Today I was going to say something about what was the most attractive product during the 2010. But then I thought it better be something I have actually invested in rather than what just grabbed my attention but was not compelling enough for me or my family to buy and use. For me two product stands out last year and you may argue that one of them came about actually in 2008, but at least for me, I discovered it this year:-
1- iPad by Apple
2- Virtualization with Hyper-V technology by Microsoft
First iPad
When the iPad was first introduced early in the year, there were immediate bad reviews of the product by naysayers that felt that it was nothing more than an over-sized iPhone or iPod Touch and it does not even have a camera! The mainstream technology press questioned whether or not the product would even catch on. Most people liking it were afraid to air their thoughts, it as they would have just been called Apple Fan Boy!
Considering that in the 4th quarter of 2010 alone, Apple sold 4.2 million iPads with average price of about £600 or about 800 USD, with estimated yearly sales of nearly 10 -12 million units worldwide, I think you would agree that all those reviewers that thought it was not going to get far were so terribly wrong.
For me iPad is, without any doubt, is the most successful product that Apple has launched even more so than iPhone or even the iPod. Mainly because when for example iPhone came out, Apple had no competition and the devices performed a task that people need. Also it did not seem to be expensive since it was subsidized by the mobile phone operators and the customer paid monthly fees that were not substantially different to other high end offerings by other manufactures.
Instead of being tied to our desks in order to access our critical productivity applications, we now have the ability to enjoy a full, rich Internet browsing experience from the couch or from our bedside, in the train, restaurants and bars without looking like a Geek. We can enjoy rich multimedia applications, read books, play games, all from one easy-to-use, effectively maintenance-free hand-held device. But for me the killer applications are what keeps my 4.5 years old Son Happy. Currently, he has over 70 games on the iPad and majority of them were free and the whole investments in paid games is no more than this Christmas purchase of PlayStation-3 Gran Turismo 5 at about £45 or about 75 USD for one game. So buying 20 or more games for my son for less than 475 is not bad.
My son also finds the Educational Apps on the iPad much more usable than using similar tools on the PC. He is far more advanced as an iPad user than a laptop user and that says something about the usability aspects of iPad.
The original idea for iPad was not new, in fact comes from 40 years old Science Fiction Books and television programs like Start-trek. And since it has appeared in our local electronic shops, it has been a transformative, disruptive technology that in such a short period of time has given cause to every single company in our industry to completely re-think the end-user computing experience and how to best enable their applications and infrastructure to support it and other “thin” technologies that are similar to it or compete with it altogether.
There are more such devices to come our way soon, like the forthcoming Android Tablets, Windows 7 and HP Palm Slates, RIM’s BlackBerry PlayBook and also Google’s Chrome OS netbooks and tablets - but none of them will win our hearts as much as the first iPad with no bugs in both software and hardware which is amazing for first generation device.
It has also together with kindle App on iPad it has changed how media will be consumed, be it web sites, books and other traditional print media such as newspapers and magazines. It is a giant leap forward in bringing about a truly paperless society where access to information is instantaneous and from everywhere. I am not sorry to say that for the past 8 months or so, I have not bought a traditional paper.
Next is Hyper V virtual server technology by Microsoft
Recently Goldman Sachs research noted. In a nutshell, hat Microsoft missed the tablet curve, faces the down slope of a Windows 7 upgrade pop and faces multiple challenges. According to Goldman Sachs 2011 is going to be a rough year for Microsoft. So I thought I make this my second best technology of this year. I know a lot of people are on and on about Kinect, but I am not so sure.
It has been over two years since the initial release of Hyper-V. I know I am late to have actually embraced this technology since when it was released many of my developer friends told me to start using it as it was great. However, 2 years ago when I tried it, I found it very hard to get it going so I ended up installing regular Windows 2008 Server rather than Hyper-V. I think it is fair to say that only geeks that know what they were doing from command line found it easy to use in those days.
However, now we have SP1 coming out soon, and there has also been minor enhancements have been made to Hyper-V while the core remained the same. The initial Marketing push of Hyper-V seem to have slowed down on Microsoft's part, now that Windows Server 2008 is fairly old and most people in the industry would be familiar with Hyper-V, good technical documentations are available for people like me so it is a great time to embrace the tried and tested technology.
In the beginning, people used Hyper-V based Virtual Servers just for test, development and prototyping? But now we use it for live web sites. I agree that whilst some large scale applications like SQL Server may not be most suitable for Virtual Server Instances, it is perfectly possible for Hyper-V based Virtual Machines to carry out production level work.
I know that because I have friends that have a single Virtual Server Instance hosting over 100 Websites!
As far as CPU and Memory utilization goes, Hyper-V Machines are almost as good as real servers. The memory is dedicated to the server, and CPU is real. However, as the number of guest instances grows, it can put a strain on the storage sub system. The overall performance of the guest machines will be limited by the performance of the storage system. If the storage system can keep up with the demands of all guest machines, all Hyper-V based Virtual Servers will perform like stand alone servers.
We have run performance tests on both the Hyper-V Host and Guest Machines to verify this. There is negligible difference between the physical and virtual server. If you are considering deployment of production Sites on a Hyper-V based Virtual Server, it is perfectly viable. I will not go through all the features that are well documented here.
I will just say that for me live migration feature is the killer USP, which allows you to move a virtual machine between two virtualization host servers without any interruption of service.
The next best feature is the fact that it can act like a private cloud as Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008 R2 now supports up to 64 logical processors in the host processor pool. Not as I can afford one of these boxes, but this is a significant upgrade from previous versions and for a start up that does not know how big they going to grow, this really makes sense. The other reason why I love this technology is because I have been able to install it on variety of PCs - fast ones, slow ones, and so long the CPU is relatively new, it works perfect.
On daily basis, I love the ability to take a snapshot, do something dangerous with the server and if it goes wrong, then just revert back. This is just amazing.
Finally you might think is there a common denominator between the two technologies that I have chosen, and the answer is this - with both technology at my disposal, I can fully control over 12 virtual servers of my customers and my own completely from my iPad anywhere, on holiday, in a restaurant and where ever with either WIFI or 3G network, like I am in front of the servers -now I think that is just amazing? |
|
|