Choosing The Right Bar Code Reader
The importance of a bar code reader in this day and age cannot be denied. A lot of practical and pragmatic applications for a bar code reader have been rendered essential by the changing times. Whether you're running a commercial establishment, a public or private library, a company that employs a lot of people, or a school that is attended by numerous students, a bar code reader would do wonders for your daily operations. A bar code reader would greatly help you in organizing your database, maintaining a good record of your inventory, monitoring and tracking the movement of items and people, and ensuring the security of your premises. These far-reaching benefits of using a bar code reader and simply fantastic! But not all barcode readers are built alike. A bar code reader may come in many forms, and some are just better than others. Well, at least for particular needs, that is. Much care and deliberation should be invested in the choice of the right bar code reader for your enterprise. Here is a guide that would hopefully help you in choosing the perfect bar code reader for your needs: * Know the reason why you need a barcode reader. Is it to keep watch of the items used for your trade? Is it to reduce staff time in automating certain processes? Is it to monitor the entry and exit of people to and from your premises? It is to track the movement of items to and from your storage facility? The choice of a bar code reader greatly depends on the purpose for its usage. * Check the numerous features of various barcode readers in the market today. A bar code reader is available in three forms. First, we have the laser-based bar code reader which makes use of light emitted from the bar code reader itself to identify and verify the barcodes of a particular item. Second, we have a charged coupled device (CCD) bar code reader which makes use of light emitted from the numerous light sensors in the barcodes which the bar code reader would gather and decode for identification and verification. Third, we have a camera-based bar code reader which takes a picture, literally speaking, of the barcodes, and identifies and verifies the same through the varying hues and contrasts of the bars of the latter. Each kind of bar code reader is good for particular industries. A laser-based bar code reader is perfect for monitoring the entry and exit of people to and from your premises, for example. A CCD bar code reader is perfect for tracking the movement of your company's supplies and tools, as well as permanent identification tags for employees and students. And a camera-based bar code reader is perfect for monitoring and regulating the movement of more sensitive items in your inventory. * Canvass. A better price for a bar code reader would always save you some cash for other investments. There will be barcode readers offered at lower prices from some sources, so it would be best to seek these out first and foremost. * Choose a credible and reliable company. A bar code reader company with an established track record of excellence would be a safer bet. A bar code reader would be a longtime investment, so might as well get things right the first time around. A bar code reader would serve your business for a long, long time. Choosing the right one, therefore, would be the essential first step for a rewarding partnership that would render the processes in your enterprise more convenient. Ewen Chia is the owner of BarCodeReader.info
providing excellent bar code reader information,
news plus completely *free* barcode fonts!
==> http://www.BarCodeReader.info
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The Making of Energy Efficient Datacenters
The Crooked E: The Unshredded Truth About Enron is a wonderful movie to watch. It is based on the book, The anatomy of greed, written by a former employee of Enron, Brian Cruver. One interesting thing that comes on our minds is the size of all power companies. They are all huge. We all depend on power for just about everything and yet very rarely do we think about conserving energy. A typical PC for example takes about 135 watts of power. A data center with about a 1000 servers should typically take about 135 x 1000 Watts or 135 Kilowatts and that would just power the computers. This does not include the air-conditioning and lighting. According to to a research paper sponsored by The California Energy Commission in a datacenter about 50% of the total energy consumed is by the servers and
about 35% is the air conditioners.
Here are some interesting research done in this field -
Feeling the heat- An interesting paper by Liebert describing the challenge
of effectively managing the heat dissipation in datacenters.
Heat-Density Trends in Data Processing, Computer Systems, and Telecommunications
Equipment- This white paper provides valuable
current data and best available insights regarding historical and
projected trends in power consumption and the resulting heat
dissipation in computer and data processing systems (servers and
workstations), storage systems, and central office-type
telecommunications equipment.
This problem can be solved by making better energy efficient air
conditioners and by making more energy
efficient computers. Many companies have taken a lot of interest
in subject. However, nothing substantial has been done primarily
because of the market requirements. The end users still want to host
their sites on the fastest processors which drives the market with the
latest processors. Going at this rate we would reach a time soon when
the energy required would be much higher than the energy available in
the market.
