What are Solid State Drives and do you need one?

Define Solid State Drives, please

More and more, we're seeing solid state hard drives being offered on store shelves and being sold with new desktops and laptops.  What's a solid state drive?  Unlike a traditional style hard drive, with it's heavy spinning disk and read/write heads, a solid state drive has no moving parts at all.  Solid state drives store information on memory chips instead of internal spinning disks.  This means solid state drives are more like the RAM in your computer or the USB thumb drive in your pocket.  

 Left: traditional HDD guts.  Right: inside a SSD.

Advantages

 The big advantage solid state drives have is speed.  No moving parts means no disk for read/write heads to physically scour for data.  This physical difference makes SSDs twice as fast as traditional hard drives and even faster in some cases.

The second advantage is durability.  There is no perpetual motion machine.  Moving parts break down, just ask your mechanic.  Solid state drives, since they have no moving parts, should outlast comparable hard drives.  This does remain to be seen, though, since SSDs haven't been out too long compared to standard hard drives.

Disadvantages

So they haven't been out long.  What does that mean to you?  It means SSDs are expensive.

Drive pricing is based on cost per gigabyte.  Traditional desktop hard drives run roughly 10 - 20 cents per gig.  Physical laptop hard drives go 20 - 30 cents per gig.

Cost per GB on a solid state drive?  About $3.

So while you can get a traditional HDD with a terabyte of storage for around $100, that may only get you a 120GB SSD.  The good news is that, like any technology, the cost of SSDs is dropping.

Who Should Buy a SSD?

People with money!  :)

Allright, that's a given.  Anyone who needs -- I mean NEEDS -- ultra fast performance should buy a solid state drive.  I don't mean gamers looking to pwn n00bs in Call of Duty.  I mean professionals who rely on high performance applications.  Anyone who creates movies or music on a computer for a living, for example, would benefit from the performance increase that using a SSD gets you.  IT professionals building servers, to an extent, would also benefit.  I say "to an extent" because of the price to space ratio.  A vmware server, for example, has a small OS footprint and would be a great candidate.

So that's the lowdown on solid state drives, their pros and cons and who should look into them.  Keep in mind that tech prices drop constantly, and they could be a dollar per gig next year, and lower the year after.  SSDs will change computing eventually.  Just not yet.

Thanks for reading!

Should You Be In the Cloud?

One of the big new buzzwords is "The Cloud."  The term "cloud computing" can mean a few different things, including hardware virtualization, hardware colocation, software as a service and even web hosting.  Being "in the cloud" means different things in different applications, but its most basic meaning is this: farming out IT services to a third party. 

The aspect of cloud computing we'll look at here is the software piece.  Also known as
 “hosted applications,” software as a service means paying a third party to host a company's applications and then the company simply pays the third party for the service.  Some examples include:

• Enterprise-level systems like Microsoft Exchange or backup/disaster recovery systems
• General desktop applications like Microsoft Office
• Specific applications like time billing software for accounting and legal firms

There are four key ways that software as a service helps companies save money.

Hardware

Consider all the servers, network equipment, storage and other hardware required to run applications and serve them to the end user.  Now consider how, as apps become more complex and need more resources, better hardware becomes a necessity.  Finally, consider the electric bill for powering and cooling a room full of servers.  Over hardware's typical five year life cycle, the cost of one server can add up to the low five figures.  Subscribing to software as a service eliminates these costs.

Software

Software manufacturers are making a killing.  Don't even ask yourself why something as simple as MS Office Professional costs the same as a week or two of groceries, depending on whether you have teen boys.  You'll just get mad.  And that's just one copy.  Software assurance, licensing per seat and other charges are drive that price higher.  Cloud computing removes this cost.   It also removes allows for "right sizing," since cloud subscribers only pay for what they actually use on a per-user basis.

 

Maintenance

I might be hurting my own bottom line here, but I have to mention that software as a service saves on maintenance costs. There is no server hardware and software troubleshooting for IT staff to do here.  Your IT department would simply need to make sure the company's Internet connection is up and that your desktops are doing alright.  This could greatly free up your business' staff and allow them to plan projects and be proactive, not reactive, for a change.

Downtime

Outages cost money.  Hardware breakdowns, software glitches, spyware, viruses, even normal upgrades and maintenance all cause downtime and a huge cost impact.  Cloud services typically build redundancy into their systems, ensuring  uptime and eliminating outage costs.

So is Cloud Computing Right for My Business?

This depends on your business and its reliance on technology.  It also depends on the size of your company, number of servers and how critical your apps are.  I'd recommend evaluating all this based on the four cost-saving factors I've outlined here, and even contacting some cloud computing companies to get pricing and learn more.  If you need or advice and don't have an IT department to bounce ideas off, contact your local independent IT contractor.  CHEAP PLUG: If you're in Maryland, feel free to look me up. 

Thanks for reading!

Computers talking to each other

This has been on my mind a lot lately, because I'm working with a small business client to create a network for them.  Funny thing about the word network...in my previous life as a college Mass Communications major, I learned that technically, boiled down to its essence, a network is two TV or radio stations sharing content.

I figure we can say the same about computers to make the concept less intimidating.  A network is essentially two computers configured to share data.  Sure, it can be more than two, but once you think of it this way, it's not so mystifying.  At home, my 2 desktops, 2 laptops, Blu-Ray player and Xbox 360 can -- on a good day when the stars align and the gods of cat5e smile upon me -- communicate.  So they're a network.

Large businesses usually has networks called domains, where a central server controls accounts, security, etc.  Small businesses and homes can get by with a network called a workgroup, where computers and their humans can share data with no centralized control but also not as much need for ongoing management.

When I tell people I'm a network engineer, I usually get a blank stare.  Really, I just make sure computers can talk to each other, among other things.

That's all a network is.  Computers talking to each other.