Dell Latitude D420

Toshiba adds cloud

Welcome to a Laptop Ac Adapter specialist
of the Toshiba Ac Adapter

Toshiba Monday announced it is adding a cloud storage backup service as an option to its Canvio line of external hard drives .

The company also upgraded the Canvio Basics and Canvio 3.0 lines to support the 6 Gbs USB 3.0 standard. The older versions support the 480 Mbps USB 2.0 standard.

The Canvio 3.0 hard drive, which comes in 500GB, 750GB and 1TB capacities, offers an optional user interface that lets users direct data to the cloud for storage.

The Canvio 3.0 drives are pre-loaded with NTI's BackupNow EZ with adapter such as Toshiba ACC10H Ac Adapter, Toshiba PA2438U Ac Adapter, Toshiba PA2500U Ac Adapter, Toshiba Portege 4000 Ac Adapter, Toshiba Satellite A10 Ac Adapter, Toshiba Tecra A1 Ac Adapter, Toshiba Satellite R15 Ac Adapter, Toshiba Satellite A100 Ac Adapter, Toshiba Tecra 8000 Ac Adapter, Toshiba Satellite 1405 Ac Adapter, Toshiba Satellite 5205 Ac Adapter, Toshiba Satellite 2800 Ac Adapter software that provides for fully-customizable cloud and drive backup schemes.

After plugging the drive into a USB port, users can create a cloud account with the Microsoft Azure -based BackupNow EZ. The optional service allows users to back up specific folders, certain file types and/or complete system backups to hosted systems.

The backup software also scans the user's system and recommends which files to back up to hosted stsrems, and which are best stored on the disk drive.

"All the consumer has to do is click, 'OK'," said Manuel Camarena, director of business development, for Toshiba America Information Systems.

Camarena said more customers are seeking more granular control of drives, so they can customize backup times, set up low usable capacity alerts and encrypt data prior to its transport to the cloud.

"It's a complete system backup to the hard drive, including the OS. And, it's a bootable drive so if your computer breaks down, you can boot to drive and select a point and time and when to restart and your computer puts everything back," Camarena said.

The drives also come with internal Toshiba's Shock Sensor and Ramp Loading Technology to protect it during daily movement from a pocket, desk, or bag.

The cloud service comes with a 30-day free trial.

The Canvio 3.0 drive has a starting price of US$89.99 for a 500GB model. The 1TB model sells for $139.00. The 5000GB Canvio Basics drive sells for $79.99 and the 1TB verion sells for $129.99.

new laptop benches are an Apple

Welcome to a Laptop Ac Adapter specialist
of the Sony Ac Adapter

We're pleased to report that since this article was written, Qantas has rejigged the design of the recessed AC outlets in its laptop-friendly airport lounge benches.

Two of the four AC sockets in each panel have now been repositioned to sit horizontally instead of vertically.

This allows the white power brickette of Apple's MacBook notebook family, which combines an AC plug with the voltage transformer, to fit snugly in one of the sockets at the end of the row.

PREVIOUS | Qantas may have made the move to an all-Apple environment in its Qantas Club and Qantas Business lounges, but the new laptop-friendly benches are decidedly unfriendly for Apple notebooks.

The benches – which have already been installed into the Sydney Qantas Business Lounge as part of a rolling refit, as well as the all-new Qantas Club and Qantas Business Lounge at Canberra Airport – typically seat up to eight people and sport 240V with adapter like Sony ACC25 Ac Adapter, Sony VGN-FZ Ac Adapter, Sony PCG-FR Ac Adapter, Sony VGN-CR Ac Adapter, Sony PCGA-AC51 Ac Adapter, Sony PCG-V505 Ac Adapter, Sony VGN-B1VP Ac Adapter, Sony PCG-Z1RA Ac Adapter, Sony VGN-TX Ac Adapter, Sony VGN-U8 Ac Adapter, Sony VGN-X505 Ac Adapter, Sony VGN-TX690 Ac Adapter AC sockets in a recessed bay under hinged centre compartments.

But as Australian Business Traveller discovered on a brief visit to in the Sydney Qantas business lounge this weekend, the bay simple isn't wide enough to cope with the palm-sized AC adaptor used by Apple's MacBook, MacBook Pro and MacBook Air family.

Apple adaptors use a different design for their power cables and AC adaptors to Windows laptops.