Intel, AMD, Transmeta and Via have all released processors which
consume very low power. A typical Pentium or AMD processor consumes
about 25 Watts of power, whereas these low powered processors take only
about 5 watts of power i.e. about 5 low powered processors would
consume as much power as a single main stream processor of today. These
low powered processors are also generally fan less processors which
means lower noise levels too. Intel has the centrino which has a lower
power consumption than the regular pentiums. Intel also has the arm
processors but those are RISC. Our prime focus would be AMD, Transmeta
and Via. They all have some very promising products.
One thing to be noted is that most of these low powered processors work
only at about 1.2GHz or lower. So they won't be as fast the pentium4s.
Which means one would have to host lesser sites per server. A good
recommendation would be upto a maximum of 600 sites on a
regular pentium 4 server. A low powered processor should comfortably
take about 200 sites. One advantage of these low powered processors is
that they have a very small form factor too. This means that one can
have more such servers in the same space that is typically allocated to
a high powered servers. All datacenters use a profitability matrix
based on the following rule: Performance/Per
Watt/Per Cubic Foot. This is one place where the low powered
processors really score high.
AMD Geode? NX Processor family
comprises of the AMD Geode? NX 1250@6W processor, the AMD Geode?
NX 1500@6W processor and the AMD Geode? NX 1750@14W processor. The
first two in these consume only 6Watts of power and run without a
cooling fan. According to AMD they provide the highest x86 performance
for fan less operations. They are based on the mobile AMD Athlon
processor technology.
Transmeta was one of the first companies to develop low powered processors.
For a long time Transmeta was known as the company where the
Microsoft co founder Paul Allen had interests in and the place
where Linus Trovalds, the father Linux, worked. Both of them are no
longer part of the organization. Today they are known for the two
processor families they have - The transmeta crusoe and
the transmeta
efficeon
Transmeta Crusoe?-
processors range from 500Mhz to 1.2 Ghz. According to Transmeta,Crusoe is a unique combination
of software and hardware. It's this radical design that gives Crusoe its
important advantages, and manufacturers of all kinds of electronic
devices their first truly innovative new platform in over 25 years.
Thanks to Crusoe, mobile devices can be made smaller and lighter than
ever. These new devices will be more comfortable to use, too, because
Crusoe generates very little heat a problem that plagues the industry's
legacy hardware-only processors. And because it uses far less power,
mobile devices running on Crusoe run far longer on a single battery
charge, and Crusoe-powered ultra-dense servers do far more work per
watt, far more efficiently.
Transmeta
Efficeon processors are the higher end processors from Transmeta
and they run at upto 1.6Ghz and have high performance I/O interfaces.
They are built upon Fujitsu's next-generation 90nm silicon technology
featuring transistors with a length of just 40nm.
The entire Transmeta range not just uses the x86 instruction set, they
also have full multimedia instruction support (MMX, SSE-SSE2).
Transmeta has done very little in marketing in terms of selling their
products for the server market. Like all other companies they have
focussed on mobile products, set-top boxes etc.. While these products
are
great for the mobile market, they do have a great potential in the
server market. FIC, JM-Net etc. have some products for the server
market
which run on the Transmeta processors.
Via, the Taiwanese
manufacturer
purchased the Cyrix processors and has since gotten out of the race of
faster processors with AMD and Intel. Instead they are focussing on fan
less, low-powered processors. They have the Eden and the C3 range of
processors. The power consumption varies from only 7watts to
15Watts. Additionally, the processors come with the
PadLock Hardware Security Suite which provides a platform approach to
computer security, ensuring uncompromising security performance. These
features include the implementation of the Quantum-based VIA PadLock
RNG (Random Number Generator), and the VIA PadLock ACE (Advanced
Cryptography Engine) supporting AES encryption.
According to Via, the VIA Eden-N
Processor is the world's smallest, lowest power and most secure
native x86 processor. It is a mere 15mm x 15mm in terms of size and
consumes between 2.5W @ 533MHz to 7W @ 1GHz.
Via again like Transmeta has not focussed in the server market. The
images above give a good idea of the benefits of this processor in the
server market. For datacenters, Via may be the best in the
Performance/Per Watt/Per Cubic Foot matrix.
Companies like Hitachi make some very good low powered hard disk drives
which have a very small form factor. They have both IDE's at 7200 rpm
as well as SCSI hard drives.
Many may think it is better to take higher end servers as the power or
heating problem does not directly affect them. As mentioned earlier a
server driven by a low-powered processor would be able to take just
about 200 sites. This means that a person with 600 sites would need to
take 3 such servers instead of one higher powered server. Here are some
benefits of this scenario.
