Blade Servers are meant to provide economy of scale in terms of hardware capital cost, installation space and centralized management.  The concept is fine but not many schools need to pay for Blade Servers as they are overkills.  We have now come up with a modified concept- “economy of scale on a small scale”.  We have done our home work to make sure that this idea is valid as the words may indicate some contradiction.  The smallest scale is of course 2 servers in one enclosure and we have found an optimal scale in 4 servers in one.  For reference, the highest density in the market is 14 systems per 7U (U is a unit of rack height).  Let us go straight to our idea which is based on fitness for purpose and total cost of ownership criteria. 

Our offer is 4 systems in 2U.  In terms of cost, we are able to achieve a price point of 3 servers for 4 when compared to single 1U systems.  Space wise, we save 100%.  Management wise, we provide individual system management via Virtual KVM.  On fitness for purpose, we maintain Dual Socket Quad Core Xeon level, up to 48GB and 3 standard SATA HDD per system.  In terms of redundancy, we provide hot PSU failover and we can even implement cold system restoration within 2 minutes.  The concept is unique and the product is brand new.  Feel free to ask for more info from This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it .

Computers are getting smaller and smaller over time.  The current vision of the ultimate size is that of a power socket on the wall and such commercial products are available already.  Without doubt, the limited size of a power socket means less components as today’s mass market technology size is indicated by a 3.5” Hard Disk (HDD) for storage or 1.8” Solid State Disk (SSD) if price is not a concern.  For sure no HDD or SSD can fit inside the wall socket at this stage.  There will be a functional compromise towards miniaturisation.   After 15 months of research and visualization efforts, Compucon has arrived at a new box that complies with open technology standards and is 1/3 in size of the current smallest computer models- Jasper and Diamond without losing much functionality. 
 
How much functionality has the new box lost and is the new box cheaper or more expensive?  The new box can have 1 or 2 memory slots for up to 2 or 4GB of memory.  The new box can have one add-on card max.  The new box can take one laptop size hard disk if we need an internal DVD RW.  The price is about 15% higher than Jasper or Diamond.  Is there a place in the school for such a desk top or desk bottom or wall mounted computer?  Please give us some comments.

Please go to the Compucon Home Page and click Products for the Mini-PC.

The writer attended the largest computer hardware exhibition in the world recently and has read a report by 2 NZ journalists on the event.  The report is about the drop of attendees due to economic recession and the proliferation of netbooks.  The points are accurate but vastly incomplete. They see one face of hardware trend only.  Netbooks are in fact a transitional product.  It is cheap, small and low powered.  It is on the way to get smaller, cheaper and lowered powered and to merge with PDA (personal digital assistant) to become MID (mobile Internet devices).

The other face of hardware is about heavy computing fabrics such as blade servers and storage servers for backroom installations. Two new products are particularly impressive.  One is a 2U Twin system providing 4 full and independent systems.  It fulfils a mid way requirement between blade servers and individualised servers.  The other is a GPU server which combines the power of GPU from VGA cards with the CPU of a standard system.  GPU is a lot faster than CPU for some scientific calculations.  Do you want one?

PC is staying as the centre of personal computing.  MID is just an interface and backend server is the arsenal and archive.  Feel free to seek more info from This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it on hardware trends relating to school ICT planning. 

We have been preaching the benefits of Information Systems in raising productivity and competitiveness.  Two recent developments overseas have echoed our views but in a more vigorous manner.

How does the Post Office use Information Technology (IT) for better handling traditional snail mail?  Certainly the Post Area Code on every mail will help but it will not produce a quantum jump in productivity. A recent news article about Swiss Post provides a better answer.  Swiss Post scans paper letters received from the public for mailing into electronic forms and sends them through a secure electronic mail network to individual email boxes.  Sweet!  What if the recipient does not have email?  We do not know the answer but a local post office in Hong Kong for example can print the mail onto paper and deliver locally.

Another news article suggested a threatening approach.  Telstra Australia has introduced steep fees in an attempt to herd customers into making online bill payments.  They estimated that a face to face bill collection service costs them as much as 2% of the bill value and online payments will save them several hundred million dollars a year. 

New Zealand as a country has not improved on productivity for a while.  This means that whilst some companies have taken up more IT, most are doing me-too movements without reaping the benefits. Food for thought here.