This is a nice explanation of what biomedical researchers are doing with HPC server. (minimal fluff)  Many companies are still tying up workstations to run calculations, but they could see dramatic improvements and efficiencies with a Windows HPC cluster. Typical Linux clusters are not the only solution for HPC applications anymore. You can view the full article here.

Biomedical Researchers Gain Faster Insights; Cut Research Costs in Half, Saving $5 Million

Scripps Research Institute, The

Researchers at The Scripps Research Institute processed test results manually, inhibiting the pace of work and limiting the time to think creatively about their work. To boost productivity, they adopted a custom high-performance computing (HPC) solution based on Windows® HPC Server 2008. Now, test results are processed 600 percent faster; researchers analyze their work more thoroughly and identify more productive research directions. continued..

Here’s a great topic to start the week off right. I will add a couple thoughts at the end of the article, but this article came from a blog called Linux Magazine. I am not a frequent reader, however I think this article makes some good points.

“ Things you could and should do.
1. Always back up. It is recommended you back up your entire hard drive regularly. You should at the very least make a back up of all your photographs. Copy them all to a CD and make at least two copies for safety. For important day to day files, a Memory Stick is probably the quickest and easiest back up. For really important files and photographs, remember that memory Sticks do have a limited life and should not be used for long-term storage.
Once pictures are safely stored on an external media, you can consider deleting some from your computer, to free up hard drive space.
2. Use System Restore and set a restore point once a week. And always set one before installing any new software or hardware. This applies to any downloaded software as well. Remember, Windows does not like changes so if things go wrong, you can use System Restore and go back to a time when things were working properly.
3. Always shut Windows down properly. Do not be tempted to just flick off the power; this will only lead to future problems. Shut down by using the Start and Turn off computer button. This will let your computer shuffle all files neatly into their proper locations; save all your data and close any open programs. I know this can sometimes take awhile, but please be patient. If you, like many other computer users, leave your PC on all the time, it is still a good idea, once a week, to re-start your machine. This will enable Windows to tidy up and put files back where they should be, for faster operations. In the unfortunate event that your computer will not turn off or has frozen for some reason, then the only option is to flick the power switch. However, you should wait at least 30 seconds before turning the power back on. Do not simply flick the switch off and straight back on, you can cause serious damage to your Motherboard by doing so.
4. Use your Security Program to scan for viruses and spyware, at least once a week. Preferably a Full System Scan. Also make sure your security suite is up to date.
5. Clear internet clutter. Temporary internet files can build up over time. Delete these by going to Internet Options via Control Panel.
6. Uninstall any programs you no longer need. Use the add/remove Wizard located in Control Panel. Do not be tempted to simply delete them. Only uninstall programs that you have installed. If any programs were pre-installed on your computer when you got it, even if you have never used them, do not uninstall these.
7. Always purchase and use genuine software. Pirated software, as well as being illegal, is often the source of computer viruses.
8. Do not let other people use your computer. Computers are private, they have personal information, confidential e-mails and pictures you wouldn’t want any body else to see. And they will always mess with your settings because they think they know best. Tell them to buy a Laptop if they are so desperate to use a computer.
9. Clean your screen now and again. Use a soft clean cloth or a lightly dampened cloth, do not use any cleaners. And don’t forget to clean your keyboard. This is best done when your computer is off, otherwise you can end up pressing the hibernate or sleep button. Use a small soft paint brush to clean between the keys. Alternatively, you can buy special cans of compressed air to blow out dust and particles, or use a small USB vacuum cleaner.
10. Unplug any USB devices that you are not using. If they are plugged in, they use up system resources even if not in use.”
Most of us know that we SHOULD do this, but I doubt many of us take the time to do it. I would also add a couple of numbers.
11. Clean your keyboard! It can become a breeding ground for germs.
12. Organize and put everything in its place. Business evolves and positions change. You never know when you are going to need that checklist, research paper, or marketing piece again. However, when you do need it, you will know where to find it.

Make it a great week!

CB Technologies and Hewlett-Packard are hosting a Round Table:

•         Achieve cost savings – both short and long term

•         Gain business and IT efficiencies through virtualization

•         Increase Systems and Application performance

•         Best Practices for ease of migration

·         Next Generation Data Centers

·         Business Critical Servers Roadmap

·         Revolutionary Form Factor and Power Supply design

·         Enhanced Security Green Data Center Design

·         HP Risk Protection for Migrating Customers

Space will be limited.  See attached for more details!