Notebooks by Dell, HP, Lenovo, Sony, Toshiba et al employ two lengths of thick black cable with a squat 'power brick' in the middle to transform the standard 240 volts AC into a notebook's lower-voltage DC supply. The end which fits into the AC socket is a standard stubby three-pronged plug.

However, Apple's simpler and some would say more elegant design incorporates the voltage transformer into a compact white block which sits at one end of the power cable and plugs directly into the AC socket.

That works fine on most wall-mounted sockets because there's sufficient room around the AC jack. But it's an issue in confined spaces such as the Qantas club benches because there's simply not enough room for the transformer+plug combo unit.

The obvious solution for MacBook users is to shift to somewhere else in the lounge. No major drama, except that these benches really are perfect for in-transit laptop users in every other respect: ideal height, ample personal space and close proximity to the food servery and bar (you can decide which trait is most important).

Otherwise, you'll want to add to your carry-on bag the long grey extension cord that came with your Apple laptop. This snaps onto the white adaptor brickette and ends in a standard three-pronged AC plug. It's a little more cumbersome and less elegant, but it works...

Lenovo IdeaTab S2109

Welcome to a Laptop Ac Adapter specialist
of the Lenovo Ac Adapter

If you’re in the market for an Android tablet then we have news for you about an upcoming one from Lenovo, the IdeaTab S2109. Currently enjoying the FCC experience it looks as though the IdeaTab S2109 could release later this month.

The IdeaTab S2109 (full name S2109A-F) has shown itself on the FCC database and sources say that is has a 9.7-inch 4:3 IPS display, a Texas Instruments OMAP processor and 4 SRS-ready speakers. It will be running the latest Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich operating system and Engadget deduces from the FCC diagrams that it also has a microSD slot on the outside.

One interesting factor is that the product label shows a huge 2.5A input at 5V indicating a 12.5W adapter such as Lenovo 92P1106 Ac Adapter, Lenovo 3000 C100 Ac Adapter, Lenovo FRU 92P1108 Ac Adapter, Lenovo 40Y7668 Ac Adapter, Lenovo 92P1160 Ac Adapter, Lenovo 3000 Ac Adapter, Lenovo ThinkPad R60 Ac Adapter, Lenovo ThinkPad T60 Ac Adapter, Lenovo 3000 V100 Ac Adapter, Lenovo 40Y7660 Ac Adapter, Lenovo 92P1157 Ac Adapter, Lenovo 92P1106 Ac Adapter. This is a big step up in tablet consumption and suggests quicker charging times. By comparison the new iPad and many other tablets currently have consumption at 10W.
Engadget’s source says that the IdeaTab S2109 will launch this month though it’s not yet known where we’ll see it first. However FCC documents list markets that it will appear in as Canada, Chile, China, Germany, India, Japan, Mexico, Russia, Turkmenistan and the U.S. The tablet is said to be assembled at Foxconn with the display being supplied by Chi Mei.

We’ll bring you more about the Lenovo IdeaTab S2109 as we hear it and there could certainly be more than a few people interested in this latest offering with Android ICS from Lenovo. Does this sound like a tablet that you might be interested in? Will you be waiting to hear more about the Lenovo IdeaTab S2109?

Follow Phones Review on Facebook and Twitter.
Read More About: android, Lenovo IdeaTab S2109

Chelsio Delivers Network Direct

Welcome to a Laptop Ac Adapter specialist
of the IBM Ac Adapter

SUNNYVALE, Calif., March 2, 2012 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ -- Chelsio Communications, a leading provider of 10Gb Ethernet Unified Wire Adapters, ASICs and Unified Storage solutions, today announced the availability of Network Direct (ND) Driver for Windows Server 2008 R2 on the Chelsio T4 Unified Wire adapters. The Chelsio T4 Unified Wire adapters are the only Internet Wide Area RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access) Protocol (iWARP) cards in the industry that are fully tested and certified for ND on Windows Server 2008. This Microsoft certification enables Chelsio T4 adapters like IBM 02K5669 Ac Adapter, IBM Thinkpad 290 Ac Adapter, IBM 92P1025 Ac Adapter, IBM ThinkPad R51 Ac Adapter, IBM 40Y7668 Ac Adapter, IBM ThinkPad T60 Ac Adapter, IBM ThinkPad Z60 Ac Adapter, IBM ThinkPad T40 Ac Adapter, IBM 92P1021 Ac Adapter, IBM ThinkPad 600 Ac Adapter, IBM ThinkPad T42 Ac Adapter, IBM 08K8209 Ac Adapterto be the preferred high performance, cost-effective iWARP Ethernet RDMA solution for all Windows high performance computing (HPC) applications.

