4 Signs You Should Retire Your Server

                Remember your first car? I know I do. It was as just a few years younger than I was (an old Ford truck), and I saved up money cooking and washing dishes for a year to afford it. It was an ugly beast of a truck, too. It was originally painted white, but over the years it had turned an off yellow, which was how I bought it. Both doors were rusting slowly from the bottom up, and to get into the driver’s seat you had to climb in from the passenger’s side. The engine was temperamental and refused to start if temperatures dipped below zero, and even on a good day roared to life with all the vigor of an angry lion. Despite all of its problems, I drove that truck for two years. Finally, inevitably, the truck quit. One bad transmission later, I was forced to purchase a different vehicle.

                Parallels can be found in any sort of investment, be it a television or a server. The more expensive an investment was originally, the less likely we are to give it up. Servers are one of the most expensive and important IT investments a small business can make, which is why so many servers end up working overtime far beyond their expected lifetime. We don’t ever want to give up something we worked so hard to get in the first place, but eventually there’s a time to let it go. Yes, that even applies to your old server, unfortunately. If you’ve been upgrading continuously over the past few years but your server still isn’t up to par with your expectations, it might be time to take the plunge and invest in a new server for your business. Not sure whether it’s that time? Here are four signs it’s time to retire your server.

1. Processor Speed. If your current server only supports a single processor, and if this processor is a dual-core or less, it’s probably time to upgrade to something a little better. Newer servers sport quad-core processors as a minimum, (there are plenty of twelve-core processors out there) and many servers support more than one processor. An outdated processor will drag your server and its applications down.
2. RAM expandability. So you’ve installed all the RAM you can in your server, taking advantage of every port possible. How much RAM do you have now? If your server’s expansion slots allow for a small maximum RAM, say, four gigabytes, it’s time to retire it. Most servers have a minimum RAM in the double digits.
3. End of Support. Normally, a manufacturer will back any of its products with the option of company support for that product. This normally extends for the entire life of the product, and, barring the possibility of a company going out of business, they will continue to support a product even if they no longer manufacture it. If your server’s manufacturer has announced it will stop supporting your server model, it’s because they no longer see it as a viable server in today’s market. They’re probably right.
4. Frequent Power Failures. I had a server which had frequent power failures. I was in the same boat as number three, which meant I couldn’t easily find a replacement power supply. My current Sun server has a great 300-2015 power supply, which hasn’t had problems yet. If you can’t find a replacement power supply, chances are your server is far too dated.

It’s not easy to say goodbye! Stay faithful to your old server or upgrade: the choice is yours. 

Storage Solutions: Magnetic vs Optical

Storage Solutions: Magnetic vs Optical

                The world of computer storage is constantly evolving. I remember, not so long ago, when MP3 players emerged onto the market. They were expensive things that didn’t seem to offer many advantages over CDs. In fact, I was certain that CDs would remain the only viable medium for my music, and that MP3s would fade away like a passing fad. As you know, I was wrong. MP3s are quickly surpassing CDs as the preferred medium for music. This is due, in no small part, to the large degree of advancements made in the storage capacities of the involved technologies.

Optical Vs. Magnetic Storage

                The CD, like DVDs and Blu-ray technology, is a form of optical storage. I remember the average CD held somewhere in the area of sixteen songs when portable MP3 players were just hitting the consumer market. The problem with those original MP3 players was one of capacity – they didn’t hold a lot of music, and were very expensive compared to the purchase of a CD. The advantages of an MP3 player were, of course, the ability to rewrite music and have multiple CDs in one location. As the technology behind the MP3 player continued to evolve, the capacity increase and cost decreased.

Magnetic Storage

                Magnetic storage began to evolve, as all technologies do, at an exponential rate. If you were to look at a visual representation of magnetic hard drive technology, you would notice something very peculiar. The size of magnetic storage devices would decrease, but the capacity of the smaller devices would greatly outpace their predecessors. Smaller drives with much more storage – magnetic storage became a very viable option, which opened up the growth of MP3 music media and other storage types as alternatives to optical media.

Optical Storage

                The development and popularity of magnetic storage did not make optical storage obsolete, however. To the contrary, optical storage has continued to develop, and offers different types of advantages to its magnetic counterpart. CDs are still sold in stores, and DVDs and BluRays are still the accepted standard for video sales. The great part about optical media is its relative resiliency and dependability. Optical media is largely not able to be rewritten. Once a CD has been written, for instance, you can’t “unwrite” it and replace the songs on it with a different playlist.

                For this reason, optical storage is the accepted medium when it comes to the archival of data. When data needs to be kept for a very long time in a permanent and retrievable state, optical storage is relied upon much more frequently. Magnetic drives are subject to a variety of problems with data. Over time, magnetic drives can simply “bleed” their data as magnetic fields leech away the data. Magnetic drives can also be overwritten, meaning a simple human error can irrevocably ruin or lose valuable data. For businesses that need to archive data, like banks or hospitals, optical libraries serve to provide more permanent storage. Optical media is much more resistant to magnetic fields, electrical disturbance, humidity, and temperature. 

