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Horse Sense #60
In this issue:
Trends
Free (and Less Expensive) Alternatives to Microsoft Office
Thinkfree offers free Microsoft
Office and Adobe PDF compatible document creation on
their web site, online.thinkfree.com. The Writely
word processor, now owned by Google, allows you to
upload Microsoft Word documents, save them to your
local machine, publish to the web, and post to blogs
at its web site,
www.writely.com. Word processing is offered by
www.writeboard.com. These free sites come with
storage space on the web for posting your
creations. At
www.openoffice.org, you can download a suite of
applications compatible with Microsoft Office for
free. There is no telling how long these web sites
will be around because there doesn't seem to be any
financial incentive in giving away the ability to
author documents. Most analysts don't see these
offerings to be a serious threat to Microsoft's
Office $12B cash cow. In fact, Corel WordPerfect
Office has often been reviewed as more capable than
Microsoft Office. It will even run in a Microsoft
emulation mode and reads older versions of Microsoft
Office files better than Microsoft Office itself.
But, even though the WordPerfect suite costs much
less, it has lost market share over time.
WordPerfect has lately regained some ground, but
Microsoft still owns the lion's share of the office
productivity market partly because Microsoft Office
is loaded on more new machines than any other
application. Still, Microsoft is concerned enough
about this market that they plan to offer an Office
Live Suite featuring online word processing and
spreadsheet software, according to a 9/14/2006
Businessweek article.
Is Tape Backup Going the Way of the Dodo?
Hard disks are replacing tapes in
the backup process. Hard drives now offer many
advantages over tape:
(1) Hard disks have greater
native capacity than tapes. Hard disks are also
increasing their capacities faster than tapes. And,
while they are getting larger, hard disks are also
getting faster and smaller. Expect to see terabyte
(1TB=1000 gigabyte) disk drives hitting the market
early next year. 750GB disk drives are already
available.
(2) Hard disks can be read and
written to millions of times. Tapes are normally
retired after 50-150 uses.
(3) You can read and write to
hard drives much faster than tape (the data transfer
rate is higher).
(4) Tapes can take many seconds
to position themselves to begin reading or writing.
Hard drives take milliseconds (the latency is
lower).
(5) Hard disks can serve needs
other than backup. Our network attached storage
server stores our backups and also serves as an
archive file server for files we don't use as often.
(6) You can read and write to
multiple hard drives in an array at once. This
ability allows for much faster backups and
restorations. It also can be used to provide added
reliability and redundancy. Lastly, you can back up
multiple machines at the same time. Tape backups
can't provide you these benefits economically.
(7) Hard drives are ideal for
imaging the hard disks on a server for disaster
recovery. You can back up and restore hard disk
images much more quickly than you can restore file
by file backups from tape. In addition, you can
mount the image on a backup hard drive and copy
individual files out of that image. Thus, an image
file on a hard drive can serve as a file by file
backup as well.
(8) Hard drives are always on
and respond to even the first read and write request
very quickly, unlike tapes, so they are ideal for
continuous data protection schemes.
(9) You can mount a hard drive
in another machine and read it with much more ease
than you can mount a tape. Tapes require the same
backup software, type of tape drive, and data
alignment relative to the heads on the tape drive.
(10) Hard drives make it
possible to compare data between backup sets and
move only the changed data over your expensive wide
area network link.
(11) Hard drives are cost
effective. Newer disk drives at the highest
capacities are always more expensive than lower
capacity drives, but even the newest 750GB drives
cost less than 66 cents/gigabyte. LTO-3 400GB tapes
are 19 cents/gigabyte, but they can't stand a
fraction of the reads and writes that hard disks
can. When you factor in the tape drive cost, a disk
based solution can be cheaper to buy. Labor-saving
automated disk backup can pay for itself quickly.
In addition, hard disk images allow rapid recovery
from a disaster. A single disaster recovery could
pay for your disk based backup solution because down
time is so expensive.
(12) Hard disk backup appliances
exist that make it easier to build a reliable backup
solution supported by a single vendor. For a
low-end Windows-only solution, you might want to
consider something like the Sonicwall CDP appliance
(www.sonicwall.com).
For more flexibility, capacity, and the ability to
physically move data off site, you should consider
Idealstor (www.idealstor.com).
Those with multiple operating systems, larger
amounts of data, or multiple sites should look at a
midrange solution like that from Unitrends (www.unitrends.com).
Of course, Iron Horse represents these and other
fine manufacturers.
To Drive Faster, Don't Move Anything
Will hard drives go the way of
the dodo, too? Chips (silicon based storage
devices) are already replacing rotating hard disk
platters in many places. For example, key chain
drives and some portable music players use chips to
provide great data transfer capabilities and music
playback. Consider these good reasons for storing
information on chips rather than on a rotating disk:
(1) Chips boot up faster. (2) Chips read and write
as fast or faster than disks and their ability to
switch from accessing one file to accessing another
is about a thousand times faster. (3) Chips are
much more resistant to shocks, like being dropped.
