Horse Sense

Horse Sense #115

Intel's Messaging to Resellers

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HP raised prices 11/1/14 on their large format supplies. Manufacturers have been gradually raising the prices of toners, inks, paper, and other consumables for years. It has now gotten to the point that replacing all the high capacity cartridges in a printer can cost more than buying a new printer with cartridges outright! But, there is relief out there. The compatible and refilled market has taken off. The problem is ensuring quality. At Iron Horse, we save our clients up to 50% off original manufacturer toner pricing, but we will not sacrifice quality. The only cartridges we sell are quality guaranteed to the last page, guaranteed to perform as well as or better than the original manufacturer toner, and fully warrant against any problems that might happen to a printer when using such cartridges. Even large companies like Xerox and Verbatim have gotten into the replacement toner business.

Intel's Messaging to Resellers

I have to take an enormous amount of training each year to maintain my status as a reseller for various products. Intel does not care overly much how much Intel branded product I sell because many of Intel's products are built into someone else's solution. Many of the products you might buy may carry another label, but they are actually built by Intel. In many cases, they are just the same product with a different part number. So, if you see SSD, networking, or processor offerings from a vendor, there is a pretty good chance it came from Intel. Their reseller training is thus very different from everyone else's and gives insights into a very large segment of the IT market. I recently attended such a training and wanted to share Intel's perspective with you.

Intel has a view of the future, though many of these technologies are in full production today: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Tw-f3i-08k

Intel gave technicians at the show in depth training in configuring an entirely new set of server technologies now shipping with lower power requirements, enhanced processing capability, faster memory, built in hardware security enhancements, and more options to connect to storage. Intel showed a nice study that told me what I have already told faithful readers of Horse Sense: if you upgrade the processor and memory, you still do not get the performance improvements you can out of a machine. You also need to make sure the storage and networking can keep up. Switching to fast solid state drives (SSDs) increases performance, often by many orders of magnitude. [Intel's newest technology SSDs have been redesigned to plug directly into the PCI bus. This allows them to transfer data six times faster than traditional SSDs!] And, adding 10 gigabit and faster network cards allows you to get information on and off a server to dish up information to users quickly and efficiently. Intel is very proud of their new high performance power sipping processors. Low power processors allow you to make equipment smaller and/or fan less because there is less heat to dissipate. You are already seeing whole new generations of thin tablets and laptops on the market. Power saving server and desktop processors (yes, desktop sales went *up* 7% last year while pundits were predicting their demise) save energy directly and indirectly by generating less waste heat while performing more useful work.

*All* of Intel's 100,000 plus employees have been using SSD equipped devices for some time. Intel discovered that productivity and user satisfaction increased markedly. Necessary repairs decreased because the drives failed less often. They also found that when they used drives capable of full drive encryption, they did not have to securely dispose of drives after they had been used. Instead, they could just throw away the old security key and reformat the drive and have confidence the old data had been completely destroyed, thus lowering costs even further when they reused the old SSD. [Maybe they were reading Horse Sense, too!]