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By William Van Winkle |
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[ Home Network Storage ] To those of us who deal with computers and networks every day, home LANs seem like old news, a foregone conclusion. Wireless routers cost $50, practically every notebook for the last three or four years has come with Wi-Fi, and structured wiring is now an option offered by over 80% of home builders. The truth is that home LANs are not even mainstream yet. Bill Gates noted at CES last month that only 40% of homes now have multiple PCs, and NETGEAR noted just last September that only 25% of U.S. homes have a network. According to IDC's "Worldwide Home Networking 2005-2009 Forecast and Analysis," the worldwide installed base of home networks will increase from 36.3 million in 2004 to 119.2 million in 2009. So there's plenty of growth still afoot and lots of room for you to slide in with both new solutions and persuasive upgrades. Just because Best Buy and Circuit City move gobs of $50 routers doesn't mean there isn't a lot of profitable opportunity. For starters, there's Gigabit Ethernet. This is a tough sell unless you're in the LAN cabling retrofit business. Most people don't want CAT5e or CAT6 cabling snaking across their floors, even if it means a more stable, higher speed connection than wireless. Yet few would object to having such cabling in their walls, especially people buying new homes. Anyone who longs for a high-def home with content flowing to multiple devices needs Gigabit. Conventional Fast Ethernet (100 Mbps) can handle a couple of HD streams, maybe three, but then you're topped out. However, Gigabit wiring is useless without Gigabit adapters in the home's PCs. This is found integrated into nearly all modern high-end motherboards and an increasing number of mid-range models. Until the arrival of ExpressCard in place of PC Card/CardBus, you couldn't get Gigabit speeds in a notebook. But now Linksys and Belkin both have Gigabit ExpressCard models for $50 to $60.
Of course, you also need a Gigabit Ethernet switch of some sort, and basic 5-port units can be had for well under $50. In general, integrating a switch with an access point that sports the wireless standard du jour is a fair strategy, but right now is an odd time. Draft-N wireless all but swears it will be firmware-upgradeable to the final 802.11n spec whenever it arrives, but the paranoid might wish to hedge their bets with a separate, no-frills access point. Linksys has its WAP4400N for $160, but you might as well just shell out $200 for D-Link's second-gen draft-N router, the DIR-655 Xtreme N Gigabit Router, which the company promises will sustain 95 Mbps. For the extra $40, your customer gets all the latest encryption, packet prioritization, full backward compatibility with 802.11b/g, and a 4-port Gigabit Ethernet switch. For those who don't want to run cabling through walls and need to make sure that wireless dead zones in the house are banished for good, this is probably the best way to go. The majority of homes will have two reasons to want a high-speed LAN. The first is gaming and the second is high-def media streaming. This may not be the year in which "media servers" become commonplace, but Microsoft, HP, Sony, and others sure seem to think it's a priority. As such, we're back to the old problem of storing content, only now it's not just 2MB photos and 5MB MP3s but high-def videos that can gobble up megabytes per second. Camcorders are going HD. Audio is edging away from stereo and into 5.1 surround. Cameras now shoot 10- and 12-megapixel images. The easiest way to store, organize, and share all of that content is with a Gigabit-enabled network-attached storage (NAS) device.
We won't rant about the need for bulletproof media backup here. Check out next month's What Matters column for that. At the very least, lead off your NAS discussion to consumers with D-Link's DNS-323 ($230 plus one or two SATA drives). You can add value to buyers byhelping them create permission-based accounts for local and remote users to better keep sensitive material private, showing them how to use the device as a USB print server, and illustrating the DNS-323's utility as a UPnP AV media server. Oh, yeah, and it includes backup software. "The DNS-323 is only $229 plus the cost of the drives," says D-Link technical media manager Michael Scott, "and if you find that you're recording a lot more video, you can increase the capacity much more easily than in a PC, plus it consumes less electricity and space. The drives just slide out and pop in. It's so simple anyone could do it—even my mom. Because it's Serial ATA with the standardized connector positions, just pop it in and—thwuk!—you're done. And because the storage device can work as a UPnP A/V server, you can watch the videos without the need for a PC." If you don't want to mess with drive installation (no matter how easy D-Link makes it), push for Seagate/Maxtor's 1TB Shared Storage II ($900), which is like D-Link's enclosure in most feature respects. For those more concerned with dollars than aesthetics, Iomega's StorCenter Wireless Network Storage 1TB sells for under $700 and is able to offer RAID 5 because it uses four 250GB drives rather than two 500GB units. And if your buyer just can't get beyond budget but still wants basic backup and media sharing capabilities, Western Digital's single-drive, Fast Ethernet NetCenter drive ($300) isn't a bad last resort, although your ability to add value obviously shrinks along with fewer product features. You've doubtless noticed that all three of these 2007 consumer hot spots—high-def media playback, living room convergence, and high-speed network storage—flow seamlessly together. That's no accident. The old paradigm of selling end-users a box and bidding them a nice day has got to go. Most consumer systems now land in multiple-PC homes, and the best way to maximize your returns in this market is to show people how to get more out of their technology investments. If you're smart and present an irresistible image of how these technologies, working collectively, can enhance people's lives, then your PCs will add up to more than the sum of their parts. Three Booms for SMBs [ Centrino Makeover ] Platforms took a hard beating in general last year as AMD lost momentum in its 4x4, LIVE!, and other efforts, and Intel retreated from doing anything that didn't involve hollering "Core 2 Duo!" into a megaphone. Viiv, Bensley, and even the once-great Centrino platforms became afterthoughts. This year, we're told, platforms will regain some of their previous status, presumably now that the Core 2 family is cemented into position.
