Cloud computing will shine on SSD, but your free storage might go away when it does.

The reason you get free storage on Gmail and SkyDrive and Mozy and flickr and all the other Web 2.0 services isn’t just to keep up with all the other Web 2.0 services. It isn’t just to draw in visitors who can see and click ads. It’s because when you use hard drives, especially cheap, consumer grade hard drives, to run your search engine on, the only way to make that storage fast enough is to leave most of it empty.

The hard drives that Google stacks together are never more than 25% full, because any more than that and the latency to get the information back off is just too slow to make the search effective and slap the ads on it. The other 75% is just sitting there spinning around on the platter and making you happy by putting your files on there for free makes sense.

You don’t need access often enough to slow down Google’s own accesses and Google can queue your request up to retrieve when it’s convenient - your Internet connection isn’t fast enough for you to notice.

SSD is still expensive, but it could save a lot of money for enterprises and Web services because it’s lower power. For a notebook PC you care about 15% longer battery life - if Intel’s figures carry over to real PCs; for a data centre, you care about Watts/IOPS and Intel is claiming SSD can offer six times the read performance using 98% less power and needing only 75% of the space - because you can put cooler drives closer together without space for fans and AC. That means SSD should quickly start to become common. But that could also mean the end of ever-increasing free online storage.

On the one hand, SSD is fast enough that latency is much less of a problem, so you don’t have to leave most of it empty. And on the other, it’s expensive enough that you don’t want to leave any of it empty. 

Battery life? Performance? No, the important test Intel’s new SSD passes is known internally as P*ssmark…

That’s the nickname for the way Intel tests how much of a difference SSD makes to user experience. It’s not just about how much extra battery life, although I’d like the expected 14 hours batter life I could get from the HP 2730p, the next version of my tablet, with SSD and the thin slab battery I already get 8 or 9 hours from.

The improved performance isn’t just for looking good in benchmarks or running video editing apps most people don’t use, it’s for stopping you sitting at the screen hollering “what are you doing!” as the hard drive light flashes on and off and Outlook sits there staring blankly. Not that it’s always Outlook; Acrobat is pretty good at sitting on its thumb, as are plenty of other applications. And as notebooks get smaller and lighter and 5400rpm is seen as something to aspire to, you can be left waiting far too often.

According to Intel’s cheekily named and possibly unscientific internal benchmark, you’ll be gnashing your teeth ten times less with an Intel SSD than a hard drive. They worked this out by asking a group of Intel employees to mark on a log sheet how often they got fed up enough with their computer to remember that they were keeping score. After two weeks they swapped them over to SSDs. And then after another two weeks, they made them go back to hard drives instead, sticking to show their frustration.

That frustration - and the tick marks - went down significantly Intel’s Principle Enginner for NAND Stephen Wells told me. “Not to zero; I’d still get annoyed if Windows blue-screened or something,” he said. But ten times less frustration was very noticeable. “And oh, the moaning and whining you got when we made people go back to the hard drive. I know - I was one of them. Do you want to get rid of your mouse? No.  Do you want to go back to DOS? No. In a few years will you want to get rid of your SSD? Absolutely not.”

 Not only is flash faster than hard drive, it’s more consistent. The 34 seconds it took to run through the photo and video tasks in one of Intel’s benchmarks always came out somewhere between 30 and 35 seconds, no matter how often the team ran it. But with the 5400rpm hard drive, Intel’s Chris Saleski told me the day before, the results were anywhere from one and a half minutes to two and a half minutes. 

Wells puts that down to the fact that data can be scattered anywhere around the disk and there’s an unknown latency in getting to it and getting it back that you don’t see with SSD - and he expects that to mean a more deterministic battery life with SSD as well. That way, when Windows says you have an hour of battery life left, you won’t find the machine hibernating to save your data fifteen minutes later. And that’s another thing I’d be ticking the frustration mark for…

Did you ever have one of those days when everything seemed to be getting bigger?

I recently put the largest machine we’ve ever had onto our office network. A 64-bit server, with 6GB of RAM and 1TB of disk, it’s taken on the role of handling all our mail and files. When a new desktop PC arrives later this week, there’ll be over 7TB of storage on this small office network.

