PATREONItems tagged with Enterprise
Major players in the solid state storage business continue to innovate at a breakneck pace, especially now that the market has begun a shift away from the lowly SATA interface towards higher performing alternatives like PCI Express. For a while, manufacturers were bolting multiple SATA controllers together on single devices, in RAID configurations, to boost performance beyond what a single SATA-based drive could do. But with the advent of NVMe, that’s no longer necessary for most applications. Though, pairing up multiple NVMe devices can also be a means to increase performance, of course.Just to give a quick refresher, NVM Express or NVMe, is a low-latency, scalable host controller interface...
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There are few things nowadays that haven't been impacted by the computer chip. Chances are good that if you look in any direction, you're bound to spot something that has a computer chip under its hood. It could be said that these chips are just not that exciting anymore - that we need a good spicing-up of things. With its PARC, Xerox has got us covered. PARC was created by Xerox as part of DARPA's vanishing programmable resources project and could provide a seriously secure way for companies to create a sensitive chip that can be easily destroyed if need be. It looks cool, with its Gorilla Glass frame and sketched IC design, but that's just a perk. These chips are built to have some enormous...
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A couple of months back (Yes, I’m tardy in reporting. Life gets in the way sometimes.), I was invited to CDW’s headquarters in Vernon Hills, IL for a “red carpet tour” of their facilities to get a firsthand look inside the computer and tech products distributor and reseller giant. The facility is located about 40 minutes outside of downtown Chicago and is a big mainstay business in the area, employing over 7,000 people worldwide with 26 facilities across North America and Canada. Formerly known as Computer Discount Warehouse, but now just CDW, the company is publicly traded on the NASDAQ under the same ticker symbol. It’s a Fortune 500 company and the founder, Michael Krasny ranks on Fortune’s...
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Two years removed from taking a $900 million write-off related to unsold Surface RT tablets, Microsoft is tapping OEMs to sell its Surface Pro line. Specifically, Dell and Hewlett-Packard will carry Surface Pro tablets as part of Microsoft's new Surface Enterprise Initiative. Dell will be the first to start selling Surface Pro tablets with Windows 10 and Surface Pro accessories. Sales will kick off next month in the United States and Canada through Dell's North America commercial sales organization and later in the year through its website. This will expand to 28 other markets in early 2016. "Business customers will be able to buy Surface Pro from Dell, the same way they buy our Venue Pro tablets...
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The "Internet of Things" (commonly shortened to IoT) is a term you've likely encountered by now. At its core, IoT is a working concept of everyday devices and gadgets connected to the Internet, and it's the backbone of today's smart home movement. Whether it's pushing a button to re-order more Tide detergent from Amazon or upgrading your thermostat to a smart model that learns your routine and automatically adjusts the temperature accordingly, it's all part of the fast growing IoT market.How fast? Market research firm ABI Research predicts that the number of business-to-business (B2B) IoT connections will more than quadruple to 5.4 billion by 2020. The stat is cited in a Verizon reported titled,...
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Seagate on Tuesday announced a new portfolio of 8TB mechanical hard disk drives (HDDs) consisting of the Seagate Enterprise Capacity 3.5 HDD, Seagate Enterprise NAS HDD, and Seagate Kintec HDD. The new 8TB drives cover markets for small-and-medium-size businesses (SMBs) and large enterprises.Starting with the Seagate Enterprise Capacity 3.5 HDD, this 8TB uses conventional magnetic recording and boasts a 100 percent performance increase over Seagate's previous generation offering. Seagate sees this drive as a high capacity and reliable option for cloud and traditional enterprise applications.The Seagate 8TB Enterprise NAS HDD is built to scale. It provides a third more storage density for any...
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About a week ago, it was revealed that Microsoft was going to be taking yet another step in the wrong direction with Windows 10. This time, it planned to forego telling us regular consumers what its Windows 10 updates would actually entail. We wouldn't know what caused a breakage if one were to occur, and worse, we wouldn't know whether or not we were vulnerable to exploits (or whether they were patched.) As ridiculous as this is for the home user, it's downright absurd for enterprise customers. It could be argued that enterprise computing should be weighed even higher than consumer computing, because it has to work, and has to work flawlessly. Any downtime results in lost dollars, so for Microsoft...
