In this issue:
-
Toys for Techs
-
A Limited Time
Special Offer
-
Keep Yourself
Secure
-
An Oldie but a
Goodie?
-
Different
Strokes for Different Folks, New Storage
Technology Trends
-
The End of the
Internet: While the Internet will Run out
of Bandwidth in 2010, You Won't
Toys for Techs
It is time once again to
think of Toys for Techs, something for your
business that someone would just love to have
and might be useful as well. For more on how to
pick a good tech toy, see <http://www.ih-online.com/hs62.html>
and for some ideas on tech toys from 2004
(amazing since many of them haven't changed) see
<http://www.ih-online.com/hs53.html>.
A Limited Time Special
Offer
You want to be able to show
off what your new toy can do, right? Well, you
can if you buy a new printer from Iron Horse.
To make room in the office, Iron Horse needs to
clear out some printers and multifunction units
from Xerox and Lexmark. You can have
them at prices significantly below our normally
good values. Some of these deals will only last
until 12/7/07 and they are first come, first
serve. We also have a Cisco switch and some
Intel processors you might like as well on
special. Go to <http://www.ih-online.com>
and click on the graphic on the left hand side
that says "Specials" for more information. If
you don't see something you want, call us.
We'll help you get what you need.
Keep Yourself Secure
Put your car keys beside your
bed at night. If you hear a noise outside your
home or someone trying to get in your house,
press the panic button for your car. The alarm
will be set off, and the horn will sound until
you turn it off. Criminals will probably leave
because your neighbors will be looking out their
windows. It is a security alarm system that you
probably already have and requires no
installation.
Remember to carry your keys
while walking to your car in a parking lot. The
alarm can work the same way there.....
It would also be useful for
any emergency, such as a heart attack, where you
can't reach a phone and need to attract help.
An Oldie but a Goodie?
A poll by Secunia of 6572
people found 65% are still using end-of-life
products on their network.
That is no surprise to us here at Iron Horse.
We are currently using a DOS based contact
management program called TeleMagic that hasn't
been supported in at least 10 years. It still
works fine for us. Yet, I am writing this on a
brand new laptop. I have yet to retire our
oldest piece of hardware, a monitor that is over
15 years old. My copy of Firefox updated
yesterday and I got a new network analysis tool
yesterday as well. Like you, we use both new
and old tools that get the job done for us. You
can talk to us about your old software and
hardware and how it might work with the new
stuff you want. We'll understand....
Different Strokes for
Different Folks, New Storage Technology Trends
The computer business is
growing up. Products are now being offered to
address the needs of specific markets and meet
specific business needs. Take data storage
devices, for example. There has been a lot of
publicity about lost data ending up in the wrong
hands. Customers want their data protected.
So, storage manufacturers and software makers
are making hardware and software that will
encrypt data in transit AND at rest on your hard
drive. Seagate even has a drive that is
designed with hardware encryption built onto the
drive itself to eliminate the burden encryption
would put on your processor. Unless you know
the password to the drive, you won't be able to
read the data. Kingston <http://www.kingston.com>
has a USB memory stick with hardware encryption
built in. Hardware encryption usually can't be
broken by using software. It is also faster and
more transparent than using software.
But, with all these choices,
it is harder than ever to make a best value
purchase. For example, Seagate <http://www.seagate.com>
offers drives with encryption, drives with
massive amounts of storage space, drives with
blazing performance figures designed for high
stress environments, drives of different
physical sizes and with different logical
connections, low power drives, drives designed
to power down and save energy,
desktop/enclosure/server oriented drives, drives
that are very quiet, drives targeted towards
non-PC devices, external USB/firewire/eSATA
drives with backup software, and drives designed
for continuously streaming video and audio. You
might not even want a hard drive at all. You
could use a solid state disk (SSD). SSDs are
cooler, quieter, and more shock and vibration
resistant. They can withstand high altitudes,
have no moving parts, weigh less, and boot up
quickly. Or, you could split the difference with
the Seagate drive designed for Windows Vista
that has a small amount of solid state memory
coupled with a large hard drive. This
combination allows for rapid boots, near
instantaneous access to recently accessed
information, less wear and tear on the hard
drive, less power consumption, large capacities,
and quieter operation at a reasonable cost.
To get the most bang for your
storage buck, please talk to us. We'll help
point you in the right direction!
The End of the Internet:
While the Internet will Run out
of Bandwidth in 2010, You Won't
USA Today seems to think the
Internet will run out of bandwidth in 2010
unless something is done <http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/technology/2007-11-18-slow-internet_N.htm>
While I don't think there will be a global
meltdown, I DO think that multimedia offerings
and other large files, like software patches and
downloads, will gobble significant amounts of
bandwidth and storage space. Capacity planning
experts often advise that you plan for a 60%
increase in storage growth PER YEAR. That means
in 10 years, you will need 100 times the amount
of storage space you have now. They aren't
kidding. The growth trend really looks like
that, and it seems to be accelerating because of
multimedia files. While storing these files and
moving them around on your local network is an
issue, moving large files through a much slower
Internet connection shared between an entire
organization is a much bigger deal.
Your Internet connection may
not be responsive enough to your business needs,
hurting your productivity. Even worse, you
don't know why it is slow because you probably
don't have a way to measure or control what is
happening. The guy listening to Internet radio
and the unattended computer downloading software
updates probably have the same priority as the
video training you are trying to take that keeps
timing out and stuttering. One user on the
network can, in effect, create a denial of
service attack against all the other users
without even intending to do so. And these
bandwidth hogs may be people using the network
responsibly, though statistics will show the
incidence of shopping, gambling, IM chatting,
and pornography viewing in a work environment
are higher than you might think (see USA Today
"Technology Makes Porn Easier to Access at Work"
<http://www.usatoday.com/printedition/news/20071018/1a_cover18.art.htm>).
Legal liability aside, the loss of productivity
can be staggering. The World Wide Web can be the
Wild Wild West. Many web sites contain malware
that can infect an unsuspecting browser's
machine, and they may not know it until it is
far too late and data is destroyed or time is
lost.
You need an effective way to
protect your users and preserve bandwidth
resources for critical applications. That's why
we're recommending Network Composer to all of
our clients.
Network Composer:
-Ensures that recreational
online activity never interferes with
mission-critical activity
-Prioritizes the resources
available for critical traffic
-Limits resources for
non-critical traffic
-Identifies and controls
bandwidth hogs
-Filters web content,
including SSL encrypted browsing
-Stops anonymous proxy
activity without having to maintain a black list
-Limits the bandwidth
available to specific sites like MySpace and
YouTube
"I immediately found a
problem on my network I had been chasing for two
years. My Network Composer paid for itself in
less than 24 hours!"
--Network Manager, Fedbid