When a customer spends extra money on redundant power supplies, dual storage controllers, and failover clustering, he’s making an investment into availability. It’s your job to protect the infrastructure leading up to all of that hardware as well. An online UPS is the most effective sort of battery backup you can sell because its batteries are always connected to the power inverter. When the power goes out, there’s no transfer time—the batteries simply run until they’re depleted. Rather than simply filtering the input utility, double-conversion units like the OL2000RMXL2U completely insulate against power quality issues.

The CyberPower unit populates 2U of rack space and provides five battery-protected NEMA 5-20R outputs. It supports up to 1400W worth of equipment—more than a standard 15A breaker can sustain. Therefore, you’ll need to connect the battery backup system to a 20A outlet. Under full load, expect seven minutes of run time. At half-load, battery power should last closer to 18 minutes.

Let’s say the 2U box you built for a local small business a year ago is running out of storage space. You could certainly move the organization to a larger machine with more room for internal drives. But the better choice would be to drop in a storage controller with at least eight external SAS ports and attach Promise’s VTrak VTE610sD storage system.

The 3U chassis sports 16 3.5” drive bays, which take either SAS or SATA disks. Redundant, hot-swappable controllers, power supplies, and cooling units help guarantee maximum uptime. And RAID 6 support delivers the utmost in data protection by withstanding up to two drive failures.

Beyond the VTE610sD’s 16 drives, you can chain up to four more expansion JBODs onto the storage system, bringing the array’s capacity as high as 80 disks. Given the massive 450GB SAS drives available from companies like Seagate and Hitachi, that should be ample scalability for all but the largest business customers.

A staple to most professionals who work in 3D modeling, animation, and rendering, 3ds Max is already a very popular application. The software evolves year after year and is well-equipped with the features its target market demands. As a result, the changes in 3ds Max 2009 are decidedly evolutionary and designed to streamline workflow. For example, the included ProMaterials library is chock full of ready-made surfaces like glass, paint, and concrete. Autodesk’s Reveal technology controls exactly what is rendered, potentially saving gobs of time. Although 3ds Max veterans might need to adjust a bit to the new UI, it’s designed to be more efficient.

Before your workstation customer gets sticker shock, remind him that if he’s already using a previous version of 3ds Max, upgrading will cost $895 rather than the full retail price. If the productivity-oriented improvements rolled into 3ds Max 2009 save even a few hours of design or rendering, the software will have paid for itself.

The SR1520ML is Intel’s take on high-density computing. The 1U box features two X38ML server motherboards and takes a pair of 2.5” SATA hard drives. Clearly, it’s not meant to stand in as an SBS box. But it does level quite a bit of muscle. Each LGA775 socket takes a desktop Core 2 Duo/Quad or Xeon 3200/3000-series processor, up to 8GB of DDR2 memory, and two Gigabit Ethernet controllers.

Despite the fact that the SR1520ML essentially crams two independent nodes into 1.75” of vertical space, there’s still room for expansion. Each X38ML board takes a single PCI Express riser with up to 16 lanes available. And in addition to conventional SATA drives, you can also deploy Intel’s Z-U130 solid state storage for quicker boot times in HPC applications.

A single 600W power supply drives both nodes. The message to performance-sensitive customers is simple: You don’t need a lot of rack space or a lot of energy consumption to enjoy serious compute power.