One of the biggest factors influencing the performance of sites on the
internet is the capability of the network card (ethernet) .
When all sites are
hosted on just one server, they all would use the same network
card to push the data. Now if these sites are distributed among 3
servers the amount of data that the sites can push would be 3 times
more
which means faster access to the sites. Another benefit is that if one
of the site goes down all 600 people would not be effected, rather only
1/3rd the number of sites would be affected.
Hence, the number of support request would be lesser. And finally, such
processors are very affordable. Typically they would be just a third of
the cost of regular mainstream processors.
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War of the Disks: A Close-in Analysis of the Hard Disk Drive vs. the Solid State Disk
Much has been written about solid state disks (SSDs) becoming the next big thing1 in the IT industry(1). But as to whether or not we have enough knowledge of how it will revolutionize the industry is a different question. How much do we really know about SSDs? If we are to ask people on the streets, it wouldn't come as a surprise that they dont know much of what an SSD is. Even if they do know, most probably it would be limited to a USB pen drive, a CompactFlash or a Secure Digital card, which are more on the consumer side of the storage industry.
Technically speaking, they are not wrong. Most web definitions describe an SSD as a high-performance plug-and-play storage device that contains no moving parts. Therefore, given that most of the aforementioned mobile disk storage devices contain no movable parts, they can certainly be categorized as SSDs.
But then again, there's more to SSDs than being a non-volatile device. The purpose of this article is to give readers a clearer picture of what an SSD is, its usage as well as its difference when pitted against the predominant data storage device at present - the hard disk drive (HDD). More than its non-volatility, this article will reveal how much potential SSDs have in optimizing the performance of the computing system.
SSD Defined
Here are several ways the SSD is defined:
"A solid state disk (SSD) is electrically, mechanically and software compatible with a conventional (magnetic) hard disk or winchester. The difference is that the storage medium is not magnetic (like a hard disk) or optical (like a CD) but solid state semiconductor such as battery backed RAM, EPROM or other electrically erasable RAM-like chip. This provides faster access time than a disk, because the data can be randomly accessed and does not rely on a read/write interface head synchronising with a rotating disk. The SSD also provides greater physical resilience to physical vibration, shock and extreme temperature fluctuations. The only downside is a higher cost per megabyte of storage."(2)
"Abbreviated SSD, a solid state disk is a high-performance plug-and-play storage device that contains no moving parts. SSD components include either DRAM or flash memory boards, a memory bus board, a CPU, and a battery card. Because they contain their own CPUs to manage data storage, they are a lot faster (18MBps for SCSI-II and 44 MBps for UltraWide SCSI interfaces) than conventional rotating hard disks ; therefore, they produce highest possible I/O rates. SSDs are most effective for server applications and server systems, where I/O response time is crucial. Data stored on SSDs should include anything that creates bottlenecks, such as databases, swap files, library and index files, and authorization and login information."(3)
For the rest of the article, we will compare the HDDs and Flash-based SSDs. The latter are the most popular type of SSDs employed by the military, aerospace, industrial and embedded systems industries.
Mortality Rate
Hard disk failure is a common occurrence in this age of desktops and notebooks. A lot of horror stories have been told, passed around and even published about how valuable data was lost and the agony of trying to retrieve or at least save a portion of the crashed hard drive. It is during this time that people wonder, why do hard disks fail?
The reason is simple - wear and tear. Just like any good old machine with mechanical components, HDDs tend to deteriorate over time. HDDs consist of rotating, magnetically coated disks, known as platters, that are used to store data. This rotating motion of the mechanical arms results in much wear and tear after long periods of use. The operational lifespan of a computer HDD is over three years.(4)
A Flash-based SSD is different. Although the most common Flash chips have around 300,000 write cycles, the best Flash chips are rated at 1,000,000 write cycles per block. On top of that, Flash SSD manufacturers employ different ways to increase the longevity of the drives. In some cases, they use a "balancing" algorithm to monitor the number of times each disk block has been written, which greatly extends the operational lifespan of the drive. Furthermore, these manufacturers also designed special "wear-leveling" algorithms where once a certain percentage threshold for a given block is reached, the SSD will swap the data in that block with the data in another block that has exhibited a "read-only-like" characteristic in the background. This reduces performance lag and avoids further wearing off of the blocks and thrashing of the disk. Even with usage patterns of writing/reading gigabytes per day, a Flash-based SSD should last several years, depending on its capacity. Add to that the inclusion of a DRAM cache in the disk architecture that further enhances its operational capabilities as well as lifespan.