Just a couple of years ago we were surprised if we had more than 500GB of storage in an office. Turning back the clock still further, I helped design a UK-scale photo storage service, where we had a hierarchical storage system with a whole 3TB of spinning disk and 30TB of fast tape. Today’s fast external drives are making that architecture obsolete - our new server is using eSATA to do a whole server backup onto a 500GB drive. That back up? It only takes 30 minutes…

Outside out office the usual run of press releases seem focused on delivering larger and larger numbers. Cuil’s leaked launch (and the claimed size of its index) led Google to claim that it had indexed over 1 trillion web pages. That’s a pretty big number - 10 to the power of 12. It’s also the approximate number of bacteria living on the human body.

Closer to home, BT is claiming that it’s hooked up just under 17 million homes with broadband connections. It turns out that there aren’t many more homes to be connected, with broadband analysts Point Topic suggesting there are only around a million households that can migrate to broadband left - and around 9.6 million that don’t have internet access at all. The days of massive growth in broadband are behind us now, and what was a luxury is rapidly becoming a commodity. It would be interesting to see the spreadhseets at BT, as the company juggles the numbers to see how it can make money from running the data pipes.

After all, there’s plenty of scope for bringing the world online. Gartner recently suggested that there were over a billion PCs in use around the world (and soon there’ll be a billion transistors in each processor, thanks to Intel). While getting to a billion PCs in 30 years may seem a lot, there’ll be another billion in just 6 years, thanks to 12% annual growth. There
’s a lot of scope for significant social change here, as the emerging world (and especially the BRIC nations) start coming on line. The anglophile web will become just a part of a global, multi-lingual web - after all, even without the iPhone, China Mobile subscribers use more mobile data than any other network.

With all those machines, and all that information out there, there’s an issue of managing the information - and manging the storage it requires. The BBC has just such a problem.

The archive is currently managing about 700,000 digital items, with most of it still on discrete media (digital video tape, CDs, DVDs). There are about 280,000 actual master files, digitised from U-Matic video and 1/4″ audio originals, and from magnetic sound tracks. Then there are 60,000 viewing-quality video files, but these are held on CD-ROM in anticipation of a mass storage system. Overall they’re managing 12 petabytes, mainly on digital videotape - with a growth rate of about 400 terabytes a year, mainly on digital videotape.

If the numbers in your office are getting to big, be glad you’re not dealing with any of the really big numbers out there!

Where has 32GB of disk space gone and how do I make Vista give it back, or there’s no such thing as a free lunch.

When we’re on the road at conferences I take a fair few photographs, and I copy a lot of PowerPoints and PDFs onto my notebook, not to mention photographing products I’m reviewing, and then there’s recordings of interviews… It all takes up space, so when I got an 8 megapixel camera the day we drove into Death Valley I did wonder if disk space on my notebook might be a problem.

Over the last few weeks I’ve been kicking along with only a few gigabytes of my 84GB disk free. Simon, who has the same laptop and takes just as many photos, had already removed the recovery partition to get 8GB back. And last week at TechEd I got down to just 1GB free,. I grabbed the biggest USB stick I have, which at 32GB is a sizable proportion of my hard drive space, and started looking for files to move, using the excellent WinDirStat to see a treemap and size-sorted folder list. Recordings and photos were the obvious place to start and after I transferred a few gigabytes of those I had enough room to download more PowerPoints and worry later. The figures didn’t seem quite right, but I was spending more time thinking about how soon we could move the server to Windows Server 2008 to get faster network file copying with SMB 2: I want to know if the 30-40x Microsoft is claiming will work for us.

Yesterday I sat down to copy the photos and recordings still on my tablet PC onto the server and after removing 3GB of recordings I had - about the same space I’d started with. I’d get up to 2.2GB and then go back down to 1.9GB or right back to 800MB free. I ran disk cleanup and deleted two 500MB files of crash reports that were hanging around waiting to upload, and felt I was rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. I ran WinDirStat and wondered why Windows needs 13GB of disk space, 6GB of which is in the WinSxS directory - ’side by side’ versions of files to avoid DLL hell. I kept coming back to the 8GB of photos that I wanted to keep on my notebook, the 11GB I use for OneNote and Outlook caches (recordings and attachments again), the fact that the conference files I was worrying about where only 2GB because the XML PowerPoint format is so compact…  and finally I looked at the summary at the top of WinDirStat that was telling me I only had 46GB of files on my hard drive.

