Call it passion, or call it an occupational addiction, but I have always kept a firm eye on the movements in the hardware arena.
I have found that the IT field, despite being an industry where changes are constantly afoot, is still, on the most part, evolutionary in nature. Revolutionary leaps in technology, especially of the breathtaking kind that makes one go “wow”, are really quite rare events.
What I am trying to say is that if you read widely enough on IT-related industry news and press releases, it is possible to predict or even identify trends or shifts in the industry before they actually come over the horizon.
Products doing 10G networking is an example of something that seems to be coming up on the radar of late. Foundry, Sun, and even Mellanox Technologies, best known as a provider of high-speed Infiniband gear, have either announced 10G gear or business strategies based on 10G.
Certainly something worth noting if you have plans on setting up network intensive infrastructure upgrades such as an iSCSI-based SAN or some kind of virtualization setup somewhere later this year.
10G networking is going to be mainstream very shortly.
Mellanox delves into 10G Ethernet (eWeek)
Foundry packs Gigabit, 10G power into small switches (Network World)
Sun to offer 10G Ethernet across its product line (eWeek)
Also, if you are still trying to decide whether to grab that extra stick of RAM for your spanking new Windows Vista downgrade upgrade, you might want to take notice of a report that The Inquirer ran on how South Korean manufacturers are actually incurring losses due to overcapacity.
Read, RAM prices are hitting rock-bottom just about now, but will probably pick up again very soon as the planned cutback in production is felt around the globe.
I expect that these fluctuations will not have much of an effect on the enterprise level. Though if you work in a smaller organization, or if you routinely put together white-boxes, now would probably be the time to go ahead with the planned RAM upgrade.
Manufacturers selling memory for less than it costs (The Inquirer)
Do you have anything to add to my brief hardware roundup? Join the discussion.
