Francis Chu

Tripp Lites Watchdog application may be power managements best friend. This new app expands the 24-by-7 capabilities of Tripps UPS systems, monitoring Windows services and restarting them if they become unresponsive. I tested Watchdog on a Tripp Lite SmartPro 2200 UPS, easily configuring the app to monitor DHCP and Terminal Service. I set performance thresholds, […]

Ultradense server systems, where every essential server component resides in a compact blade form factor, were one of the most impressive technologies to emerge last year. Recent developments ensure these systems wont become yesterdays news, but theyre not about to replace standard rack-mount systems. eWeek Labs early look at second-generation blade technologies revealed that now […]

Adaptecs Ultra320 SCSI products, slated for release later this year, will be the first to include the companys Seamless Streaming Technology. The Ultra320 reaches data transfer rates of 320MB per second, effectively doubling the speed of the Ultra160 SCSI systems used in high-end servers and workstations. The Ultra160 SCSI uses the packetized SCSI protocol to […]

Maxtor Corp.s latest NAS appliance, the MaxAttach 6000, boasts impressive storage capacity, competitive price and ease of use, making it a good offering for sites that need affordable, high-capacity network data storage. However, although it achieved decent performance in eWeek Labs tests, as an IDE-based network-attached storage device, the MaxAttach 6000 will be a hard […]

Version 7.0 of executive Software Internationals Diskeeper disk defragmenter, which shipped last month, gains remote network installation capabilities and support for Windows XP. Diskeeper is built into Windows 2000 and XP, but the separate software version, priced at $249 for servers and $49 for workstations, has more advanced features and is a good investment for […]

IBMs 1GB microdrive is poised to fatten the skinny storage resources of portable devices, opening the door to new multimedia applications and allowing PDAs to handle scads more personal data. This is good news for more than just the MP3 crowd: Corporate storage managers would do well to take a hard look at high-capacity portable […]

Top Layer Networks Inc.s IDS Balancer 3500 switch-and-software combo improves the performance of installed intrusion detection system sensors by mirroring network data flows to load balanced IDS groups, allowing sites to monitor all the traffic entering and leaving the network. In eWeek Labs tests, the IDS Balancer proved to be an innovative, easy-to-use appliance that […]

NetScaler Inc.s RS6500 traffic management appliance can improve the performance and security of enterprise Web infrastructures without emptying the IT budget. In eWeek Labs tests, the NetScaler RS6500, which shipped in November, integrated high-performance traffic management capabilities with hardware that gave our test Web site a significant performance boost. The RS6500 runs on FreeBSD and […]

Polycoms $599 ViaVideo appliance is an excellent option for sites that can afford peer-to-peer desktop videoconferencing. This USB device provides video, voice and data communications between desktop PCs over LANs or WANs. It taps the G.723.1 compression standard to provide video messaging and application sharing in Windows 2000 over NetMeeting software. The ViaVideos video quality […]

The new high-end NAS device from Quantum Corp., the Snap Server 12000, boasts large storage capacity, faster performance and multiple-hardware redundancy—a first for workgroup-class network- attached storage devices—at a reasonable price. The Snap Server 12000 has the highest capacity in the Snap Server NAS appliance family, able to store almost a terabyte of data, with […]