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Sometimes it's the enterprise sector that gets dibs on the coolest technology, and so it goes with a trio of TCO-optimized, high-performance solid state drives from Samsung, all three of which are based on three-dimensional (3D) Vertical NAND (V-NAND) flash memory technology. And get this -- the fastest of bunch can read data at up to 5,500 megabytes per second. That's the rated sequential read speed of Samsung's PM1725, a half-height, half-length (HHHL) card-type NVMe SSD. Other rated specs include a random read speed of up to 1,000,000 IOPS, random write performance of up to 120,000 IOPS, and sequential writes topping out at 1,800MB/s. On paper, this new PCIe SSD lays to waste even Intel's...
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Adding to its portfolio of "Rugged" Latitude notebooks, Dell has just announced the release of a tablet that falls into the same series. The Latitude 12 Rugged Tablet's goals are obvious: it's designed to work in a variety of environments and handle a bit of abuse - should some come its way. This Windows-based tablet features Intel's fifth-gen Core M processors under-the-hood, and with its dual 2-cell batteries, it can last for up to 12 hours. Its screen is 11.6-inch and can be viewed outside, although the press release doesn't mention a resolution. It's probably safe to say that it will be 1080p, given its form-factor. Other specs include 802.11ac Wi-Fi, optional mobile broadband and GPS, up...
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With Google's I/O conference set to kick off later this week, the anticipation surrounding its upcoming OS, Android M, is growing fast. While we just learned that M internally stands for Macadamia Nut Cookie, we have doubts this OS release will crumble. Whereas Lollipop represented a major overhaul of the OS, Android M will refine what's there, and then toss in some cool new features (at least, we hope). As we discovered earlier this month, it seems like Android M could have a big business focus. Perhaps that business focus ties into the bit of information leaked late last week, claiming that Android M will have native fingerprint authentication. Unlocking a phone with a fingerprint isn't new,...
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Just over a month following its official unveil, Microsoft's Surface 3 is already a belle of the tablet ball as far as business is concerned, running Windows 8.1 and offering easy IT integration and robust Enterprise-class security. And with the company's release yesterday of a new driver update designed to bring the process of Surface 3 mass system deployment in line with that of the larger and faster (and more expensive) Surface Pro 3, the attraction is set to grow deeper. According to a Microsoft blog post, "The update – which is available now -- improves the mass deployment process, broadens the range of enterprise-level features, and helps bring the Surface...
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Security firms and anti-malware providers sure do have their work cut out for them, a fact that seems to get emphasized every day. As attackers become more creative, researchers have to dig deep in order to understand how malware manages to hide itself so well. It used to be that static scanners would be suitable enough, but that's hardly the case nowadays. Attackers are becoming even more creative, creating almost ninja-like malware. Take Rombertik, for example. This is a piece of malware that was deeply analyzed by Cisco's Talos Security Intelligence and Research Group that at the high level hooks into a user's Web browser to read sensitive information that is then passed along to a remote...
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With all of the great stuff that's been announced for Windows 10 up to this point, it's hard to believe that Microsoft is still dishing it out. For enterprise customers, there's a good reason to be excited for Windows 10: Windows Update has been given an overhaul, and a lot more control. Announced at the Ignite conference in Chicago, Microsoft's Satya Nadella talked about a much-improved Windows Update mechanism that should come as a big relief to IT staff. In particular, IT will have complete control over how and which updates get rolled out, which for big corporations, could prove to be a boon. There are four big features tying into this upgrade. For starters, Windows Update can utilize distribution...
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A lot of the attention Windows 10 has received from the media has focused on consumer features and amenities, but there's quite a bit for enterprise users to look forward to as well. One of them is called Device Guard, a previously unnamed feature from Microsoft that gives organizations the ability to lock down devices in a way that's designed to offer advanced malware protection. "It provides better security against malware and zero days for Windows 10 by blocking anything other than trusted apps—which are apps that are signed by specific software vendors, the Windows Store, or even your own organization," Microsoft explains. "You’re in control of what sources Device Guard considers trustworthy...
