels. A few years ago, part of the reason why people weren’t adopting cloud computing was because they simply didn’t understand it and what it could do for them. And, a few years ago, the technology and services were relatively new and not as built-out and established as they are now.
In my previous posts of this series, I talked about what I thought would come in 2012 for cloud computing, I debunked a few common misstatements about the cloud and, I listed out some ways to make cloud computing work better for people. With this article, I’m going to break down some of the different types of clouds and explain how they might be used.
Because the cloud is relatively new to many businesses and individuals, I typically describe and explain it more as a generalist than a technologist. If you get into the weeds too quickly, you can frequently lose your audience. That is not my goal in this article. If you want to get into the geek speak about which hypervisor you should look for (hint: it doesn’t really matter), what type of I/O performance should you be achieving or how to configure a Cassandra DB cluster that spans multiple data centers with real-time replication, you aren’t going to find that here. I like to keep things moderately simple so that more people can understand and hopefully gain insights into why cloud computing might be the right choice for them.
This list is not complete, but should provide you with some of the most prevalent clouds out there. You, of course, have the daunting task of trying to decide which one works best for your business or personal needs. [click to continue…]
by Michael Sheehan on January 19, 2012
in auto, Cast of Dads, Consumer Electronics, Family, Ford, Gadgets, General, Hardware, Opinion, Review, Sony, video
A few months ago, Sony and Ford Motors invited the Cast of Dads out to the East Coast to participate in a variety of events, one of them was driving a 2011 Ford Explorer (note, link is for the 2012 model) from Boston to NYC. Unfortunately, I was not able to attend the event, and boy was I jealous. Part of my envy came from the fact that I couldn’t drive the Ford Explorer (you can read more about the excursion over at the Cast of Dads). Luckily, over the 2011 holidays, I did have the pleasure of getting behind the wheel of the 2011 Ford Explorer for a road trip to and from Los Angeles from the San Francisco Bay Area.
I’m pretty familiar with Ford and their push to enable technology behind the wheel. I have test driven the Ford Flex and the Lincoln MKX (which is essentially quite similar to the Ford Edge). But being able to experience the Explorer first hand was pretty important to me since it has been a long running model for Ford since 1990.
Image source: Wikipedia.com
Well, we are already in 2012 now, so how does the 2011 Ford Explorer stack up? Pretty darn well. It has plenty of technology to make a gadget-drooling dad happy as I barreled down the super boring stretch of the I-5. (If you haven’t driving the I-5 ever, you definitely aren’t in for any type of treat. It’s really boring and at times your auto is filled with the lovely stench of cow manure as you pass the cattle farms – you can also almost take a nap without turning the wheel as the I-5 seems to stretch on indefinitely.)
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So you have heard about cloud computing but are not really sure what you can do with it. Or maybe, your only exposure to the cloud is what you have seen in ads or heard in the media. Let me tell you, what you see on TV is only a fraction of the cloud’s true power. I’m obviously a bit biased, as I work for a cloud infrastructure provider. But that also gives me the ability to really focus in on use cases that seem to be popular this day and age.
As I wrote in my previous article, there are some things that the cloud definitely is not. And, I would like to add that it is definitely not some sort of magical concoction that deploys and repairs itself. Cloud computing, just like traditional hosting, can have issues or outages if not approached and worked with properly. Think of it this way, if you were a football coach, you wouldn’t use your playbook at a baseball game, right? Obviously not. When working with the cloud, you need to design and build specifically for the cloud in order to take advantages of its capabilities and strengths.
With this article, I want to provide some ideas on ways to make cloud computing work for you. That is to say, some best practice suggestions and implementation ideas that can get you down the road toward success. The most important thing to remember when embarking on a cloud adventure is to know that no two cloud are the same. So if someone is trying to sell one a “one size fits all” type of solution, you might want to consider a different vendors.
1) Choose the Right Cloud Layer – In my previous article, I briefly outlined the distinct layers of cloud computing: Application, Platform and Infrastructure. When you are thinking about adopting a cloud strategy, you need to be sure that you select the right layer for your architecture as they can be dramatically different. Even within the same layers there are nuances that can change the direction of your IT rollout. Without completely rehashing the previous article, you need to decide what your business needs. Is it merely that you want to have a shared network drive for backups, document storage, remote access and disaster recovery – a cloud storage, if you will? You are most likely looking at a cloud application like Dropbox or Box.net. On the other extreme is the infrastructure side where you can essentially build that cloud storage example above yourself as a business model or for your enterprise, using a variety of infrastructure components like load balancers, servers, firewalls, storage and other appliances. The infrastructure side provide flexibility and a higher degree of control while on the application side, you get a “pre-packaged” solution that, most likely, will not be tailored exactly to your needs. And right in between these two is the platform layer, where you get more flexibility than the application side, but less than the infrastructure side and you only have access to a framework like .NET or Ruby, for example. But, the underlying infrastructure (e.g., patching, distribution of compute, etc.) is managed for you. So figure out what you really need and how you will use it.
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