TechInsight Magazine
Intel's vision of digital signage in the near future: Augmented reality.
Looking for a new direction for your company? Right now might be a great time to get into the digital signage business for a couple of reasons. The first is easy. Over the next three years, tremendous growth is projected for digital signage in wide variety of areas – healthcare, education, entertainment, hospitality – the list goes on.
But what I also like is how distribution has matured their digital signage product line over the last few years and how, working thru their various product offerings gives resellers a great opportunity to enter the digital signage market with a controlled investment.
Selling digital signage isn't easy. There are lots of pieces to the puzzle and they're all just as important. You need to pick the right hardware based on the needs of the job. Will an Intel Atom-based system solve the problem or do they need the power of something along the lines of the Intel Core i5 or Core i7 processor (and the opportunity to include vPro technology).
The word on the street: Intel, you gotta drop the price on your 520 series SSDs! So guess what? They did.
Intel's new lineup of SSDs, the 520 series, got great reviews for using premium high-quality NAND, a five year warranty, and Intel's support structure but there was some serious doubt of whether the higher across the board pricing was worth it.
The challenge is that the 520 series is based on SandForce controller technology and even though Intel has apparent exclusive usage of the updated controller, it was difficult to justify the premium price when so many other drives were available at a lower price. They did that by using an earlier version of the controller, offering only a three year warrantee, and who out there can match Intel's support structure?
Next-Gen Enthusiast. Intel’s Core i7 3000-series processors represent the company’s most modern high-end platform, incorporating up to six cores, 15 MB of L3 cache, and 40 lanes of PCIe.Intel stunned enthusiasts early in 2011 when it launched its second-generation Core i7, i5, and i3 processors based on the Sandy Bridge architecture. Despite the fact that they were priced aggressively, the new CPUs delivered incredible speed increases. Now, the company's most enthusiast-oriented products are inheriting the same fundamental design, with the added benefits of extra execution cores, more shared L3 cache, higher clock rates, and tons of PCI Express connectivity. As a result, the power users who stuck with their high-end machines, opting to hold off on Sandy Bridge, now have a compelling reason to upgrade.
Smashing Bottlenecks With New Tech
High-Capacity Flash Storage. Just-announced 20 nm NAND from Intel and Micron facilitates density not yet seen in the solid-state storage space. These eight 128 Gb die hold up to 128 GB of data.The fact that we've covered storage technology throughout 2011 is incredibly telling. What was once a fairly even-paced industry absolutely rocketed forward once solid-state drives started finding their way into more business-oriented applications. Quickly, an infrastructure of supporting cards, controllers, and software emerged to help resellers and their customers make the most of flash-based storage. That's not to take anything away from conventional hard drives; they're still the backbone of most servers, delivering the best price per gigabyte of capacity. Today, mixed environments are proving their mettle.
Performance Computing Get Ahead Of The HPC Curve
Big-Time Compute Density. Microway’s NumberSmasher cluster combines Intel Xeon processors, fast InfiniBand interconnects, and high-speed storage in a potent computing platform.
We make a clear distinction between storage servers, rack-mounted machines, and even entry-level pedestal boxes perfect for an SMB. Although those are practically very different, the VARs who build and maintain one type of business-oriented solution are often well-qualified to take care of the others. Stepping into the world of high-performance computing is not like that. Resellers who get involved not only need expertise on the hardware side, but they should also be able to address unique software applications. We're here to help get your feet wet with the tenets of HPC.