Oh no, I thought; finally an application I care about that doesn’t run properly under Vista. Maybe every folder is just bigger. WinDirStat says it’s 20.9GB for the Users folder tree but Explorer says- well Explorer said 20.9GB as well. It’s not the swap and hibernation files; I can see 3GB for each of them in WinDirStat and besides, 84.2GB-46.5GB is some 32GB of disk space that’s missing. I cleared everything except the last system restore point: no difference. If I had 32GB of bad sectors, the hard drive ought to have raised the white flag in surrender by now. Where else would Vista be hiding disk space?

There’s a great new feature that Apple put into the Leopard release of Mac OS X called Time Machine, that takes a copy of all your files as you edit them, creating continuous backup so you can find files you’ve deleted and undo changes you made long after you’ve saved a document and moved on. Apart from the starry backdrop and the timeline scrollbar this is exactly the same as the Volume Shadow copy that Microsoft put into Windows Server 2003, which powers the Previous Versions feature in Vista, as well as System Restore. Shadow because you have to copy the ’shadow’ a file casts if it’s open or you can’t copy it at all, volume because it can get any or all files on that drive and Volume Shadow because, let’s face it, Microsoft has no clue about good product and feature names.

The interface is much less sexy too; you right-click on a file or folder and choose Restore previous versions. And how do you see how much space this really useful feature is using?

First you have to open a command prompt as an administrator; I run as a standard user because I don’t mind clicking on a dialog that confirms it’s me and not a virus mucking with the internals of Windows, so I hit the Start button, type CMD and right-click on the Command Prompt icon that appears to choose Run as Admin.  The command for working with Volume Shadow Services is VSSAdmin and the command to find out how much space it has its shadowy fingers on is:

VSSAdmin List ShadowStorage

By default, Vista gives 15% of total disk space or 30% of free disk space to System Restore and Volume Shadow Services, whichever is smaller. There’s no slider to adjust as there was in XP and the space doesn’t change unless you turn System Restore on and off - which deletes all the previous versions and restore points, so while it’s easy it’s not really a good idea. But you’re going to want to check and probably change the setting because a lot of PCs seem to think 15% isn’t enough and set the upper limit to - well, all the free disk space you have.  In my case Vista had used 15GB of space for previous versions, it had allocated itself 16GB of space and the maximum space was UNBOUNDED. Yes, all my free disk space. I could have gone back to the day I turned on the notebook and got the files I was editing - but that’s not much use if I can’t create any new files.

Put some limits on VSS by typing:
VSSAdmin Resize ShadowStorage /For=C: /On=C: /MaxSize=15GB
I was feeling parsimonious, and I keep most of the files on the SBS 2003 server which also runs VSS, so I gave it 5GB to play with. It allocated just over 2GB and filled 700MB immediately, so I suspect I get the changes on my files yesterday and nothing more. But I also get 39GB of free disk space, so I’m not complaining. 

I’m not sure if my notebook came from HP with VSS set to UNBOUNDED in first place or if SP1 might have changed this, so I don’t know who to name and shame. I have seen a lot of Vista users reporting that they’ve been losing disk space the same way, with UNBOUNDED set on machines from Dell, Lenovo and other big-name PC companies. But Microsoft gets a share of the blame, for adding a great feature with no way to control it except from the command line. Worried users will make the VSS space too small? Don’t take the slider away all together; just don’t let it go down below, say, 5GB. I can stop certain file types from getting shadowed by adding them to the HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\BackupRestore\FilesNotToSnapshot registry key. Temporary files are there by default; I’ll probably add MP3 files as I tend not to be editing these… but I’d rather do it without delving into the registry.

And if you’re running Vista Basic or Home Premium, VSS is running for System Restore and backing up your documents, but you can’t right-click to see and retrieve previous versions of a file even though they’re taking up space. Get a copy of ShadowExplorer  (only at version 0.2 but also free) from www.shadowexplorer.com and you can make the most of the disk space you agree to give up. 
-Mary

The Mac Air is cute, shiny, lightweight – and a true reflection of the Mac market in many ways.

Walking around the show floor at MacWorld shows the difference between the Mac and PC markets. There was the new Mac version of Office of course, Office 2008, which combines the logically arranged big icons of 2007 Office with the menus of every other version, adding the SmartArt and XML file formats without making a fuss about them. There was Bento, the build-your-own-catalogue tool for people who find FileMaker too complicated. There was Parallels, making an excellent business of putting Windows onto the Mac.

