Technology Ramblings

One the newest standards in Wireless is the 802.11ac standard.  The successor to 802.11n it promises to bring speeds up to 2.6Gbps over the 5Ghz WiFi bands. So sounds great - 2.6Gbps over wireless.  And every wireless vendor on the planet has 802.11ac offerings.   You'll notice a range of available models with AC in the name along with a number from 600 to 3200.  That number represents the published total Mbps rating across all bands. Prices can range from around $90 for an AC1200 all the way up to $250 or more for an AC3200 model.    What differentiates the models is the number of concurrent streams it can support to a single end-point.  So for example an AC1200 model supports a 2 antenna access point (AP) and a dual antenna endpoint at 80Mhz wide channel up to 867Mbps at 5Ghz. An AC3200 device supports 2 antenna AP and dual antenna endpoints with a 160Mhz wide channel so 1.3Gbps at 5Ghz + another 1.3Gbps using the new 60Ghz bands - also ...

I've been involved in networking computers since the middle 80s.  Back then it was the early versions of a solution called Ethernet from a company called 3Com.   Over the years I've watched the explosive growth of this industry and the introduction of first the Hub, then the router and then the switch.   By 2006 I was Sr. Director of Networking and Telecommunications for Intuit running a large multi-site shop with over 2500 network devices and a staff of 125. Today most data center networks are defined by the Access, Aggregation and Core concept introduced by Cisco.  With this concept, individual servers connected to an Access or Top of Rack (TOR) switch.  The TOR switches consolidated to an End of Row (EOR) Aggregation switch which then consolidated to a large redundant set of Core switches.  Using this model Cisco has become the 900 pound gorilla in the market with some 70%+ market share. Along with this basic topology was concepts like Spanning Tree ...

For nearly 25 years now - the Intel based x86 server platform has been the basis for modern distributed computing.    From the early Compaq System Pro in 1989 and Proliant in 1992 the concept of combining a single, dual or quad processor motherboard along with a drive bay capable of supporting pluggable hard drives with RAID and dual power supplies became the base platform for the growth of operating systems like Windows Server and Linux. By the late 90's as the numbers of these servers exploded and the storage requirements started to grow beyond the capacity of of the drive bays - there was a movement to consolidate storage onto large scale arrays and create a storage area network (SAN) to provide access from servers to those arrays.    All throughout the last decade the SAN grew in popularity and customers spent millions on the arrays and the associated networking gear.  The challenge was - SANs are expensive - easily double and triple the cost of the sa...

It has been recently reported that MS is looking to acquire a company called Acompli.   Acompli is the developer of a mobile email, calendaring and contacts app and backend services for iOS and Android.   Think of it as Outlook for mobile that supports Office365, Gmail, Outlook.com, DropBox, OneDrive and more. http://www.acompli.com Acompli addresses one of the challenges I've felt about modern mobile devices and that is the separate Mail, Calendar and Contact apps that every Mobile OS has.  It's not that seperate apps are necessarily bad, but for the modern corporate user with multiple email accounts, having a more unifying experience is great.... When MS released Office for iPad back in March of this year, one of things that I asked was why no Outlook.   For many Corporate users, that is the one app that they actually spend more time in than Word or Excel or Powerpoint - so why not include it ?   Especially when Outlook is typically the primary gateway...

Normally I write about home computing, mobile and home automation subjects. But in real life I am a pre-sales architect for the Enterprise Solutions Group @ Dell in the Healthcare vertical.  That means I spend my days developing solutions involving hundreds if not thousands of servers, petabytes of storage and all the networking that makes it all work.    With the advent of server virtualization, many of the traditional approaches to compute, network and storage solutions are being challenged.   One of those challenges is the concept of converged infrastructure.    Converged Infrastructure is the approach of taking two or more pieces of compute, network or storage components and integrating them in some fashion to create a single manageable entity.    In recent years companies like VCE - the joint partnership between Cisco, EMC and VMware - have created rack sized product offerings that attempt to create that single managed entity. ...

So I starting thinking about a replacement for my 5 year old HP Pavilion e9270 CTO desktop.  I bought this from HP back on 12/1/2009 for about $1,220. This device has been my primary computer and sports a 1st Gen Clarkdale Core i7 920 Proc - 8Gb of RAM P55 Express Chipset, a Samsung 830 series 256GB SSD and Seagate 3TB 7200 RPM HDD.  It also has a ATI Radeon 4850 GPU with 1024Mb RAM.   The Motherboard itself is actually an MSI MS7613 Mini-ATX with a 450W Power supply. I figured okay we're now at 4th Gen Core family - so maybe I should see how much more performance the new Haswell based designs may get me and for how much. So from my first round of due diligence the answer is not as much as you'd think... So let take a look at my current system.. The Intel Core i-7 920 is a 4 Core, 8 Thread proc running at 2.67Ghz with 8M Smart Cache and 4.8 GT/s DMI and supports up to 24GB of DDR3 800/1066 RAM and 25.6 GB/s Throughput.  But it is a bit of a power hog @...

So I recently decided to upgrade my granddaughter's PC.  She had been using an 9 year old Dell Dimension 9100 I bought way back in 2005.  That device over the years went from being my primary computer to a Home Server to a VM Host and finally to my granddaughter.  I decided the stick with the desktop format versus and All-in-One (AIO) or laptop.  My granddaughter already uses an iPad2 as her "tablet" device and while I like the AIO format and own an HP TouchSmart device circa 2007 - I wanted something a little easier to upgrade and less expensive.  It always surprises me the premium for AIO considering the components used. So after some due diligence I bought a Dell Inspiron 3647 Small Form Factor (SFF) desktop and new 22" 16:9 HD monitor.  All in it cost me less than $500.  That included an 4th Gen Core i3 processor with 3M of L2 Cache on H81 chipset running at 3.5Ghz, 4GB of RAM, Intel 4600 Graphics and a 1TB 7200 RPM HDD - Running Wind...

So writing this post from Windows 10 Tech Preview newest build 9879.  This is the second update to W10 since the initial release.  From the standpoint of using a preview build of an OS, Windows 10 has proved itself to be stable and fast.  But in my opinion not any more or less stable and fast than Windows 8.1 update 1 that I run on the same machine. Versus running W10 in a VM - I decided to go ahead and dual boot my machine to get a more day-to-day feel.   Here are my thoughts in terms of using W10.. It feels like Windows 7 with an updated UI and Start Menu.  Not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing.   And here's why... With the elimination of the Modern UI for desktop computers, the biggest thing I noticed is that I rarely run the modern apps.  Since they are part of the Start Menu and Live Tile updated, when I want a quick glace of news, weather, finance, etc, you just click on Start and take a quick look.  It is sli...

On November 11th, MS is going to announce their first Lumia Phone.  The preliminary indications are that this will be a Dual-SIM phone with a lower end SnapDragon 400 Processor with 1280 x 720 screen, 1Gb RAM and 8Gb storage + SD expansion. So who is this phone for ?   Certainly not the US market.   The US carriers really don't like Dual-SIM phones and while you can go buy some from companies like BLU - they are rare. Also why would MS release yet another low end phone.  This year the 630/635, 735 and 830 were released.  The 635 - of which I own 2 - where the direct upgrade path for the 520/521.   The 735 while a nice phone is not available on any carrier in the US and may only be available on Verizon sometime in early 2015 and the 830 from the initial reviews appears to be a very overpriced device with relatively unimpressive specs and only available from AT&T. So my belief here is that this phone will be an EU or Asian phone and will probab...