What hard drive would be best for you?

Data can be the most priceless thing on the planet, that is why consumers and businesses alike have spent millions of dollars or more on protecting their data in some form. Consumers can turn to a company who specializes in backup servers that they can rent space on, they can purchase their own private external hardware, or they can get internal hardware and spread copies of important data across each drive. But these options take on a whole new list of challenges or features when you are a business that needs to backup something. As a business you can't turn towards another company and give out your data (which is most likely sensitive financial information or customer records), and both external and internal drives that you can purchase could fail at any time as well as cost a large amount. As a small business the later options might work but what do the bigger companies use?

An article was recently posted on Computerworld.com about a report that came out from a large data center run by Backblaze, and in this report they shared what types of drives and what brands they use, as well as the failure rates across 38 thousand of the drives. The article can be found here:

http://www.computerworld.com/article/2687068/consumer-drives-shown-to-be-more-reliable-than-enterprise-drives.html

There are two types of drives mentioned, the enterprise class drives with supposedly a better lifespan and more reliability for data storage, and the consumer class that is cheaper and sold to the public. Overall Hitachi drives performed outstandingly well with under a 5% failure rate, and Seagate drives were on the other end of the spectrum, performing with as high as a 25% failure rate after 4 years. All of this can be glazed over or misunderstood as Seagate is not as good a drive as Hitachi, but the real point of the article was about the differences between the enterprise class and the consumer class drives. Enterprise class drives were double the price of consumer drives, and in the tests performed at the data center, less effective and reliable then their consumer counterparts. Whether you are a business or a consumer on the market for a new hard drive, the reports from Backblaze might influence your decision on what brand or class to buy. Take a look.

The System Benchmark

How does a business rate a computer system? With the modern world of total user customization of hardware, and an unparalleled amount of software that is available for just about any usage or purpose, how is it possible to compare a system to another system that has totally different parts, unknown software, and a different purpose? I saw this article and it caught my eye:

http://www.computerworld.com/article/2684640/beyond-flops-the-co-evolving-world-of-computer-benchmarking.html

This article gave a couple of different companies that can be used to interdependently verify and benchmark a system whether that system is in an office, bank, or a data center. Each different company could test your system with a common tool called a suite of tests (since one test alone could not measure every aspect of a system) and then the suite would generate a report that "rated" your system in efficiency and power as well as other important numbers.

Toward the end of the article I noticed that it shifted from the examination of the process and the companies that preform the tests, but instead into what the future can bring when a business wants to look at a benchmark. The article hinted that the standard measure of a system (the FLOP) was actually not a good way to measure anything since most of the time it is not intense calculations the computer system is doing. This could mean that sometime in the near or distant future consumers and businesses alike could see a shift towards the measurement of different variables such as power consumption or elapsed time in a much more efficient and effective system.

5 Information Systems that Companies use to Stop Theft

5 Ways Tech Is Stopping Theft

Being an ex-grocery store employee doesn't sound glamorous or fun, but I did learn a lot about all of the stupid or ingenious ways people can steal from a store. Theft is a major problem for many different industries that involve the sale of goods to a consumer from a showroom of sorts. Millions of dollars (if not more) are lost every year in some of the bigger store locations, so the industry has come up with many different ways to try to reduce that number or even eliminate it all together. The linked article above names some of the technologies and systems that are being put into place or used to stop theft. Everything from video analytic software (which watches every customer in the store in real time to guess who is stealing and acting suspicious) to new types of display stands that trigger alarms when certain things happen (like a portion of the merchandise leaving the display all at once), are in use by stores now. These systems were either created for or adapted to the industry but in both cases they are actually making an impact on the thefts and shrinkage (a fancy industry term for amount stolen).

The Role of Computers in Modern Life

     I personally just got done with a project of mine that had me recording and writing down in some centralized fashion EVERY single time I encountered any kind of IS system in my daily life. Has anyone else ever tried that? It is much harder to do then you would think, since this world is made up of dozens of these systems before you even step foot outside your door in the morning and it only gets more complicated from there!
     What I did learn is that you can not avoid them. It just isn't possible in the modern world. I understand that an IS system in it's broadest sense is the most important thing in the world, the most used and the most wanted thing humanity has created to date. I will use, design, fix, and even create them almost every single day for the rest of my life, and even after that my actions and information will be stored somewhere, used by someone as data for the next one. And I love computers (and by extension IS systems) all the more for it. My life really just would not be the same, nothing I dream of would be possible without them.
     I know that I know nothing about computers, about how they work or why or even how to use them beyond a semi-intelligent mash of buttons, and that excites me to no end, that is why I am where I am and why I think computers and IS systems are amazing.