And then there were the colours. You can thank the Mac market for the different colour cases for iomega’s portable eGo hard drives, because Mac users are used to colours. We saw whale-print neoprene laptop sleeves, embroidered neoprene laptop sleeves, oversize purple leather handbags designed to take notebooks and more rubber, leather, plastic and metal iPod and iPhone cases than you could shake an unlocked iPhone at. Whatever your tastes in technology as personal jewellry, there’s a case to suit.

It’s great to see so much style; when I bought my Portégé 2000 back in 2001, I hunted high and low for a stylish, small case that didn’t make me feel like a corporate drone. I had to go to a Japanese stationery store in San Jose to find a protective sleeve and even then it was black. Now, whether your heart’s desire is a MacBook Air – the first Apple notebook in a very long time that you can truly call ultraportable – or a 17” MacBook Pro that needs its own wheeled suitcase, you can snap on a red cover or stick on a Van Gogh skin.

If your heart’s desire is a touchscreen Mac, that’s not quite as easy. You have to take your Mac to Axiotron and have it undergo major surgery to add a Wacom layer and remove the keyboard. (And if you want to use it in portrait mode, run BootCamp and Vista on it, as Apple hasn’t built screen rotation into the Leopard graphics drivers). If your heart’s desire is a MacBook Air and a second battery, you either need to be very skilled with a screwdriver (and we wouldn’t advise doing it on a transatlantic flight) or you have to go to BatteryGeek and buy an external battery that plugs into the MagSafe power port. You’ll have to wait until they make a new tip for the new MagSafe connector for the Air; Apple hasn’t licensed them the details of the MagSafe connector so they’re reverse engineering it, along with Nokia and dozens of other connectors.

If your heart’s desire is a 7” ultramobile, or a computer built right into a TV screen rather than an extra box (no matter how stylish the box), or any other niche form factor, there isn’t a Mac for you. That’s not a criticism of Apple; Apple is making computers for the largest audience it can get. It can’t afford to be HP, Dell, OQO, Motion Computing and Asus rolled into one. Apple isn’t going to license the Mac OS (or lets VMWare and Parallels virtualise it on non-Mac hardware) because that means supporting a lot of different hardware and writing a lot of different drivers. The choice isn’t what style of machine, it’s which Mac and what colour accessories.

The PC market is about choice in a different way. The Toshiba Portégé R500 is lighter than the Air even with an optical drive in the case and as thin as the thickest slice of the Air; it doesn’t look nearly as sleek but it was available last summer, and it wasn’t the first ultraportable PC, just the lightest one so far. Hardly any of them have looked as good as a Mac and while you can get stick-on skins for every HP laptop – and the new Artist’s Edition has gorgeous colours and designs printed right into the case – you can’t get a purple brushed metal clip-on case custom built to fit. By definition, Mac users don’t need the range of hardware choice you get with the PC (or they’d have bought a PC instead) and PC users will continue to envy Mac users their stylish design and colourful accessories

At least the lime-green neoprene sleeves will look good on my shiny white Toshiba R400 tablet…

Every now and then I want to throw my laptop out of the window in sheer frustration. I’ve certainly flung USB sticks across the room from time to time, by accident. I’ve also done a Bill Gates and left my travel mug on the car roof when we drove off (although unlike the spoof video in Gates’ CES keynote speech the mug wasn’t there when we arrived). Most flash drives can survive a certain amount of damage - or at least the flash memory can. A USB stick would probably survive the fall from a car roof but I have a rather fetching 1Gb earring made from a flash stick that was sticking out of Simon’s PC when he turned his chair a little too far and snapped off the USB connector.  

If you expect to treat your data roughly, Corsair has the rugged, rubber-coated Voyager and the Survivor which screws into an aircraft-grade aluminium canister. The Survivor we saw looked a touch battered; Corsair had driven a tractor over it to test it out. Voyager drives were sitting in ice, water and sand but they still worked when we fished them out.

Both now come in 32GB,  and at that size you start to wonder if it’s worth carrying a portable hard drive. Except portable hard drives now have a lot more storage for the size; Seagate had a new version of the FreeAgent Go at the show that fits 250GB into something about the size of a CD case (remember those?). Verbatim’s new SmartDisk goes up to 320GB.