It seems as though Panasas is expanding its portfolio. Here is a blurb from their most recent press release.

” HPC storage vendor Panasas has launched PAS HC, a high capacity HPC storage solution for active archives and massive primary storage. The offering is aimed at organizations whose active data is expanding into the petabyte realm, outgrowing their traditional NAS or direct attached storage setups.

PAS HC is just the latest offering in Panasas’ NAS storage line. PAS, by the way, is the company’s new shorthand for all the Panasas ActiveStor lines, although, in this case, the architecture of PAS HC is quite different from that of the existing PAS 7, 8, and 9 series products. The latter are blade-based servers that use SATA drives, while the HC is implemented as a rackmount Nehalem-based storage system filled with Fibre Channel JBODs — a first for Panasas.”

The rest of the article can be found here.

I love to learn when I make a mistake, because it gives me the opportunity to correct and learn from it! I had an epiphany this morning about a mistake that I made on our website. You see, we have all been trained to look for a “Search Box” in any website. We have AOL (yes they were once a monster), Yahoo, and Google to thank for that.  The point of the search box is to get to your desired destination quickly. This is the reason why Google controls the majority of US search traffic. They produce more relevant results for web searchers quicker and easier than any other search engine. I am an avid Googler, so I find it amazing that I made this mistake. The story started when I received a phone call from someone asking about some of our partnerships, and whether we carried certain products.  The answer was yes, but what I didn’t comprehend, until this morning, was why she asked the question. You see, search algorithms look through text for matching keywords, letters, terms etc. What it will not do is see images as text unless they are tagged with keywords. The mistake that I made was not that I have images or logos on that unique page, but I forgot to insert the meta data (text) in the web page to allow it to be searchable through our website.  I have since corrected the problem, but I am extremely happy that I spoke with that person and learned a bit. So to her, thank you! Remember, tag or insert meta data when using images on your website. Have a great weekend!

I was thinking about my first job out of college the other day. We were a 7 person team that didn’t put too much into marketing. (at least outside of paper print) We were a brick and mortar that had local connections and a number of repeat customers. It was great when we grew organically, but there were severe limitations and risks to that type of business. Large corporations, with buying power, could put the wraps on our profit margins pretty quickly, if they moved into town. Outside of the fact that, we relied heavily on the local economy being robust.  I think there are places for both large and small companies in any economy though. The point is you have to find out where the opportunities lie and figure out how to distinguish yourself!! For instance, how many days a week can you walk into a Wal-Mart and speak to the CEO???? This is not a knock on Wal-Mart, but I believe their headquarters are in Arkansas. Yet, a local reader can catch your blog of the week and actually walk in and talk to you …or email… or call…  
To me that is pretty useful customer service. Our job, as entrepreneurs and employees alike, is to be creative. We need to utilize our resources as much as possible and work lean. The last time I checked, blogs were free, Twitter is free, and Facebook is free. Email can be free,(I suggest against it) and websites can be extremely cheap to put up. Use them, try them, get familiar with them, or just call us. Our team will be happy to talk to you about them and help you get started. I still believe that paper print is useful, (such as OC Business Journal), but newspapers are struggling for readership and direct mail has less than a 1% capture rate. Therefore, you need to diversify and use any and all capable resources. Once you get comfortable with them, I suggest tying them in together and automating wherever possible.  

Also, good luck to the Virginia Cavalier wrestling team this weekend at the ACC’s!

LinkedIn, the social networking site for professionals, has become the first social network to announce a “working” relationship with Microsoft Outlook Social Connector. Social Connector is Microsoft’s way to merge all your online connections and social activities into the outlook user interface. There are clear advantages and reasons for Microsoft attempting this network merge into their current offerings, but I am not going to dive into that aspect of things. Rather, I decided I would play around with the Beta. The steps can be found here, but as most Windows users know, they entail: DOWNLOAD, NEXT, NEXT, FINISH, RESTART
You then have to go to the LinkedIn site and download their plug-in. This is pretty much the same procedure as above. After a few restarts to Outlook, you should have a new contact folder called LinkedIn. I have pulled up my own profile for privacy purposes, but you can see it will automatically link to your LinkedIn profile picture(which is part of my team and I at our charity golf outing). This plug-in is definitely not for those that are camera shy with their email contacts.

However, there are some nice features to both products. Here is a better image of the social connector window pane that gets added as a 3rd pane to your outlook window.

