Microsoft just released Windows 7 beta for the general public and if the initial reports are to be believed, it is really far superior than Vista! I am planning on spending some time and upgrading my current ( annoying) Vista to the Windows 7 beta. If you want to read a review of the beta you can check out this piece from Walt Mossberg( Wall Street journal) here. Gizmo also has a nice review here.While you are reviewing the latest and greatest on Tech gadgets, check out NY Times Technology editdor David Pogues opinion here .
Actually David Pogue and Walt Mossberg are the two columnists who are widely regarded in the tech community , these guys can really make or break a product by their reviews. if you want your products to be successful, make sure these guys see you favorably!

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Microsoft just released Windows 7 beta for the general public and if the initial reports are to be believed, it is really far superior than Vista! I am planning on spending some time and upgrading my current ( annoying) Vista to the Windows 7 beta. If you want to read a review of the beta you can check out this piece from Walt Mossberg( Wall Street journal) here. Gizmo also has a nice review here.While you are reviewing the latest and greatest on Tech gadgets, check out NY Times Technology editdor David Pogues opinion here .
Actually David Pogue and Walt Mossberg are the two columnists who are widely regarded in the tech community , these guys can really make or break a product by their reviews. if you want your products to be successful, make sure these guys see you favorably!

I am glad that 64 bit is finally taking off! I am usually an early adopter of new technology, some of this is just part of my job requirement. Take 64 bit for instance, the storage product I work on needed a 64 bit upgrade, because our customers have started demanding it. We are close to wrapping up the 64 bit enhancements, this new 64 bit hardware/software that I purchased can also be used in evaluating our own product! The new machine is HP- pavilion, has an AMD live quad core processor, 4 GB RAM and 500GB hard disk. The notable difference with a 64 bit machine is that now one can have RAM higher than 4 GB. I work a lot on the kernel side of the windows operating system and 64 bit is likely to help there as well. The device drivers are usually restricted to 16k stack limit per thread, now that limit has gone up significantly. Stack overflow was one of the primary reason for driver crashes, not any more. This is a big relief. My new PC is blazing fast and boots up pretty quickly, I am hoping to save some 10-15 minutes of my life everyday waiting for the darn thing to boot up! The only downside so far is that many of the device drivers are still not available for this environment. I found my external wi-fi device form cisco-linksys no longer works and going to their support website tells me the driver is yet not available! Cisco is such a big company and they are not ready with their 64 bit offering, gives me a reason to take pride in our work. Our 64 bit driver has been tested and awaiting general availability shortly, you go to Cisco website and you get TBD on the wi-fi adopter driver. Come on give me a break! Customers need better than that, ask us!!

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I am glad that 64 bit is finally taking off! I am usually an early adopter of new technology, some of this is just part of my job requirement. Take 64 bit for instance, the storage product I work on needed a 64 bit upgrade, because our customers have started demanding it. We are close to wrapping up the 64 bit enhancements, this new 64 bit hardware/software that I purchased can also be used in evaluating our own product! The new machine is HP- pavilion, has an AMD live quad core processor, 4 GB RAM and 500GB hard disk. The notable difference with a 64 bit machine is that now one can have RAM higher than 4 GB. I work a lot on the kernel side of the windows operating system and 64 bit is likely to help there as well. The device drivers are usually restricted to 16k stack limit per thread, now that limit has gone up significantly. Stack overflow was one of the primary reason for driver crashes, not any more. This is a big relief. My new PC is blazing fast and boots up pretty quickly, I am hoping to save some 10-15 minutes of my life everyday waiting for the darn thing to boot up! The only downside so far is that many of the device drivers are still not available for this environment. I found my external wi-fi device form cisco-linksys no longer works and going to their support website tells me the driver is yet not available! Cisco is such a big company and they are not ready with their 64 bit offering, gives me a reason to take pride in our work. Our 64 bit driver has been tested and awaiting general availability shortly, you go to Cisco website and you get TBD on the wi-fi adopter driver. Come on give me a break! Customers need better than that, ask us!!

I have been hearing a lot of chatter on Microsoft SharePoint lately. Seems like it is experiencing good adaptation rates by the enterprise customer. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is meant to help customers with Collaboration,Portals, Enterprise Search, Enterprise Content Management, Business Process and Forms and Business Intelligence. I looked at this product from two angle- first how we can use SharePoint and increase productivity within our company and second how can we dig deeper in the product APIs and build interfaces around it so that we can have our own custom application around it. As I write this, the research within our company at API level is still ongoing and I am sure we can find some value addition in this market and hopefully participate in this movement!
Microsoft does have a competitor in this market and that is none other than the Big blue IBM. It is called Lotus Quickr,and according to this article, IBM thinks (obviously) they have a better offering. Lets wait and watch, for now I am betting on Microsoft!