And if you want to take 4TB around with you, Intel has conveniently put it into a suitcase. Well, it’s actually a NAS box designed for the home but it looks like a suitcase - because that’s what you put things in and take things out of. Ideal for backup of course, but you can also put your media in it and stream it out to almost any device: on the stand Intel was streaming different video files to an iPhone, a Windows Mobile phone, an Xbox, a PC and a TV screen, all at the same time.

It wouldn’t quite fit in our cases for the trip to MacWorld, alas. As I write this we’re driving off down I-15, watching the moon set like a thin orange smile. And as I don’t yet have a 32GB SD card for my camera, the next task is to unload the photos from our driving trip through Arizona, ready to snap whatever we see next.

Between the queues and the crowds and the firehouse of information, CES quickly turns into a blur. Yesterday things kicked off gently with Logitech announcing new products over a leisurely lunch – a Squeezebox with an iPod-style remote control, a tiny keyboard with built-in scroll wheel for running a media center or driving a presentation, a Bluetooth version of the MX Revolution mouse that gets you through a multi-page PDF more ergonomically and time to chat about trends. The CES Unveiled preview was less a queue and more a moving herd of journalists, grazing on the buffet and crowding past the stands. SSD capacity is going up but prices are still at the level where you have to care a lot about TCO and data safety to find them good value.

One of the points that came up again and again while we were researching future IT trends at the end of last year is that video is coming to business – presentations, training and chat as well as video conferencing. This brings up lots of issues around storage and search and regulatory compliance, but there’s also the question of how good this video is going to look. You can drive a spreadsheet, you can knock together a presentation – but could you edit a video? Video editing is going to get as accessible as image editing soon and Pinnacle is hoping to get market share by giving away a simple video editing package, but technologies like auto-summarising, search and index, facial recognition and embedded metadata are going to take some of the work out of watching video.

HD camcorders are going to get small and cheap this year, but Casio is putting video into a camera in a way that could completely change the way you take pictures. A good digital camera will have a burst mode that’s gets 10 shots in a second; the new 6 megapixel $999 Exilim Pro EX-F1 will take 60. It’s a lightweight EVF model rather than a DSLR, it takes around 300 shots on a single battery charge – and it’s much more likely that those will be the shots you want. You can either shoot away and pick later or preview the shot and choose the frame you want –put the preview in slow motion so you can find it more easily. The flash can’t quite keep up but you can still get 30 frames per second with flash.

Burst mode is great when you’re prepared and pointing the right way but you still have to get your finger on the shutter button. The EX-F1 can pre-record images so that when you press the shutter button it saves a preset number of frames before and after, which does away with shutter lag pretty comprehensively. There’s a five second version on the pocket-sized Exilim s10, which also has an ‘autoshutter’ feature that presses the button for you when the subject isn’t moving, the camera isn’t shaking, the subject is front and centre, the person you’re photographing – or when you make it into the frame after you set the timer.

Casio is using video to get better still images but the EX-F1 can also shoot 1080i HD video at 60fps – or a lower resolution at 300, 600 or 1200fps. That catches motion you couldn’t see with the naked eye and give you the kind of amazing shots you used to only see on TV. When you burst a balloon full of water what you see is the water falling; when you video it at 1200fps you see the water holding the shape of the balloon before it succumbs to gravity. HD video is easier to look at because the detail makes it look more real; high speed video shows you something you couldn’t see otherwise.

We try out a lot of technology - so much different technology that sometimes we don’t take the time to sort out the technology we really need ourselves. Instead of resolving to work out more and work less, we decided to work out our own technology in 2008. It’s time for some upgrades, some changes and some less is more.

1.    Exchange Server 2007
I want HTML email on my smartphone. I can already file messages but I want to be able to flag emails on my phone so I don’t have to leave half of them to deal with when I get back to the office. That means we need to upgrade the Exchange server - and that means we need a 64-bit server, which is why we haven’t upgraded already. Any new server will have Intel AMT support so we can remote in to fix any problems when we’re traveling.

2.    And Windows Server 2008
While we’re at it, we’ll make sure the box can run Windows Server 2008 when it comes out at the end of February. This means we’re switching away from SBS at last; not because SBS isn’t a good idea, but because it’s just too long a wait to get the new versions. We’re not expecting Server 2008 features until SBS 2009 and that’s too long to wait for PowerShell and the better Vista support. After all, nearly all our PCs run Vista now.