The Chelsio ND driver is Windows Hardware Quality Lab (WHQL)-certified by Microsoft as an iWARP Ethernet RDMA solution for HPC clusters running Windows 2008 R2. In addition, Chelsio's ND driver and T4 Unified Wire Adapters have been fully qualified by IBM as part of the HPC solution for the IBM® Intelligent Cluster products (IBM's fully integrated, factory-built and tested high performance cluster products).

"Exxact servers utilize Microsoft Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 8 Operating Systems to provide optimized throughput for datacenter applications," says Jason Chen, VP of Exxact Corporation. "By leveraging Chelsio network cards we can further improve networking optimizations and capabilities that increase I/O efficiency and decrease I/O latency through Microsoft Network Direct."

The ND driver for T4 Unified Wire adapters is available for free from the Chelsio Download Center.

About Chelsio Communications, Inc.

Chelsio is a leading technology company focused on solving high performance networking and storage challenges for virtualized enterprise data centers, cloud service installations, and cluster computing environments. Now shipping its fourth generation protocol acceleration technology, Chelsio is delivering hardware and software solutions including Unified Wire Ethernet network adapter cards, unified storage software, high performance storage gateways, unified management software, bypass cards, and other solutions focused on specialized applications. Visit the company at www.chelsio.com .

HP Mini 40W AC Adapter

Welcome to a Laptop Ac Adapter specialist
of the Hp Ac Adapter

Prices, specifications, availability and terms of offers may change without notice. Quantity limits may apply to orders, including orders for discounted and promotional items. Despite our best efforts, a small number of items may contain pricing, typography, or photography errors. Correct prices and promotions are validated at the time your order is placed. These terms apply only to products sold by the HP Home & Home Office Store; reseller offers may vary. Items sold by the HP Home & Home Office Store are not for immediate resale. Orders that do not comply with HP Home & Home Office Store terms, conditions, and limitations may be cancelled.

Based on Passmark Report passmark2011 with adapter such as HP F1781A Ac Adapter, HP 298238-001 Ac Adapter, HP OmniBook 2106 Ac Adapter, HP OmniBook 6050 Ac Adapter, HP Pavilion N5500 Ac Adapter, HP Pavilion n6400 Ac Adapter, HP Pavilion XF125 Ac Adapter, HP Pavilion ZT1130 Ac Adapter, HP ED495AA Ac Adapter, HP 391173-001 Ac Adapter, HP ACC23H Ac Adapter, HP Pavilion DV1000 Ac Adapter and Dennis Technology Labs dennislabs2011

Intel's numbering is not a measurement of higher performance.

Actual formatted capacity is less. A portion of the hard drive is reserved for system recovery software: for notebooks, up to 40GB (Windows 7); for desktops, up to 26GB (Windows 7). For hard drives, 1GB=1 billion bytes.

This PC is preloaded with reduced-functionality versions of Word and Excel with advertising. NOT INCLUDED: PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote, Access and Publisher.

In-home warranty is available only on select customizable HP desktop PCs. Need for in-home service is determined by HP support representative. Customer may be required to run system self-test programs or correct reported faults by following advice given over phone. On-site services provided only if issue can't be corrected remotely. Service not available holidays and weekends.

After first page; see www.hp.com/go/inkjetprinter for details.

AMD's model numbering is not a measurement of clock speed. Dual/Quad/Triple Core is a new technology designed to improve performance of multithreaded software products and hardware-aware multitasking operating systems and may require appropriate operating system software for full benefit. Not all customers or software applications will necessarily benefit from use of this technology.

Battery life will vary depending on the product model, configuration, loaded applications, features, use, wireless functionality (including the wireless functionality) and power management settings. The maximum capacity of the battery will naturally decrease with time and usage. See MobileMark07 battery benchmarkproducts/mobilemark2007 for additional details.

This system may require upgraded and/or separately purchased hardware and/or a DVD drive to install the Windows 7 software and take full advantage of Windows 7 functionality.See http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/ for details.

Majority of laser AiOs<$750, printers<$300, using Officejet Pro products with XL cartridges; for details:

Intel, the Intel logo, Intel Core and Core Inside are trademarks or registered trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries in the United States and other countries.