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First announced late last fall, Microsoft's video component for Office 365 is now available worldwide to its enterprise customers. Microsoft's goal here is to allow companies to relay information via video throughout the organization using apps and an interface they're familiar with. One key advantage is that companies can get off of YouTube, with its insecure "Unlisted" option. Office 365 Video will work on any device that supports HTML5, and at the moment, there's just a single app available so far, for the iPhone. On Android? Just load up an HTML5-equipped browser, and the service should work just fine. Microsoft designed the Video interface with a responsive design, so whether on a desktop,...
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There's nothing wrong with being an early adopter of new technologies and products, you just have to understand that inevitably something better, faster, and/or less expensive will follow whatever it is you just recently paid a premium for. Case in point is Panasonic's 20-inch Toughpad 4K tablet -- the revamped standard edition model now sports a 5th Generation Intel Core i5 vPro processor and costs half as much as first generation Performance SKU when it debuted earlier this year.Less than a year ago, the Toughpad 4K was wielding an Intel Core i7 3687U vPro processor, a dual-core part clocked at 2.1GHz to 3.3GHz with Hyper Threading support and 4MB of cache. But now that Broadwell-U is here,...
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Think stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars from an enterprise organization is difficult? You might be surprised after learning about how the 'Dyre' malware that IBM has been tracking operates. Like most malware, Dyre needs to infect a PC in order to work. This can be done via a number of different methods, but email is the most common. Once someone takes the bait, the waiting game begins for a bank transfer to be made. If the thieves behind Dyre are lucky enough to infect an important PC, an error message will be displayed in the event that a bank transfer is initiated, complete with a phone number to call to initiate a manual transfer. There are a couple of interesting aspects to this:...
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IBM is planning to invest a whopping $3 billion over the next four years on a new Internet of Things (IoT) division that will focus on the enterprise. In addition, IBM said it's building a cloud-based open platform designed to help clients and ecosystem partners build IoT solutions. The open platform will help its clients and partners integrate data from a wide range of IoT and traditional sources, ultimately allowing them to design and produce a whole new generation of connected devices that are better optimized for IoT. "Our knowledge of the world grows with every connected sensor and device, but too often we are not acting on it, even when we know we can ensure a better result," said Bob Picciano,...
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Intel's aiming to bring big core performance and intelligence in a microserver form factor with its new Xeon D family of processors, the company's first ever Xeon-based System-on-Chip (SoC). That sound you hear may be ARM's pulse skipping a beat, as Intel jams a mighty intimidating wrench into the rival chip maker's plans to dominate the microserver market. The Xeon D line is built on Intel's 14nm process technology and combines the performance and intelligence of its regular Xeon chips with the size and power savings of an SoC. According to Intel, Xeon D delivers up to 3.4x faster performance node and up to 1.7x better performance per watt compared to the company's Atom C2750, which is part...
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Can big data companies really budget for an all-flash memory storage scheme? SanDisk is hoping to make it possible with its new InfiniFlash storage system that delivers massive capacity, extreme performance, and rock solid reliability to big data and hyperscale workloads while reducing data center complexity and costs. InfiniFlash is a next-generation storage solution comprised entirely of Flash memory. It's available in three configurations -- IF100, IF500, and IF700 -- and offers five times the density, 50 times the performance, and four times the reliability compared to traditional hard disk drive arrays, all while consuming 80 percent less power, according to SanDisk. What about cost? SanDisk...
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There are few pieces of software as ubiquitous as Microsoft's Office, and given its prominence for the past two-and-a-half decades, it's a hard ruler to overthrow. But that notion doesn't tame the likes of Google. In fact, the company's come forward about its plans to dethrone Microsoft Office, and nab at least 80% of its business. Now that's what we call ambition. Google's Microsoft Office chase began ten-years-ago with the launch of its Google Apps platform. Today, Google Apps has become a solid all-in-one solution for businesses wanting to move most of their data and services to the cloud, such as email, storage, and so forth. Since 2007, Google's Docs service...
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Intel promises a lot with its just-announced fifth-gen Core vPro processors, but if there's one overarching theme, it's that the company wants you to be wireless -- even if you need to take advantage of a big screen. Three major focuses for Intel with this launch include general PC design, wireless displays, and wireless docking. On the design front, Intel says that with these new vPro processors, vendors will be able to create products that are up to three times thinner and 50% lighter over previous generations. That's a bold claim, and an exciting one for mobile warriors. Intel's Fifth-gen Core vPro Processor A great example of where the wireless capabilities come in can be seen in...
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