www.1001TopWords.com |
Your Business versus Mother Nature
Business Consultants earn hundreds of thousands of dollars every year showing businesses how to improve their productivity. All business consultants in the Information Technology area agree that the biggest threat to business survival is data loss. There are many different data backup solutions available on the Internet today. Unlike years past there are not only different providers but also many different methods of data backup. Some solutions are "on-site" based methods. These include tape drives or other magnetic storage media, DVD-R and CD-R based methods and NAS (network attached storage) methods of creating local (within the LAN) backups of critical data. These methods of data backup are definitely better than nothing, and can provide protection against user error, data corruption, and in some cases even computer theft (that is if the data backup equipment itself isn't also stolen) and many of the other pitfalls associated with digital media. But what about protection against the most powerful of all forces, Mother Nature? Hurricanes, tornados, earthquakes, and other natural disasters are a serious potential threat to the crucial data you have stored within your computer network. Add into the equation the collateral damage of flooding and fire that often comes along with Mother Nature's wrath and you have a recipe for some serious data loss in the unfortunate event that one of these uncommon, but critically devastating, events occur. In most cases your existing backup solution would be useless and would suffer the same peril as your original data. The answer is simple: Have a complete, up-to-date copy of your data stored at a different location. You should back up your data using an offsite data backup service. Offsite data backups allow you to store mission critical digital files in a secure, remote location. When you store data in an offsite location you are doubling the protection of your most import data files and enabling a level of security that even the best on-premises data backup solutions can't provide. Your data is encrypted and backed up over your existing internet connection to a secure server. You can set it up to perform backups at any frequency you wish. You can even set up the system to schedule backups while the office is empty on weekends and evenings, or when the computers are idle for a certain period of time (great for those systems that need to be accessed 24/7 and cannot afford the potential downtime that may be incurred due to backup procedures being run at the time). Mother Nature is a concern for the integrity of your critical data. All smart businesses understand this. Your DATA is your LIFE. Protect it! Harald Anderson is a freelance writer and webmaster for http://www.online-remote-data-backup.com an online backup service. Experience the Digital Peace of Mind that safe, secure, encrypted online data backups can offer. Online Backups
|
RELATED ARTICLES
Electronic Schematics Diagram-The Four Commonly Asked Questions I came across quite a number of questions about electronic circuit schematics diagram. Routing, Routed, and Non-Routable Protocols ROUTING PROTOCOLS A Review of Refurbished HP Laptops HP refurbished laptops can be found on their website hpshopping.com. Just enter "refurbished laptop" into their search field and browse through the current selections. (Note that Hewlett-Packard also owns and distributes Compaq computers.) There you can purchase a quality refurbished laptop for up to 30% off the new retail price. The Top 10 Must-Have Laptop Accessories You've laid out good money for your laptop computer, but you're not done spending just yet. Best DVDs for Your Personal DVD Player When bought personal DVD player, the very next thing to do is purchasing an important DVDs collection with your favourite movies, documentaries, shows, cartoons. Here are few hints before buying. Dell Inspiron 600m Notebook Computer After twelve years of owning desktop computers, I finally opted for a laptop so I would no longer be chained to my desk. After months of research and weighing various makes and models, I settled on the Dell Inspiron 600m Notebook Computer. This particular model has exceeded all of my expectations and at a price that is hundreds of dollars lower than many competing brands. Understanding Transistor Data and Replacement If, for some reason, you can't get an exact replacement for the transistor that you want to replace, you can refer to one of the transistor substitution guides or book, and try to identify a "near replacement". Beware, however. A substitution guide will sometimes list a replacement for your part, even though the two parts are not very similar. The most commonly used transistor substitution guides is the Philips ECG semiconductors Master Replacement Guide. Selecting the right transistor parameters or specifications for the equipment you repair will avoid callbacks from customers. Callbacks or repeated repairs due to wrong transistor substitution will cost you extra money and a waste of time. A Look at Laser Toners Laser toner is the ink for laser printers. It is an extremely fine synthetic powder (usually plastic) packed into a cartridge. You insert the cartridge into your laser printer according to the manufacturer's instructions. When the printer goes to print a page, there are several steps to the process: Facing DVD Software Dilemma? Its Brainlessly Simple 1. Pocket DVD