Patriot Memory PBO Alpine Media Player

Welcome to a Laptop Ac Adapter specialist
of the Fujitsu Ac Adapter

On the heels of its Box Office success, Patriot Memory has a brand new HD media player coming to market that is powered by an ARM926 processor and running Android 2.2. Could the PBO Alpine the next edition to your HD home entertainment experience? With a tremendous feature set inside a tiny footprint, we think it is worthy.
Patriot Memory, a company best known for its memory products, has branched out in recent years, establishing itself as a major player in the HD media player market with its Patriot Box Office line. In fact, we reviewed one of the original Patriot Box Office media players right here over two years ago.

Established in 1985, Patriot offers a wide range of memory products including SSD with adapter like Fujitsu ACC10 Ac Adapter, Fujitsu ACB25 Ac Adapter, Fujitsu Lifebook B2610 Ac Adapter, Fujitsu LifeBook A1010 Ac Adapter, Fujitsu LifeBook C2010 Ac Adapter, Fujitsu LifeBook E2010 Ac Adapter, Fujitsu Lifebook P2040 Ac Adapter, Fujitsu Lifebook E6520 Ac Adapter, Fujitsu Lifebook S6010 Ac Adapter, Fujitsu Lifebook P2000 Ac Adapter, Fujitsu Stylistic 3500 Ac Adapter, Fujitsu Stylistic LT Ac Adapter, flash media devices, desktop memory and multimedia products. According to the Patriot website, the company has offices located throughout the U.S. and Asia.
Today we are looking at the company's latest HD media player, the Patriot Memory PBO Alpine. The company describes the Patriot Memory PBO Alpine as follows:

The Patriot Memory PBO Alpine is the perfect choice for those looking for ultimate flexibility and functionality in a media player solution. Powered by an ARM926 processor and Android OS, the PBO Alpine will support full 1080p playback and will offer a wide range of connectivity options including HDMI, Component, and optical audio out.

Providing out of the box entertainment, the Patriot Memory PBO Alpine will come preloaded with YouTube, iTV, iRadio, Picasa, and a fully functional web browser. For enthusiast buyers, the PBO Alpine will offer support for user developed Apps that can be side-loaded for custom functionality.

The PBO Alpine will deliver full support for M-JPEG, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, H.263, H.264, VC-1, DivX, Xvid, RealVideo, VP6, .MKV and surround sound/stereo decoders for Dolby Digital Plus, and DTS 2.0. For easy connectivity to all your media files, the Patriot Memory PBO Alpine will include a wired connection and seamlessly integrate in to your home network.

Dell snaps up RNA Networks

Welcome to a Laptop Ac Adapter specialist
of the Dell Ac Adapter

Dell has quietly acquired Portland, Oregon-based RNA Networks, one of a handful of innovative startups that have been launched in the past couple of years to glue multiple x64-based servers together and allow them to look like a single, monster server to specific workloads.

Dell has not made a formal announcement of the acquisition, but the RNA Networks site made this simple statement last Friday:

"RNA Networks, Inc. has been acquired by Dell Inc. Dell Inc. (NASDAQ: DELL) listens to customers and delivers innovative technology and services that give them the power to do more."

The announcement also included a sales pitch for you to look for a career at Dell. The rest of the RNA Networks site has gone the way of all flesh.

Dell didn't want to say much more about the acquisition at this point. "RNA Networks has a great memory virtualization technology that Dell will leverage in future offerings," Dell said in a statement to The Register.

A Dell spokesman confirmed that the deal has been completed and said that Dell is not disclosing the terms of the agreement or providing a timeline on when specific product offerings using RNA Networks intellectual property will be used – or where.

But clearly, there are a lot of places where Dell can use the RNA Networks software in its systems, storage, and networking products.

And it is about time that Dell decided sophisticated server clustering technology was strategic to its future and that it needed to be less reliant on partnerships to provide this basic functionality.

RNA study
RNA Networks was founded in 2006 by Ranjit Pandit, who led the database clustering project at SilverStorm Technologies (which was eaten by QLogic) and who worked on the InfiniBand interconnect and the Pentium 4 chip while at Intel.

It received $7m in Series A venture funding in March 2008, and closed a $7m Series B round in February 2009. Menlo Ventures, Oregon Angel Fund, Divergent Ventures, and Reference Capital have all kicked in dough to RNA Networks.