What is an Optical Jukebox?

 

              If you go into any bar and restaurant, chances are you can find a jukebox somewhere in the joint. For a few quarters, you can page through the jukebox’s selection and find your favorite song to play over the stereo. Unless you’re in an old-fashioned bar or diner, chances are that song you just selected isn’t playing off an old vinyl. It’s most likely playing off a digital library. But you do remember those old jukeboxes, don’t you? You could page through several different albums, and when you chose the song you preferred, the jukebox would actually load the corresponding vinyl onto the tray, the needle would fall, and the gritty music would play.

Optical Storage

                Optical storage is the standard medium for long-term, archived data storage. So what does that old musical jukebox have to do with optical storage? Well, let’s take a look at how optical storage works and the necessities of using it. Optical storage is a variety of data storage which relies on the “writing” of a disk using an intensely focused laser. Optical storage is most often contrasted with magnetic storage. Magnetic storage is the kind which you most likely have in your computer’s hard drive. Magnetic storage can be rewritten time and time again, old data replaced by new data as much as you need. Optical storage, by the nature of its writing, cannot be rewritten.

                While optical storage does not offer the obvious advantage of being able to rewrite and alter data, there is an advantage for the very same reason which might not be immediately apparent. Magnetic storage is not nearly as dependable as optical because it is not permanent. Magnetically stored data can be altered or deteriorate in quality over a relatively short period of time, while optical media remains dependable even over a time as long as fifty years.

The Jukebox

                Optical storage is handled by writing data onto optical storage media, most commonly an optical disc. These discs often offer ultra dense storage, but even then, a single disc is not enough to hold all the data required of a large business like a bank or hospital. Instead, when data on a specific disc needs to be accessed, the disc must be loaded into a computer drive. As you might imagine, the trouble required in loading discs by hand would be an overwhelming and tedious task.

                The answer to this problem is the optical jukebox. Just like the musical jukebox, an optical jukebox manages the transfer of disks into and out of the computer’s disk drive as the demand arises. An optical jukebox is managed by a computer program which, upon receiving a request for a specific bit of data, locates the corresponding optical media. The jukebox then takes the physical media and inserts it into the computer drive for the data retrieval. After the disk is no longer needed, it is replaced back into storage. Many manufacturers include this technology inside their libraries. A Plasmon jukebox, for instance, functions entirely within a Plasmon optical library. 

How It Works: Optical Media

                If you’re anything like me, you probably have CDs all over your vehicle. Once I filled up my CD sleeve with my favorite music, I found myself taking albums I didn’t care for too much and storing them anywhere I could find space. I know have CDs in my glove box, on the back of the visor, in the center console, and under the driver’s seat. Despite my relatively poor treatment of what I call my “B-Side” CDs, I can still pick one up, pop in it the player, and listen to my music. Despite the often cited problem of a scratched disk, optical media such as a CD is an amazingly resilient form of data storage.

                Optical discs are flat, usually circular data storage devices. Data is stored on optical discs by using an intense laser to “write” data onto the disc. Pits and lands, as they are called, are encoded onto the disc, which can then be read by a laser which measures the reflection from the flat surface. Most optical media consists of a very small disc of metal pressed between two clear plastic discs, thus allowing the laser to read the reflected light through the transparent material.

                Have you ever noticed the rainbow look your optical discs have? That’s because the optical disc works by distorting and reflecting the reader’s laser light, thus communicating all of the data on the disc. Optical media is used to store all varieties of information, though you are probably most familiar with CDs, DVDs, and BluRay discs. Optical media is a great choice for music and video because it allows for a very large amount of data to be written, stored, and retrieved in a relatively small form.

                The optical disc was first invented in 1958, and was used for video recording. The first discs were larger and did not have anywhere near the same capacity as the discs we use today. As the technology continued to evolve, the capacity for optical discs increased at an exponential rate. Today, we have discs that have far surpassed the older disc capacity which ranged in the dozens of megabytes. Those antiquated discs were replaced by Ultra Density Optical discs, or UDO for short.

                UDO media is a vast improvement for a variety of reasons. They still offer the same great degree of affordability and reliability that popularized optical media in the first place, but UDO discs today are capable of storing in the area of sixty gigabytes. This is a tremendous improvement, and opened UDO up as a viable alternative for storing information. Bluray technology is able to store high-definition movies on one disc because of its ultra dense configuration. Additionally, optical media has become the standard in archiving applications such as bank and hospital records. Plasmon UDO, for instance, boasts archiving solutions which can sustain databases without redundant backups/rewrites for up to fifty years.