“We are all here for a spell; get all the good laughs you can.”
Will Rogers, American humorist and social commentator

If there was anyone who enjoyed a good laugh, it was Will Rogers. Peaking in popularity around the 1930s, he used an earthy, down-home style to poke fun at politicians, gangsters, government programs and other topical targets. His humor and wit helped carry the U.S. through the Great Depression.

Considering the amount of time we spend at work, we should heed Rogers’ advice and all share a good laugh or two each day.

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When I am out on the road in Europe, visiting customers and partners, one common theme that comes up on a daily basis is that high-availability systems are essential to nearly all businesses regardless of size or industry. Sadly, all too often we see what can happen when systems running business-critical applications such as transaction processing, Web servers or electronic commerce are not accessible – potentially lost revenue and lost productivity, leading to dramatically downward-spiralling customer satisfaction.

To reduce this risk, the industry focus has been on achieving the best level of high availability, and for the enterprise market segment this has often meant installing and running storage area network (SAN) solutions.

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I want to warn you, there is some thick background information here first. But don’t worry. I’ll get to the meat of the topic and that’s this: Ultimately, I think that PCIe® cards will evolve to more external, rack-level, pooled flash solutions, without sacrificing all their great attributes today. This is just my opinion, but other leaders in flash are going down this path too…

I’ve been working on enterprise flash storage since 2007 – mulling over how to make it work.

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Big data and Hadoop are all about exploiting new value and opportunities with data. In financial trading, business and some areas of science, it’s all about being fastest or first to take advantage of the data. The bigger the data sets, the smarter the analytics. The next competitive edge with big data comes when you layer in flash acceleration. The challenge is scaling performance in Hadoop clusters.

The most cost-effective option emerging for breaking through disk-to-I/O bottlenecks to scale performance is to use high-performance read/write flash cache acceleration cards for caching.

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It may sound crazy, but hard disk drives (HDDs) do not actually have a delete command. Now we all know HDDs have a fixed capacity, so over time the older data must somehow get removed, right? Actually it is not removed, but overwritten. The operating system (OS) uses a reference table to track the locations (addresses) of all data on the HDD. This table tells the OS which spots on the HDD are used and which are free. When the OS or a user deletes a file from the system, the OS simply marks the corresponding spot in the table as free, making it available to store new data.

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There are few people living today who have not heard of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.  His music is undoubtedly brilliant, and 250 years later it still remains present in many forms of our media – Hollywood movies, television advertisements and even cell phone ring tones.

A key “differentiator” of Mozart’s lasting genius was the diversity of his work. Arguably, there have been few composers who were more versatile than Mozart. He wrote music in nearly every form conceivable – songs, sonatas, operas, symphonies. 

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I remember in the mid-1990s the question of how many minutes away from a diversion airport a two-engine passenger jet should be allowed to fly in the event of an engine failure. Staying in the air long enough is one of those high-availability functions that really matters. In the case of the Boeing 777, it was the first aircraft to enter service with a 180-minute extended operations certification (ETOPS)¹. This meant that longer over-water and remote terrain routes were immediately possible.

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The term global warming can be very polarizing in a conversation and both sides of the argument have mountains of material that support or discredit the overall situation. The most devout believers in global warming point to the average temperature increases in the Earth’s atmosphere over the last 100+ years. They maintain the rise is primarily caused by increased greenhouse gases from humans burning fossil fuels and deforestation.

The opposition generally agrees with the measured increase in temperature over that time, but claims that increase is part of a natural cycle of the planet and not something humans can significantly impact one way or another.

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The benefits versus drawbacks of using PowerPoint® presentations can stir lively conversation in the workplace. Some would go so far as to toss out PowerPoint presentations altogether, such as the late Steve Jobs, who believed they stifled creative thinking. Others firmly stand by them as an effective way to communicate.

I believe that a well-crafted PowerPoint presentation can be, well, powerful and pointed. Appealing and engaging slides can bring focus to a discussion, present complex facts and figures in a way that’s easy for an audience to grasp, spark lively dialogue, and enable teams to come to closure on solving a problem or diving into a new project.

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Have you ever run out of gas in your car? Do you often risk running your gas tank dry? Hopefully you are more cautious than that and you start searching for a gas station when you get down to a ¼ tank. You do this because you want plenty of cushion in case something comes up that prevents you from getting to a station before it is too late.

The reason most people stretch their tank is to maximize travel between station visits.

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