Wizardhttp://www.deprice.com/pocketdvdwizard.htm What is EEPROM ? EEPROM stands for Electrical Erasable Programmable Read Only Memory and also referred to as E²PROM. As the name suggest, an EEPROM can be both erased and programmed with electrical pulses. Since it can be both electrically written into and electrically erased, the EEPROM can be rapidly programmed and erased in circuit for reprogramming without removing them from the circuit board. The Right Way To Discharge Capacitor In Switch Mode Power Supplies Switch mode power supply contain some large filter capacitors that can hold dangerous charges even if the unit has not been used for several days. Typical values of this type of filter capacitor are 220uf 250volt and 330uf 400volt! If you are going to work on the power supply circuits, it's a good idea to discharge that capacitor first. Throw Away The Fax Machine ? A Guide To Online Fax Have you ever felt like throwing the fax machine out the window? Well you may not know it but you can, but not literally please. Sony vs. Olympus: Digital Voice Recorders Digital voice recorders have become increasingly popular over the last few years, as they offer a relatively cheap and reliable alternative to older cassette voice recorders. Digital voice recorders use memory - much like the memory used in your personal pc - to record sound, rather than tape cassettes. Newer recorders tend to have very large memory capacities, despite their small size. A Guide to Refurbished IBM Laptops IBM boasts a very large array of older and newer refurbished laptops on their website ibm.com. Look for "Notebooks: IBM Certified Used Equipment." There you can buy any of dozens of models and variations, for hundreds of dollars less than new models. IBM inspects all of their returned laptops (including the batteries, as with most factory-refurbished laptops), makes sure they up and running at top speed, and repackages them for resale. Laptop Notebook ? Inexpensive Business Laptops Laptop Notebook ? Your Portable Office Expansion Cards Part 3: PCI Express In the first two installments of this series of Tech Tips, we took a look at PCI and AGP, undoubtedly the most common expansion slots in a computer today. With a few key improvements over both of these, PCI Express is destined to replace both and offer a whole new level of computer performance. Special Events Recording in DVD Players Age The proliferation of portable DVD players has dramatically changed the videography approach. Ink Cartridges & Printing - Poor Print Quality Solutions Why are there faint areas or gaps in my print out? The Making of Energy Efficient Datacenters The Crooked E: The Unshredded Truth About Enron is a wonderful movie to watch. It is based on the book, The anatomy of greed, written by a former employee of Enron, Brian Cruver. One interesting thing that comes on our minds is the size of all power companies. They are all huge. We all depend on power for just about everything and yet very rarely do we think about conserving energy. A typical PC for example takes about 135 watts of power. A data center with about a 1000 servers should typically take about 135 x 1000 Watts or 135 Kilowatts and that would just power the computers. This does not include the air-conditioning and lighting. According to to a research paper sponsored by The California Energy Commission in a datacenter about 50% of the total energy consumed is by the servers and about 35% is the air conditioners. Here are some interesting research done in this field - Feeling the heat- An interesting paper by Liebert describing the challengeof effectively managing the heat dissipation in datacenters. Heat-Density Trends in Data Processing, Computer Systems, and TelecommunicationsEquipment- This white paper provides valuablecurrent data and best available insights regarding historical andprojected trends in power consumption and the resulting heatdissipation in computer and data processing systems (servers andworkstations), storage systems, and central office-typetelecommunications equipment. This problem can be solved by making better energy efficient airconditioners and by making more energyefficient computers. Many companies have taken a lot of interestin subject. However, nothing substantial has been done primarilybecause of the market requirements. The end users still want to hosttheir sites on the fastest processors which drives the market with thelatest processors. Going at this rate we would reach a time soon whenthe energy required would be much higher than the energy available inthe market. Intel, AMD, Transmeta and Via have all released processors whichconsume very low power. A typical Pentium or AMD processor consumesabout 25 Watts of power, whereas these low powered processors take onlyabout 5 watts of power i.e. about 5 low powered processors wouldconsume as much power as a single main stream processor of today. Theselow powered processors are also generally fan less processors whichmeans lower noise levels too. Intel has the centrino which has a lowerpower consumption than the regular pentiums. Intel also has the armprocessors but those are RISC. Our prime focus would be AMD, Transmetaand Via. They all have some very promising products.One thing to be noted is that most of these low powered processors workonly at about 1.2GHz or lower. So they won't be as fast the pentium4s.Which means one would have to host lesser sites per server. A goodrecommendation would be upto a maximum of 600 sites on aregular