Speeding Up
With the very fast paced lifestyle these days, most businesses are time-bound and cannot afford a slowing down in their transactions. This makes speed of HDDs a crucial point in technological purchases. The typical access time for a Flash based SSD is about 35 - 100 s, whereas that of a rotating disk is around 5,000 - 10,000 s. That makes a Flash-based SSD approximately 100 times faster than a rotating disk.
This however raises another point - what's the benefit of a high-speed SSD when the entire system cannot support it? The evolution of CPUs in terms of performance has far surpassed the development of the data storage system. The HDD is actually limiting the potential of a computer system when they are not able to keep up with the performance of the other components, particularly the CPU. If an HDD is replaced by a high-speed SSD, the performance would significantly improve. The resulting system would be a high-powered set-up that can go beyond the demands of high-speed business or military environments.
Size Matters
To be a true plug-in replacement for HDDs, Flash-based SSDs are manufactured in standard 2.5" and 3.5" form factors. 2.5" SSDs are normally used in laptops or notebooks while the 3.5" form factors are used in desktops, or in JBOD or other SAN/NAS/DAS configurations. They can often be used to replace traditional disks in storage arrays or in a server's internal disk bays. Flash-based SSDs certainly fit the storage needs of most embedded systems that require much smaller form factors.
Reliability
In terms of reliability, conventional HDDs pale when compared to SSDs. The absence of mechanical arms and spinning platters is the reason behind its reliability. In demanding environments, SSDs provide the type of ruggedness required for mobile applications. Unlike the HDD, SSD's can withstand extreme shock and vibration with data integrity and without any danger of data loss. This feature is very important in industrial applications where exposure to highly combustible materials and electromagnetic radiation are typical. Their ability to deliver unnerving performance in extreme conditions also makes SSD play a vital role in military operations, be it in defense, aerospace or aviation applications. Military applications require, in most cases, an operating temperature range of -60C to +95C. Shock, vibration, and temperature ratings of HDDs cannot comply with military standards, only SSDs can.
Power Play
In addition to speed, reliability and mortality rate being positively affected by the SSD's non-volatility, they also consume much less power than traditional HDDs. No additional power is required to activate the platters or the mechanical arms present in most HDDs. Its power consumption is practically only a fraction of a hard disk drive.
Heat Dissipation
Along with the lower power consumption, there is also much lesser heat dissipation for systems using Flash-based SSDs as their data storage solution. This is due to the absence of heat generated from the rotating/movable media. This certainly proves to be the one of the main advantages of Flash-based SSDs relative to that of a traditional HDD. With less heat dissipation, it serves as the ideal data storage solution for mobile systems such as PDAs, notebooks, etc. Users can do away with large cooling fans, internal power supply and batteries for large storage arrays in storage area networks.
Cost Considerations
Of course, everything comes with a price. Based on a cost-benefit logic, it is but expected that something with very impressive features be priced higher than something that offers fewer benefits. SSDs as being a bit more pricey than the traditional hard disk drive may be one of the compelling reasons why up to now it hasn't gained as much popularity as it should be getting with all its brilliant functions.
While the use of SSDs today have mostly been limited to industrial and military implications, enterprise are now looking closely at SSDs for implementing tiered storage and optimizing their storage architectures.
To quote from the Solid State Disks Buyers Guide published by storagesearch.com, "In fact the SSD is replacing servers and software licenses. SSDs can be used either to speed up the response time of existing applications as an alternative to buying more servers, or to reduce the number of servers and software licenses deployed. The economics can be compellingly in favor of an SSD deployment". The industry is also expecting more breakthroughs as higher memory capacities and faster performance are now being produced for a wider array of choices fit for any mission-critical application.
Analysts foresee a rapidly closing gap between HDD and flash SSD pricing (see related article "Are Flash Solid-State Disks Ready for the Enterprise"(5) ). This vision is also bolstered by a recent announcement(6) of electronic giant Samsung that they will invest heavily in improving their flash and DRAM production lines and flash SSD equipped laptops. Only time will tell if we will witness widespread commercial adoption of SSDs.(end)
This article has been reprinted from www.e-disk.com
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