3.    SP1 everywhere
We didn’t install Vista SP1 in beta on our production machines because while it was mostly a good update there were problems with it - that’s fair enough for a beta. RC1 is stable and worth having, so we’ll upgrade all the Vista machines.

4.    More memory everywhere
Vista needs memory. Memory is cheap these days and it doesn’t make sense to have less than 1GB in a machine - 2GB for Vista - so we’ll do a little shopping. I’ll get a faster hard drive for my Toshiba R400 too; the 4200rpm drive just doesn’t cut it.

5.    Sort out the media centre
The late, lamented Elonex produced a completely integrated Media Center PC, in an LCD screen. It works really well, but we want to add more memory so we can take it to Vista, and add an HD-DVD drive. What we really want is to take the Dremel to the case to cut out the SCART socket and wire up the SCART connector on the motherboard so we can use our Sky+ box with the same screen, but we haven’t found a firmware upgrade that allows that. If we can’t do all the upgrades we want, we’ll probably get a flat screen and a separate Media Center in a Shuttle case or similar. We’ll just have to make sure it gets enough ventilation sitting inside the TV bench.

6.    Save some money, save some power
The fan on the switch has been going beserk recently; lifting it off the carpet on a metal rack helped with that. Most summers the office gets uncomfortably warm, so we’ll be looking for a new server that runs cool and for switches and routers that reduce the power they use when there’s no Ethernet traffic. Rigging the surge protectors that the various phone and media player and camera chargers are plugged in to so we can turn them off when we’re not actually charging could be a money saver; some estimates say 75% of the electricity used in the US is driving devices that aren’t actually plugged in. In an ideal world the charger would detect when there’s no current draw and stop taking power itself, of course. Greening the data centre is going to go from a warm cuddly feeling and advertising slogan to a hard look at the bottom line; in business, IT is going to have to pay its development, installation and running costs - including power - and generate profit besides. Smaller businesses need to do the sums as well.

7.    Personal navigation
When we have a GPS phone like the O2 XDA Stellar on test, we get to meetings on time and without going to the wrong tube stop. When we drive around the US, CoPilot gets us to the oddest places, down the most obscure back roads. This year I’m going to add navigation to my own phone, the HTC Excalibur. Either I’ll run CoPilot and use a Bluetooth GPS, or I’ll use Google Maps with the cellular location feature to do it without GPS, which will save on battery.

8.    Better BES
We both use Windows Mobile, but we both use a BlackBerry quite often too. You need a separate server to run BlackBerry Enterprise Server on, so we usually just get email over the air and connect by USB to sync addresses and calendars. It’s not worth running another server for so few users but a hosted BES service would make sense.

9.    Make our VPN less virtual
Most home DSL routers don’t do VPNs properly, so we end up using Remote Desktop or Hamachi to retrieve files when we’re on the road. Getting a Soho or business router will give us real VPN, which is faster and one less step to deal with when we want to get a file in a hurry.

10.    Into the cloud
Of course it would be easier not to have to get the file over DSL at all. As laptop hard drives haven’t yet got large enough to take every file we have on the server (and offline files remains delightful in theory and impossible to use on our network in practice), the best solution is to be backing those files up into the cloud somewhere we can retrieve them from as well; encrypted and password protected of course.  We’ll always have servers and hardware locally, for speed and control; software as a service doesn’t really fit our business. But to steal a phrase from Microsoft, software plus services makes what you already have better.

If we can get all that done by the end of the year, the IT department will reward itself with a really good Christmas do…

The average office document is about five pages long. Don’t be mean; assume that you’re storing it as an image rather than skinny text files; the JPEGs take up about 200K, so five of them to the megabyte. At retail prices for something like the twin 500GB Maxtor OneTouch drive that comes out to one cent. The time it takes for you to hit delete costs your company more than the space to keep that file for ever.

RAID is a great idea but matching drives exactly is a pain in the neck, especially if you’re trying to match a new drive to the three working drives still in your two-year old system when the fourth disk turns up its toes. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could get a seamless volume incorporating all the storage on your external drives as well as the ones in your NAS box? That kind of storage fabric used to mean a huge investment in hardware and software but it was only a matter of time before somebody did the work to bring it to a wider audience. The first real candidates come from Microsoft; the Home Storage Server cherry picks features from Windows Longhorn Server including unified storage: all the internal and external drives show up as a single storage space that you can make available to users. Machines around the home (or in the office with Longhorn Server) are automatically backed up into the space too. For the larger business, the high availability features you get in Exchange 2007 with an enterprise exchange work with direct attached storage - Microsoft has thrown away its own SAN for this.