The company included techies from supercomputer maker Cray, chip maker Intel, host bus adapter like Dell Latitude D820 Ac Adapter, Dell Latitude D500 Ac Adapter, Dell Inspiron E1505 Ac Adapter, Dell Inspiron E1405 Ac Adapter, Dell Inspiron 600M Ac Adapter, Dell Inspiron E1705 Ac Adapter, Dell Latitude X200 Ac Adapter, Dell Inspiron 2650 Ac Adapter, Dell Inspiron 2600 Ac Adapter, Dell Inspiron 2500 Ac Adapter, Dell Inspiron 7500 Ac Adapter, Dell Latitude CS Ac Adapter maker QLogic, and Web caching provider Akamai. The thing that they all had in common is expertise in caching, interconnects, and remote direct access memory (RDMA) technology.

Shared global memory
RNA Networks came out of stealth mode in February 2009 with a server virtualization technology that doesn't carve up a single physical server into multiple virtual machines.

Instead it takes multiple servers and clues their processors and memory into a single virtual image for applications to run upon, just like they would on big and expensive SMP and NUMA servers. It is fairly easy to create a server virtualization hypervisor but it is tricky to create the high-speed networks and virtualization

The RNA software, which has gone by a number of different names in its short history, creates a pool of shared global memory from main memory in each server node that can be accessed like a cache by all of the other nodes in a cluster.

The server nodes can be linked with either Ethernet or InfiniBand networks, with or without RDMA turned on, but obviously InfiniBand with RDMA or Ethernet with RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) will significantly improve the performance of the virtualized memory pool.

RNA Networks then plunks a messaging engine, an API layer, and a pointer updating algorithm on top of the global shred memory infrastructure, with the net effect that all nodes in the cluster see the global shared memory as their own main memory.

The RNA code keeps the memory coherent across the server, giving all the benefits of an SMP or NUMA server without actually lashing the CPUs on each machine together tightly so they can run one copy of the operating system.

For financing and scientific applications that run messaging protocols, this approach allows for both horizontal application scalability and very fast data sharing across the nodes.

RNAmessenger, the company's first product, deployed on 32-bit or 64-bit hardware and runs on Sparc, Power (including the now defunct Cell chip), x86, x64, and Itanium processors. The software could boost throughput on workloads by a factor or 10 to 30 times and scale to hundreds of nodes and multiple terabytes of main memory across those nodes.

Memory Virtualization Acceleration
Last July, RNA Networks rejiggered its product line, converging a bunch of separate features in RNAmessenger and RNAcache, a separate but related product for Web caching, into a single product called Memory Virtualization Acceleration, or MVX for short, and put out a 2.5 release.

This included a bunch of new features called Memory Cache, Memory Motion, and Memory Store. The cache feature turns a memory pool into a cache for network-attached storage (NAS) arrays, which RNA Networks contends is a lot cheaper than putting gobs of memory onto a NAS box.

Memory Store turns the memory pool into virtual block storage devices that look like virtual RAMdisks to servers. The Memory Motion feature is aimed at giving operating systems on virtual servers a swap device to get around waiting for the underlying iron, which might be disks or solid state drives, to get data.

As you might expect, the MVX block device was very fast, reading data 52 times faster and writing data 24 times faster than SATA disks; it absolutely blows away SSDs, too, which makes sense, with main memory being so much faster than flash memory.

The benefit of the MVX software is that hypervisors, operating systems, and applications that have been written for disk access don't have to be recoded - you just point them at the MVX software, which looks and smells like a file or block device, depending on what you need.

Dell sprays hot fluid data across storage products

Welcome to a Laptop Ac Adapter specialist
of the Dell Ac Adapter

Dell's fluid data is travelling faster and further, with its first Data Domain replacement box, a SharePoint object storage system, and more capable Compellent SANs that better support VMware and have faster network links.

Fluid data is Dell's concept of having data stored, manageable, protected and accessible across its Compellent (FC SAN), EqualLogic (ISCSI SAN), PowerVault (entry-level) and DX6000 (object storage) arrays, with scale-out NAS (Exanet) and data reduction technology (Ocarina) available independently and across the four platforms.

The company aims to provide dynamic tiering, native cloud integration, scale-out designs, storage efficiency and other features forming its fluid data concept across its storage products so users get consistent features and ownership experiences across them.

Specifically tiering will be extended from its availability within individual platforms today to taking it cross-platform, adding file tiering, cloud tiering, and treating cache in servers as a tier.

Dell storage will support open standards. The company says it will work better when integrated with Dell servers and networking than with other vendors' servers and networking products. The mantra is "better together".