Centrino, of course, stands as the model of a successful platform launch. By gathering a CPU family, chipset, and wireless technology into a tidy bundle and then backing it with messaging about battery life savings and unprecedented performance, Intel had a runaway hit on its hands. (Pouring $150 million into developing a Wi-Fi hot spot infrastructure across the country didn't hurt, either.) Centrino scored because the platform was about enabling users to do what they wanted through a cohesive, simplified set of technologies. The second and third Centrino generations, Sonoma and Napa, drew less appreciation because they had little to add to the user's experience. The CPUs got a little faster. The wireless grew from 802.11b to 802.11g. That's it. Nearly four years old, Centrino is looking dusty. Enter Santa Rosa, Centrino's fourth generation due to arrive in April. The processor change with Santa Rosa isn't as dramatic as the original Pentium M that debuted with Carmel, the original Centrino generation. Santa Rosa will use Merom, the Core 2 Duo chips that arrived last year and were compatible with the Napa generation. With Santa Rosa, though, Centrino will migrate from today's Socket 479 into a new 800 MHz front-side bus on Socket P, which can dynamically throttle back to 400 MHz to save power.
Predictably, Intel will update Santa Rosa with the mobile version of today's G965 chipset. The key importance here is the integrated GMA X3000 graphics core, which is amply capable of fueling Windows Vista's Aero interface and boasts a programmable architecture, so there's no telling what sorts of performance and functionality Intel will wring from the IGP going forward. Also notable is that Santa Rosa's chipset will support Intel Active Management Technology. This is good stuff so far, but nothing groundbreaking. More important is Intel's new mini-PCIe (Mini Card) wireless adapter, the Intel WiFi Link 4965AGN, code-named Kedron. This all-in-one gem supports 802.11 a, b, g, and n. While Intel seems reluctant to use the term, Kedron actually is a draft-N part, since there is no final 802.11n spec yet. The company's embracing of draft-N is the surest sign yet that what we have today will be forward-compatible with the official 802.11n technology. Surprisingly, Intel didn't sit on Kedron until April. It is available now. If your current notebook offerings support an internal Mini Card slot, then you've got a great upsell opportunity in advance of the official Santa Rosa release.
Now, the real reason to love Santa Rosa is a new system acceleration technology code-named Robson. Robson is Intel's motherboard-mounted NAND flash memory technology. This is much like the "hybrid" flash memory you'll soon see Seagate and others integrating into hard drives. (Hybrid drives compete with Robson, and we've seen no reports yet on how well these two innovations cooperate in the same system.) Robson memory acts as a system cache in which commonly used data can be stored. Flash memory is solid state, so no moving apparatus is required in reading or writing information, meaning lower power consumption. Additionally, flash memory accesses are faster than with hard disks, and, unlike volatile RAM, data stays resident in flash when the system is powered down. According to Intel, Robson will enable notebooks to initiate system resumes in half the time we face now. Application load/run times will similarly be halved. Rosbon will knock .4W off of the system's power consumption, but if estimates we've seen from the hybrid hard drive world apply to Robson, actual savings in battery life will be significant as the majority of hard disk accesses can now be handled by Robson cache. Moreover, if hard disks stay parked more often, the risk of physical shock damage is reduced. Robson relies on hooks in the Intel CPU and the southbridge's PCIe interface, but the flash memory is actually mounted on a Mini Card. Faced with Kedron cards using the same format, we can assume that Santa Rosa motherboards will feature at least two such slots. Earlier last year, there was plenty of buzz that Santa Rosa would include a WiMAX component. WiMAX, more formally known as the 802.16 standard and officially called WirelessMAN, has a maximum reach of 70 miles, top speed of 70 Mbps, and is widely regarded as a wireless alternative to last-mile copper broadband connections and 4G cellular services. Unfortunately, WiMAX got pushed back to the 2008 Centrino iteration, Montevina. Another last-minute exclusion from the Santa Rosa roster is Windigo, Intel's code-name for the Wireless Wide Area Network (WWAN) cellular technology co-developed with Nokia. Need more chunks in your alphabet soup? Throw in HSDPA (High-Speed Download Packet Access), the 3G cellular protocol Nokia and Intel are leveraging on Windigo. The upshot (hopefully) is that Montevina will soon deliver the option to add yet another Mini Card, and this one will deliver a digital cellular connection with data rates up to 3.6 Mbps. That's a far cry from WiMAX, but remember that it's on par with today's cable and DSL broadband speeds. Online charges from cellular carriers may remain spendy for a while, but the productivity benefits to mobile workers should be huge.
There are several significant aspects to Santa Rosa for whitebox resellers, not least among them that this platform helps to expand the number of upsell opportunities present within each clamshell. With Robson, for example, it's a fair bet that there will be different flash memory capacities available on different card SKUs. Those who aren't ready to upgrade to draft-N will have more conventional 802.11a/b/g options available. Critics who have yammered at Intel for mandating "thou shalt buy Centrino with X, Y, and Z components" can now take a breather. With Santa Rosa, Centrino becomes a more flexible platform that, particularly when coupled with Intel's VBI whitebook initiative, will give system builders an unprecedented capability to fine-tune notebooks into solutions at all market levels. ...more |
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