Businesses are going to be the first customers for several of the storage devices announced at CES this year, like Hitachi’s 1TB drive (imagine four of those in a Buffalo Terastation Pro if you have plenty of space or two in the new SATA NAS enclosure from D-LINK if you have space for a six-pack). SanDisk has a 1.8″ drive that looks to the system like a hard drive but is all flash - 32GB first, 64GB by the middle of the year; frequent travellers will put up with a little less space to get faster startup, faster file read and write and more battery life. We put two versions of the Sony UX micro PC side by side at CES; one with a standard hard drive and one with a flash drive. We tried to time shutting them both down and starting them both up, but I got so fed up waiting for the hard drive system to finish shutting down when it was still churning long after the flash system was done that I just pressed the power button on the flash system again. It had practically finished loading Windows by the time the hard drive system finished shutting down. Hybrid hard drives won’t give you quite the same speedup but they’ll be a lot cheaper - and they’ll be ready for anyone to buy when Vista ships at the end of the month; SanDisk will only have enough units for OEMs to build into new PCs.

My dream machine, the Portégé R400, doesn’t have an SD card socket. I don’t mind much because both SanDisk and Kingston Micro have USB thumb drives that incorporate an SD socket so I can still get files off my camera. They’re both doing several ReadyBoost thumb drives, including an 8GB stick; ReadyBoost only uses 4GB so that will leave me 4GB for files. I don’t think I’ll run out of storage this year…
- Mary Branscombe

Like many small businesses, Mary and I keep our email and files on a small server running Small Business Server 2003. It’s a useful little OS, and its built-in backup tools simplify archiving your data and your email. We’re also backing up volume shadow copy data, so lost files can be retrieved from Windows’ often ignored file system snapshots.

(If you’ve not turned it on Shadow Copies yet, go do it now. Yes, you’ll lose some free disk space, but you’ll gain a lot of peace of mind. Right click on a volume, and open the properties dialog. In the Shadow Copies tab, click “Enable”. Shadow Copies may not be as pretty as Apple’s Time Machine, but it does the same job, and it’s here now. If you’re trying out a business edition of Vista, you can turn it on there too…)

We currently do nightly backups onto a NAS appliance, a Buffalo Terastation Pro, shifting around 50 GB from the server to the NAS store. With 2 TB of disk space, configured as RAID 5, there’s plenty of space for several days worth of backups. There was only one fly in the ointment: the backup was taking far too long.

That fly was down to our network. 100 base-T Ethernet is fine for most purposes, but 50 GB of backup took just under nine hours every night. That’s a significant amount of time, and the more data being backed up, the longer it would take - and the process was already beginning to eat into the working day.

I’m in the process of upgrading our network from 100 base-T to 1000 base-T. With gigabit Ethernet prices plummeting, it’s becoming easy to justify the upgrade. The Buffalo Terastation Pro has on board gigabit, and more and more motherboards come with built in gigabit networking. We’ve started the upgrade by removing our venerable Allied Telesyn FS716 switch, and replacing it with a D-Link DGS 1024D 24-port gigabit unmanaged switch. We’d already moved much of the cabling to CAT 5e and CAT 6, so it was ready for gigabit speeds.

The first machine to get an upgrade was the server. Its motherboard Ethernet needed to be disabled in the BIOS, and I dropped a D-Link DGE-530T PCI gigabit network card into a spare PCI slot. Reassigning IP addresses didn’t take long, and the server was soon reporting a 1GBps connection to the network.

Last night the backup ran as usual, but this time it took a lot less time - more than three hours less. The previous night’s run took 8 hours 52 minutes, post upgrade dropping to 5 hours 44 minutes. Perhaps not as much of a change as I’d have liked, but the actual process of building the backup set and verifying the data still takes a while. Certainly it’s still a substantial improvement.

It’ll be interesting to see the effects of the next stage of the network upgrade - a new server built using an Intel Core Duo Core VPro motherboard and running a 64-bit version of Windows Server 2003. We’ll report back on that upgrade early in the New Year.– Simon Bisson
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