Today, at its Storage Forum in London, Dell is introducing its first disk-to-disk backup product using Ocarina technology, the DR4000 with adapter such as Dell 02H098 Ac Adapter, Dell 2H098 Ac Adapter, Dell Inspiron 1000 Ac Adapter, Dell Inspiron 1100 Ac Adapter, Dell Inspiron 5100 Ac Adapter, Dell Precision M50 Ac Adapter, Dell Latitude D800 Ac Adapter, Dell Inspiron 6400 Ac Adapter, Dell Latitude D620 Ac Adapter, Dell Precision M60 Ac Adapter, Dell Inspiron 6000 Ac Adapter, Dell Latitude X300 Ac Adapter; version 6 of the Compellent SAN software which moves from 32-bit to 64-bit addressing; a SharePoint backup and archiving system based on the the DX6000, and software from AvePoint; and support for 16Gbit/s Fibre Channel and 10Gbit/s Ethernet switching products.

The DR4000 is the deduplicating disk-to-disk backup product that first surfaced last November. It is aimed at small and medium businesses and smaller enterprises, and uses the Ocarina deduplication, compression and optimisation technology Dell acquired in July 2010. This was targeted by Ocarina at various image file formats but is now being applied to backup data streams and has had inline deduplication functionality added.

Dell figures a 15:1 deduplication ratio can be obtained and this reduces costs down towards $0.25/GB. The DR4000 is available at raw capacity levels of 3.6, 7.2 and 12TB, which Dell says provide logical capacity levels of 35, 70 and 130TB respectively – assuming the aforesaid 15:1 data reduction ratio. All software features are included in a single license, including 1-to-1 replication and Symantec OST support. RAID 6 support is also included.

The DR4000 does a write verify before committing data to disk, writes data with a calculated checksum and then runs background inspections of the checksums to ensure data integrity. Hardware scans are also run in the background.

Dell spokesperson Bill Robbins said: "[The Ingest speed is] 1TB/hour over NFS and can go as high as 4TB/hour with other protocols that would be launched in the short term."

We asked if the DR4000 has anything like DataDomain's Boost, to work with Symantec backup and have the media server do some of the deduplication work and so speed ingest? Robbins said: "That is currently in the plans for the near term, but not available as part of today's announcement." Dell says that OST support will come after the DR4000's RTS (Ready To Ship) date.

DataDomain's DD160 has a standard 40TB logical capacity while the DD620 offers an 83TB logical capacity. The 160 ingests data at 1.1TB/hour with Boost, the use of Symantec's OST to have the media server pre-process the backup data stream, and 667GB/hour without it. The 620 uses Boost to reach 2.4TB/hour and runs at 1.1TB/hour without it. All software features are included in the base price.

Quantum's DXi4500 is for the SMB customer and deduplicates at up to 1.4TB/hour both for NAS and with Symantec's OpenStorage (OST). The DXi4510 has a 2TB capacity while the DXi4601 ranges from 4 to 12TB capacity.

Dell's DR4000 is faster than the un-Boosted DD160 and comparable to the Boosted DD160 and un-Boosted DD620. It is not as fast as the DXi4500 but has a larger base capacity than the 4510 while matching that of the 4601 product.

Dell will expand the DR4000 product range, adding speed and capacity, to cover larger enterprise requirements and, no doubt, support remote and branch offices as well. Future functionality will be added via firmware upgrades so that existing users don't have to forklift upgrade their kit to get additional features.

The company tells us that there will be integration with disaster recovery, data movement without rehydration, and WAN optimisation function additions, as well as many-to-1 replication in future releases. There will also be more ISV and partner integration.

The O/S for Compellent storage arrays, Storage Center, has a major upgrade to v6.0, and gets 64-bit support plus extended VMware integration. This release was mentioned in March last year, when the prospect of tiering data in 32K block sizes instead of the currently used 512K block size was discussed. Such finer granularity would increase storage efficiency by being more certain that only hot data was stored on the faster and more expensive tiers of storage such as SSDs.

This move to tiering smaller blocks would be possible through 64-bit addressing, enabling a vastly larger number of blocks to be tracked. Storage Center 6.0 does not offer such smaller block size tiering yet, but it is the platform on which such additions of functionality will be built, and has the addition of Exanet scale-out NAS and Ocarina data reduction technologies.

Bob Fine, Compellent's product marketing director, said the new release doubles the cache in the controller and on Dell cache cards.

It also offers more VMware and VAAI support. Storage Center already supports block zeroing. Now copy offload and hardware-assisted locking primitives are present as well. Fine said these can make deployment of virtual machines up to 40 per cent faster. Support for a Thin Provisioning Unmap VAAI primitive is in the product but there is a problem.