pentium 4 server. A low powered processor should comfortablytake about 200 sites. One advantage of these low powered processors isthat they have a very small form factor too. This means that one canhave more such servers in the same space that is typically allocated toa high powered servers. All datacenters use a profitability matrixbased on the following rule: Performance/PerWatt/Per Cubic Foot. This is one place where the low poweredprocessors really score high. AMD Geode? NX Processor familycomprises of the AMD Geode? NX 1250@6W processor, the AMD Geode?NX 1500@6W processor and the AMD Geode? NX 1750@14W processor. Thefirst two in these consume only 6Watts of power and run without acooling fan. According to AMD they provide the highest x86 performancefor fan less operations. They are based on the mobile AMD Athlonprocessor technology.Transmeta was one of the first companies to develop low powered processors.For a long time Transmeta was known as the company where theMicrosoft co founder Paul Allen had interests in and the placewhere Linus Trovalds, the father Linux, worked. Both of them are nolonger part of the organization. Today they are known for the twoprocessor families they have - The transmeta crusoe andthe transmetaefficeonTransmeta Crusoe?-processors range from 500Mhz to 1.2 Ghz. According to Transmeta,Crusoe is a unique combinationof software and hardware. It's this radical design that gives Crusoe itsimportant advantages, and manufacturers of all kinds of electronicdevices their first truly innovative new platform in over 25 years.Thanks to Crusoe, mobile devices can be made smaller and lighter thanever. These new devices will be more comfortable to use, too, becauseCrusoe generates very little heat a problem that plagues the industry'slegacy hardware-only processors. And because it uses far less power,mobile devices running on Crusoe run far longer on a single batterycharge, and Crusoe-powered ultra-dense servers do far more work perwatt, far more efficiently. TransmetaEfficeon processors are the higher end processors from Transmetaand they run at upto 1.6Ghz and have high performance I/O interfaces.They are built upon Fujitsu's next-generation 90nm silicon technologyfeaturing transistors with a length of just 40nm. The entire Transmeta range not just uses the x86 instruction set, theyalso have full multimedia instruction support (MMX, SSE-SSE2).Transmeta has done very little in marketing in terms of selling theirproducts for the server market. Like all other companies they havefocussed on mobile products, set-top boxes etc.. While these productsaregreat for the mobile market, they do have a great potential in theserver market. FIC, JM-Net etc. have some products for the servermarketwhich run on the Transmeta processors. Via, the Taiwanesemanufacturerpurchased the Cyrix processors and has since gotten out of the race offaster processors with AMD and Intel. Instead they are focussing on fanless, low-powered processors. They have the Eden and the C3 range ofprocessors. The power consumption varies from only 7watts to15Watts. Additionally, the processors come with thePadLock Hardware Security Suite which provides a platform approach tocomputer security, ensuring uncompromising security performance. Thesefeatures include the implementation of the Quantum-based VIA PadLockRNG (Random Number Generator), and the VIA PadLock ACE (AdvancedCryptography Engine) supporting AES encryption. According to Via, the VIA Eden-NProcessor is the world's smallest, lowest power and most securenative x86 processor. It is a mere 15mm x 15mm in terms of size andconsumes between 2.5W @ 533MHz to 7W @ 1GHz. Via again like Transmeta has not focussed in the server market. Theimages above give a good idea of the benefits of this processor in theserver market. For datacenters, Via may be the best in thePerformance/Per Watt/Per Cubic Foot matrix.Companies like Hitachi make some very good low powered hard disk driveswhich have a very small form factor. They have both IDE's at 7200 rpmas well as SCSI hard drives. Many may think it is better to take higher end servers as the power orheating problem does not directly affect them. As mentioned earlier aserver driven by a low-powered processor would be able to take justabout 200 sites. This means that a person with 600 sites would need totake 3 such servers instead of one higher powered server. Here are somebenefits of this scenario. One of the biggest factors influencing the performance of sites on theinternet is the capability of the network card (ethernet) .When all sites arehosted on just one server, they all would use the same networkcard to push the data. Now if these sites are distributed among 3servers the amount of data that the sites can push would be 3 timesmorewhich means faster access to the sites. Another benefit is that if oneof the site goes down all 600 people would not be effected, rather only1/3rd the number of sites would be affected.Hence, the number of support request would be lesser. And finally, suchprocessors are very affordable. Typically they would be just a third ofthe cost of regular mainstream processors. Digital Camera Prints - Getting the Most for Your Money Digital cameras have really taken off in popularity in recent years. It's not uncommon anymore to see several people at an event with a digital camera. Here are some things to keep in mind when getting your digital camera prints converted into keepsakes. |
© Athifea Distribution LLC - 2013 |