2008/12/11
TheRegister: EMC wants more of the data warehousing pie
by Chris Mellor
EMC has set up a data warehousing/business intelligence competency centre to tie its virtualised servers and desktops, Clariion and Symmetrix storage, to DW/BI application vendors' software.
Recently HP announced a tie-up with Oracle to build the specialised HP Oracle Database Machine for DW and BI apps. Sun has also been working with GreenPlum and other SW vendors in that space to turn its X4500 server/storage product into a scale-out DW/BI storage system.
Several software vendors, such as Netezza, are offering DW/BI appliances saying their dedicated technology performs better than Terradata-type big SW environments on standard servers and storage.
DW/BI is reckoned to account for up to a fifth of enterprise storage by Chuck Hollis, EMC's global marketing chief technology officer, and he wants EMC to sell more kit in that market and not let HP, Sun and the appliance vendors profit at EMC's expense.
TheRegister: The Mother of All Demos - 150 years ahead of its time
by Cade Metz
Sometime in the late sixties, as Douglas Engelbart was preparing what would one day be called The Mother of All Demos, his boss flew to Washington to meet with the money man.
The demo that birthed the modern computer mouse - and so much more - was funded by Bob Taylor, a NASA program manager who would one day take his own place among the titans of modern computing. Engelbart's boss had a single question on his mind as he walked into Taylor's office after a cross-country flight from Northern California's Stanford Research Institute.
"He came from the west coast to see me, which was very unusual," remembers Taylor, also known for cooking up the ARPAnet and Xerox PARC's Computer Science Laboratory. "He came into my office and he said 'I want to talk to you about Doug - Why are you funding this guy?'"
Needless to say, Douglas Engelbart's boss wasn't the only one who questioned the import of the mouse inventor's 1968 interactive-computing demo, which received a 40th anniversary celebration at Stanford University's Memorial Hall yesterday afternoon. Bill Paxton - one of the SRI researchers who participated in the demo - says that 90 per cent of the computer science community thought Engelbart was "a crackpot."
"It's hard to believe now," he explains, "but at the time, even we (Engelbart's fellow researchers) had trouble understanding what he was doing. Think of everyone else out there."
InfoWorld: Which operating system is best for SSDs?
by Lucas Mearian
Solid-state disk (SSD) drive architecture can play a big role in how fast a computer boots up and performs. But how big a role the SSDs play – and how much faster an operating system is – depends as much on the operating system as on the drive. Although none of the mainstream operating systems now in use have been optimized to work better with SSDs, some do natively work more efficiently than others, according to storage experts.
That aging operating system, said Saeed Arash Far, engineering manager at SSD manufacturer Patriot Memory, is markedly faster than Windows XP, Vista , Mac OS X, or Linux when using NAND flash memory. Far said his company's tests showed that Windows 2000 is 5 percent to 8 percent faster over its newer rivals because "Windows 2000 doesn't run any applications in the background.
"We're getting ridiculous numbers with Windows 2000," he said. "When it comes to Vista, it is faster than XP, but with XP, you have the luxury of turning off background applications. ... With Vista, you can't."
According to Far, Mac OS X runs "a little faster than Vista" with an SSD drive, but Linux is "always faster" than Vista or Mac OS X – to the tune of 1 percent to 2 percent – because like Windows 2000, "it never runs anything in the background."