Robbins said: "VMware has pulled support for the product as posted in this blog . As such, VMware is not providing support for the feature." Dell, like every other VMware VAAI partner, is waiting for VMware to fix this, if it can fix it.

A Storage Replication Adapter download is available for VMware SRM 5 enabling automated failback from a disaster, and planned workflows for migration and downtime. With SRM 5, Dell says, "all disaster recovery hardware and software support [can] be provided by the Dell Compellent Copilot support organisation."

There is a vSphere 5 Client plug-in and integration between Compellent's Enterprise Manager console and vSphere 5. This means vSphere 5 admins can manage pools of storage in Compellent arrays without having to use Enterprise Manager directly.

There is also integration with CommVault's snapshot-based protection with its application-aware recovery.

HP revs NonStop blades with Tukwila Itaniums

Welcome to a Laptop Ac Adapter specialist
of the Compaq Ac Adapter

Hewlett-Packard is moving its NonStop fault tolerant database and operating system up to the latest "Tukwila" Itanium 9300 technology from chip partner Intel.

The quad-core Itanium 9300s were launched by Intel back in February 2010, and HP revamped its Integrity blade servers to make use of these chips and to allow for them to be snapped together in two or four units to make SMP servers using the extra QuickPath Interconnect (QPI) buses on the Tukwila chips. The base Tukwila-based Integrity blade debuting back in April 2010 was the BL860c, a two-socket blade with a dozen DDR3 main memory slots. When you snap two of them together with the SMP port (which is external to the blade on the front of the chassis), it becomes the BL870c i2, and when you link four of them, you get the BL890c i2.

With the Integrity NonStop, HP plunks a NonStop ServerNet card into the mezzanine slot that would normally have a Gigabit, 10 Gigabit, or InfiniBand networking adapter like Compaq 101898-001 Ac Adapter, Compaq Armada E500 Ac Adapter, Compaq Evo N610C Ac Adapter, Compaq Presario X1036 Ac Adapter, Compaq ACC10H Ac Adapter, Compaq PPP012L Ac Adapter, Compaq Armada M700 Ac Adapter, Compaq OmniBook XE2 Ac Adapter, Compaq Presario 1200 Ac Adapter, Compaq Presario R4000 Ac Adapter, Compaq PPP014H Ac Adapter, Compaq PV158PA Ac Adapter. This ServerNet, along with the NonStop kernel, is what makes the system fault tolerant. As was the case with the prior Integrity NonStop NB50000c blades, based on the dual-core Itanium 9100s and announced back in June 2008, the new blade only has one processor socket of the two on the blade populated when it runs the NonStop kernel and relational database. It has to do with the balance of I/O across the blades, which are linked into nodes and then clustered into systems by ServerNet.

Not everyone wanted blades in the NonStop world, so in March 2009, HP put out the NS2000 rack server to run NonStop, which was clustered into logical nodes using ServerNet and then further clustered into fault tolerant systems.

The new NB54000c blade is based on the BL860c i2 blade from last April, and it only comes with one processor option: the four-core 1.6 GHz Itanium 9340, which has a 1.73 GHz Turbo Boost speed bump and which has 20 MB of L3 cache on chip. HP is not making the 1.73 GHz Itanium 9350 part available in the new Integrity NonStop blade, which has 24 MB of L3 cache and runs a little faster, but which costs $3,838 a pop in 1,000-unit quantities, compared to the $2,059 price tag on the Itanium 9340.

The three other Itanium 9300 chips, which run slower and cooler than this 185 watt part, are not certified for use in NonStop configurations. The base NB54000c blade comes with 16 GB of main memory, expandable to 48 GB. HP has only certified 4 GB memory sticks on the blade. There is no point in adding the second socket of processors and beefing up the node with lots of memory since the whole point of a fault tolerant cluster is to have lots of nodes doing a modest amount of work.

The NB54000c blade plugs into the same BladeSystem c7000 chassis that regular ProLiant and Integrity blade. The blades support SAS 2.0 disks, which offer more throughput than prior generations of drives uses in the system. The minimum configuration of a NonStop blade box has two blades and a single logical node can scale up to 16 blades. Up to 255 of these logical nodes can be linked together using ServerNet for a total of 4,080 nodes for a total of 16,320 cores. The NonStop system can support up to 192,000 program processes per node and just under 49 million across the fully expanded ServerNet network. That's plenty of headroom, with the typical large NonStop customer sporting somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000 cores in their clusters.