There are a total of 6 tabs that you can choose in this pane: 1. the current shown, which is an aggregation of the other 5, 2. news feed updates, 3. emails, 4. Attachments sent by this individual, 5. calendar items shared with this person, and 6. status updates (ie. the LinkedIn updates that you share with your LinkedIn connections)
I found the attachments tab to be the most useful. These tabs act as an auto-sort for you, which is already a feature in Outlook, but the attachments tab produces the last 10 or so attachments sent by this individual. It enables you to find attachments without having to scour through emails hoping to know the name of the attachment that you are looking for. It is a pretty handy feature!
The status updates are currently on hiatus for me, I have separate work/LinkedIn emails, so they are not updating at this point. However, it could be a useful feature to have real time information on what is going through your contacts head. Or in other words, the potential to a better way to email market in real time! In my opinion, it’s worth the 5 minutes of install to spend a day and see if it is useful.

I found myself working in our lab today. For those of you who don’t know, our lab is filled with 3 racks of servers. (view a schematic here) I have never paid much attention to how loud it was, until today, when I tried talking on the phone while in front of the terminal.  Let’s just say it was challenging.  For an example, go find the largest industrial fan out there and turn it on high. From there, put your right ear right up to the fan and try talking on your cell phone with your left ear. You will find yourself 70% deaf.  It is even more challenging trying to type while talking. Needless to say, it is not the ideal situation. So I decided to figure out a better solution.
I often find myself using Windows remote desktop protocol(RDP) to port into other computers for access to different applications.  This is pretty useful when you are porting into other Windows machines. However, this does not work when you are porting into a Linux box, which is what I was working on today, and why I was in the server room.  Of course, as we all strive to work smarter, and frankly my ears were buzzing, I remembered that I still had access to HP RGS. RGS (Remote Graphics Software) was designed for remote multi-person collaboration with advanced graphics capabilities. It is a pretty cool solution for design/manufacturing/simulation industries. However, one of its features allows you to do a screen scrape from a Windows box to a Linux box. Or in other words, it will deliver the Linux server screen to your windows desktop similar to RDP.  So after a quick and easy install of the RGS sender software on the Linux box, I installed the receiver on my Windows desktop. Connecting was a breeze with the Linux IP address and my log in credentials.  Here’s a screen capture to give you an idea of what it looks like. By the way, Jing is a really useful tool for screen captures.

RGS is free on the receiving end and a software license can be purchased from CB Technologies pretty inexpensively for the RGS Sender. However, it is a free download and trial for 30 days, so if nothing else, play around with it and see if it is a useful tool for your everyday work needs.

Data deduplication was the “Buzz” word of the month a little while back. Many cold-callers would open with “If you aren’t using dedupe, you are wasting money.” I don’t put much stock in the buzz word of the month club, but data deduplication does offer some value to clients.  Before I dive into the value that I see, let’s get a brief definition of what it is. Good old Wikipedia says data deduplication is “the elimination of duplicated or redundant data.” Well, we already got that much from the name, so diving a little further in, deduplication cuts down on copying the same data over by referencing the original full copy, similar to when I just referenced Wikipedia. I gave you a hyperlink or pointer to go see all that Wikipedia had to offer without copying the entire page. Data deduplication works very similarly, it consolidates all that duplicate data of  and replaces it with pointers to the original material.

Now that we have a basic understanding of what it does, the real question is WHY does it matter to you? Company storage data doubles every 1 to 2 years. Storage product, such as disk and tape, costs continue to decrease per GB, but they are not keeping pace with the amount of increased data that must be stored. There are also recurring costs of storage; such as power, cooling, and real estate. Therefore, your storage costs are increasing exponentially every time you plug in a new device. What deduplication allows you to do is minimize the space required to store your files, thus allowing you to get more out of every disk, limiting power consumption, and keeping data center sprawl to a minimum. This equates to saving you money! In short, you should consider data deduplication when you want to store more data, in less space, for less cost.

There are multiple companies that offer deduplication software and each claims to have a better “special sauce” than the other. Some of these vendors are HP, NetApp, and Data Domain. A good IT partner can help you work through the particulars of which product will work best for you, and why and where to use deduplication technology.

A few interesting links on the topic:

HP White Paper: http://h20195.www2.hp.com/V2/GetPDF.aspx/4AA1-9796ENW.pdf

List of White Papers by multiple vendors: http://whitepapers.businessweek.com/rlist/term/Data-Deduplication.html