(4) Chips run cooler. You might not need a fan.
(5) Chips are smaller. (6) Chips are noiseless.
(7) Chips weigh less. (8) Chips take less power.
Your battery will last longer.
Why isn't everything run by chips
now? A gigabyte of chip storage costs 30-60 times
more than hard disk storage. Still, if you only
need a small amount of memory (or another factor
like low heat or power consumption is a big issue),
silicon-based storage is a great way to go. For
example, most routers and firewalls enhance their
reliability and speed while decreasing their size,
power needs, heat output and overall cost by using
chips to provide program storage.
It is now possible to build a PC
without a rotating disk, but your next machine won't
be built that way. Instead, there is a pretty good
chance solid state memory will be used in one of two
ways. Computers with boot files on chips will start
up quickly. And, if they cache critical files on
these chips, they'll be quicker than today's
machines. So, you may have more than one drive
letter on your new system, and one of those drives
will be a silicon disk. The second, more
interesting, design incorporates large amounts of
nonvolatile RAM onto hard disks. These hard drives
will transparently and dynamically cache the most
useful information. Boot times will be quick and
applications will accelerate, but the hard drive
itself will automatically decide what data should be
stored for rapid access in silicon. Less common
reads and writes to the disk platters will occur in
larger, more ordered chunks, resulting in additional
speed and reliability. As drives may only spin when
needed, use of non-volatile RAM will lower the power
draw. Expect to see these drives in portables and
backup solutions soon.
Avoid Costly Computing Errors
During my 20 years as a computer
salesman, consultant and dealer, I've seen many
common computing mistakes that can be avoided. I'll
only be addressing one of them today. We'll deal
with others in future Horse Sense newsletters. Use
these tips when working with your IT providers to
save money, time, and grief. If you have a favorite
tip or story, please write us about it!
The Trust Deficit
If you don't trust your
salesperson's or consultant's advice, you need to be
doing business with another salesman or another
company (like Iron Horse). A PROFESSIONAL salesman
doesn't just want your business now; he wants it
forever. A professional salesman won't knowingly
lie to you because he can't afford it. If he loses
your trust, he'll lose your business and anyone you
might refer to him.
A professional has to meet your
present needs, anticipate your future needs, get
past misconceptions, and help you get to where you
want and need to go, even if you don't see it yet.
One of the biggest mistakes we've seen people and
organizations make is to treat their salesmen,
consultants, and suppliers as disposable
commodities. They aren't. The right business
partner makes a BIG difference. Would you choose a
pacemaker simply because it was the lowest priced?
Would go under a cardiologist's knife if you got the
idea he didn't care if you lived or died? If you
walked into his office and said "I feel fine,"
should he send you home immediately with no further
examination? Your business health is important to
you. Select your business partners carefully.
Partners who mutually care about the health and
success of each other's businesses can produce
amazing results. The members of Iron Horse want to
show you how they believe in these partnerships.
Case in
point: A federal crime-fighting agency was
building an extension to one of their networks.
They needed share information with other
crime-fighting organizations. Their proposal
requested Cisco specific equipment, but alternative
suggestions were requested as well. The requested
Cisco product was old, overpriced, underpowered, and
expensive. They also wanted to use Cisco
proprietary networking protocols. This meant that
anyone connecting to this network had to use Cisco
equipment, not the equipment they already had. The
winning Cisco solution was $2.7 million. Our
comparable, higher-performing, more flexible
solution was $0.9 million. An even more capable
solution we proposed was $1.1 million. Oddly, our
proposal was technically disqualified because it
didn't run the proprietary Cisco protocols when it
turns out that one piece of the Cisco equipment they
bought didn't run it either. Predictably,
integrating with partner networks has been slow and
rocky.
Another
case in point: This same agency wanted
hundreds of very expensive networking adapters, but
we told them that they were a bad idea. Instead, we
recommended much less expensive ones that used more
standard technology which was expected to have a
much longer lifetime. They insisted on buying the
more expensive adapters. We offered them a
competitive price anyway, telling them not to buy
the current stock because they were defective and
under recall by the manufacturer. Unfortunately,
they ignored our advice and went with a pricier
alternate supplier of those adapters. When they
arrived, they plugged them into brand new
computers. The adapters promptly caught on fire,
damaging the computers as well. Since the recall
had already been issued and the agency informed, the
manufacturer would not honor the warranty.
The lesson? In a nutshell, find
someone you trust enough to tell you things you
don't want to (but may need to) hear. Get to know
and understand one another. Then work together as a
team to solve your problems.
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