Bob Kossler, director of strategy and planning for the NonStop line in HP's Business Critical Systems division, tells El Reg that an entry two-blade system with the NonStop kernel and database plus memory, disk, ServerNet links, and networking to the outside world costs somewhere between $100,000 and $200,000. Yes, that is mainframe-class pricing, and that is because Tandem products (no matter whose brand is on the front, Compaq or HP) offer mainframe-class availability and I/O scalability.

That price includes a slight uptick for the software stack and about the same price for the hardware stack, and customers whose workloads are not cache sensitive are seeing more than a 2X performance boost moving from the dual-core Itanium 9100 to the quad-core Itanium 9300 blades. That is close to twice the bang for the buck for the typical NonStop shop, which is about what you would expect over a three-year product cycle.

You may have written the NonStop server business off as being a totally niche product, but HP has not. In the wake of the acquisition of Compaq by HP the NonStop business declined, just as IBM's System z mainframe did, but Kossler says that the business actually recovered in the years following the dot-com bust. And while the NonStop business took some lumps in the Great Recession, Kossler is optimistic about the future, and not just because the IBM mainframe is on the rebound in recent quarters.

"This is a solid business," says Kossler. "As the financial services sector recovers, we expect to get growth. We have already seen good growth among our telecom provider customers - those iPhone and iPads are a curse for network operators and a blessing for both us and them."

Kossler says that there are not many of the pre-Integrity NonStop S generation of machines out there in the world, but there are still a few. And unlike the server market at large, the NonStop base is really taking a shining to the blade versions over the rack versions. More than half of HP's NonStop sales are for blade versions now, which compares to about 15 per cent for the server market at large these days.

Asus UX21E Zenbook 11.6in Ultrabook

Welcome to a Laptop Ac Adapter specialist
of the Asus Ac Adapter

Having already reviewed the slightly larger Asus UX31E Zenbook for El Reg, and quite liking it, I whinged that sending me the UX21E model would be a waste of time. It wasn’t, obviously, because you’re reading this. I loved it. In fact, I preferred it.

For such a small device, the Asus UX21E has a big feel – in use, nothing seems cramped

The Zenbook, if you didn’t know already, is Asus’s take on the growing Ultrabook craze kickstarted by Apple when it decided to turn its MacBook Air from a smart-arse tech demo into a half-decent portable computer with adapter like Asus ADP-65DB Ac Adapter, Asus A6 Ac Adapter, Asus A7 Ac Adapter, Asus A8 Ac Adapter, Asus F9 Ac Adapter, Asus U5 Ac Adapter, Asus A6JA Ac Adapter, Asus A7J Ac Adapter, Asus A8Js Ac Adapter, Asus Z91 Ac Adapter, Asus W3V Ac Adapter, Asus Z61a Ac Adapter. Naturally, cramming a Windows PC into a notebook that’s roughly a centimetre thick – and that’s with the lid shut, by the way – involves sacrificing components. In my opinion, Asus made all the right decisions when choosing what to put in and what to leave out.

For a start, the brushed aluminium case is the case: it’s not just some ghastly surface effect. Such a skinny computer would be dangerously flimsy built from plastic. During on-the-road testing, the solid metal build of the Zenbook prevented me from accidentally folding it in half – in one instance, diagonally (don’t ask).

Build from (not just clad in) an aluminium alloy, the case is extremely sturdy

Opening the notebook is a bit tricky. Perhaps it’s a security feature, but getting a grip on the micron-wide overlap between the flush lid and base isn’t something I could achieve without a struggle every time.

The case then opens smoothly and silently to reveal a pleasantly uncluttered keyboard layout with 12 Function Keys but no numeric keypad. The metallic key caps look as if they might rattle but they don’t. In fact, the action of the keyboard is unusually quiet and it is very comfortable to use. If I had to be picky, I might complain that black labels on metallic key caps are less legible than, say, black on white or vice versa. But I can’t say I ever thought about it while testing.

Yes, it really is that thin. I ended up holding it in one hand like a tablet

In front of the keyboard is a trackpad that at 104 x 63mm is unexpectedly large for such a small notebook. It supports one-, two- and three-finger gestures, including scrolls, swipes, zoom and rotate. It even has a little line printed near the front edge to help fuckwits work out where to tap for left and right clicks. Best of all, the trackpad is sensitive to a light touch, so no brutish pressing or squeezing is required.