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I have been hearing a lot of chatter on Microsoft SharePoint lately. Seems like it is experiencing good adaptation rates by the enterprise customer. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is meant to help customers with Collaboration,Portals, Enterprise Search, Enterprise Content Management, Business Process and Forms and Business Intelligence. I looked at this product from two angle- first how we can use SharePoint and increase productivity within our company and second how can we dig deeper in the product APIs and build interfaces around it so that we can have our own custom application around it. As I write this, the research within our company at API level is still ongoing and I am sure we can find some value addition in this market and hopefully participate in this movement!
Microsoft does have a competitor in this market and that is none other than the Big blue IBM. It is called Lotus Quickr,and according to this article, IBM thinks (obviously) they have a better offering. Lets wait and watch, for now I am betting on Microsoft!

Lately I have seen a lot of buzz around cloud computing. It essentially means that all your digital data (mp3-audio, avi- video, docs, xls-spreadsheets, jpegs- photos and so on) reside in “cloud” meaning you can access them any time with any where as long as you have an internet enabled device. Obviously it is pretty interesting concept and could be disruptive to the current desktop/laptop paradigm. I think for a lot of us, this transitioning is already happening, albeit at a measured pace.

If I were to estimate, I would say this technology will be mainstream in a year or two. When that happens you will no longer be tethered to your laptop on a business trip.Going to be liberating isn’t it! I know my dependence on laptop has already gone down thanks to the smartphone I carry ( yes, I am a loyal blackberry customer!).
I know Microsoft has started working in the space and Google already has various offering in this space. At the end, this technology is going to get mainstream, this seems to be the path of least resistance. Granted, the path towards this would have some barriers, the privacy issues, the bandwidth issues, but I don’t consider any one of these to be a show stopper. At the end, if your competitor is offering this service and you don’t guess what, in this world of razor thin margins and picky customers, your customers are going to jump ship!

>Lately I have seen a lot of buzz around cloud computing. It essentially means that all your digital data (mp3-audio, avi- video, docs, xls-spreadsheets, jpegs- photos and so on) reside in “cloud” meaning you can access them any time with any where as long as you have an internet enabled device. Obviously it is pretty interesting concept and could be disruptive to the current desktop/laptop paradigm. I think for a lot of us, this transitioning is already happening, albeit at a measured pace.

If I were to estimate, I would say this technology will be mainstream in a year or two. When that happens you will no longer be tethered to your laptop on a business trip.Going to be liberating isn’t it! I know my dependence on laptop has already gone down thanks to the smartphone I carry ( yes, I am a loyal blackberry customer!).
I know Microsoft has started working in the space and Google already has various offering in this space. At the end, this technology is going to get mainstream, this seems to be the path of least resistance. Granted, the path towards this would have some barriers, the privacy issues, the bandwidth issues, but I don’t consider any one of these to be a show stopper. At the end, if your competitor is offering this service and you don’t guess what, in this world of razor thin margins and picky customers, your customers are going to jump ship!

NAS and SAN have been two competing technologies in enterprise storage, although sometime they compliment each other. Enterprises today use one or both of the technologies depending on their unique situation. The SAN is a block level abstraction of physical storage whereas the NAS is at file level. As these technologies have gained momentum so has software required to manage these devices. In a different blog I covered some of the tools available to manage SAN volumes, this post is meant for discussing some of the tools available for manging NAS. This article is pretty recent ( August 2007) and talks about the different tools from different vendors.Notice the presence of Microsoft’s Windows Storage Server 2003 R2 in the article. I have seen this technology being used at some our clients, a good attempt by Microsoft to enter into this market, but I think the effort falls short and leaves leaves much to be desired. For starter, virtualization support in EMC’s Celerra Manager is much advanced compared to Microsoft Storage Server. We have liked EMC Celerra for various other reasons and have in our technology roadmap development of a middleware between Windows 2003/2008 Servers and Cellera.

>NAS and SAN have been two competing technologies in enterprise storage, although sometime they compliment each other. Enterprises today use one or both of the technologies depending on their unique situation. The SAN is a block level abstraction of physical storage whereas the NAS is at file level. As these technologies have gained momentum so has software required to manage these devices. In a different blog I covered some of the tools available to manage SAN volumes, this post is meant for discussing some of the tools available for manging NAS. This article is pretty recent ( August 2007) and talks about the different tools from different vendors.Notice the presence of Microsoft’s Windows Storage Server 2003 R2 in the article. I have seen this technology being used at some our clients, a good attempt by Microsoft to enter into this market, but I think the effort falls short and leaves leaves much to be desired. For starter, virtualization support in EMC’s Celerra Manager is much advanced compared to Microsoft Storage Server. We have liked EMC Celerra for various other reasons and have in our technology roadmap development of a middleware between Windows 2003/2008 Servers and Cellera.