Many technologies originally intended for the enterprise end up trickling down into the consumer market at some point. Some of these technologies (ethernet or virtualization, for instance) are more practical than others; but if businesses find a use for a specific piece of technology, then chances are good that consumers can benefit from it as well. Such is the case with iSCSI.

iSCSI stands for Internet Small Computer System Interface. SCSI (sans i) has long served to connect a variety of peripherals to computer systems, but most commonly it appears in storage devices, such as hard drives or tape-backup drives. iSCSI builds upon the base technology by allowing users to connect to a remote storage volume over a network, as if said storage volume were a locally attached disk. Simply put, iSCSI transmits SCSI commands over IP (Internet Protocol) networks. iSCSI is like a virtual SATA (or SCSI) cable, in that it uses a network connection to link a system and a storage volume.

Judging from that description, you may be wondering how iSCSI differs from any other network share with a mapped drive letter. On many levels, the end results are similar. With iSCSI, though, the attached volume appears to the operating system as a locally attached, block storage device that you can format with the file system of your choice. In addition, fewer layers of abstraction separate an iSCSI volume and your PC, which can result in increased performance.

Ready to get your hands dirty with some hardware? If you wish to use iSCSI, there are two main requirements: a network-attached storage device or server with a volume that can be configured as an iSCSI target, and an iSCSI initiator, which allows a system to connect to the target.

If you own a NAS drive attached to a Windows PC (or if you have managed to make your own NAS), you probably have everything you need; virtually all NAS (network-attached storage) servers offer the ability to configure iSCSI targets, and Microsoft has included an iSCSI initiator tool with every version of Windows since Vista. You can download and install Microsoft’s iSCSI initiator on all previous versions of Windows from 2000 on up, too.

For this project, we chose a two-bay Thecus N2200XXX NAS server with a pair of Western Digital 2TB RE4 hard drives installed, running in a RAID 1 configuration for data redundancy.

To show you how to use iSCSI, we’re using a two-drive Thecus N2200XXX NAS server, which runs a custom version of Linux with iSCSI support, and a desktop system running Windows 7 Ultimate. Any system running Windows will do when paired with a NAS that supports iSCSI (such as the excellent Iomega StorCenter PX6-300d).

Pros and Cons

I’ve already touched on some of the benefits of using iSCSI. As mentioned above, an iSCSI network target appears to a system as a local drive; therefore, not only can you format the iSCSI target with the host OS’s file system, but you can also run applications that require local storage from the iSCSI volume instead. This flexibility is great for small businesses because many programs cannot run over shared networks, even if you’re using mapped drive letters; iSCSI works around that issue.

For some workloads, iSCSI may also offer better performance. Although iSCSI improves PC performance in the enterprise by allowing large storage arrays to connect to client systems without the need for custom hardware or cabling (which can result in a huge cost savings), I’m going to focus on average consumers and desktop systems here. To prove that iSCSI can enhance your PC’s performance, we ran some benchmarks on a testing unit; I’ll show you the results on the next page.

Note, however, that using iSCSI has some drawbacks. While setup is not terribly difficult, configuring an iSCSI target and initiator is more involved than simply browsing to a shared network resource. Also, only one initiator should be connected to the iSCSI target at a time, to prevent possible data loss or corruption. In addition, assuming that you use a fast server and drives, performance may be limited by your network connection speed. A gigabit network connection (or better) is the optimal choice; with slower network connections, the potential benefits of iSCSI may be nullified.

Getting Started

Following are the steps necessary to set up a Thecus N2200XXX NAS server for use with iSCSI. The steps should be similar for other devices and servers as well. To see how everything works, click on each screenshot for a larger version.

Step 1: Log in to the NAS server’s configuration menu, configure the RAID mode, and reserve some storage space for the eventual iSCSI volume. We used RAID 1 for redundancy with two 2TB drives, and split our setup right down the middle–dedicating half of the usable capacity to an EXT4 data share while leaving the other half unused. We would later configure the unused space for iSCSI purposes.

Make sure to allocate plenty of space on your NAS drive for sharing via iSCSI.

Step 2: After you allocate space to the RAID, you must format it before continuing. When the formatting process is complete (depending on your drive setup, it could take hours), you can then configure the unused space as an iSCSI target. Note that if you reserved all of the available storage space for iSCSI, you will have no need to format the array at this point.

Remember to format your NAS first if you aren’t planning on using the entire capacity for iSCSI access.

Step 3: Next, we configured the iSCSI target. On our Thecus NAS, we first had to click the Space Allocation link under the Storage menu in the left pane. Then we clicked the Add button under the ‘iSCSI target’ tab; a new window popped up, in which we had to set the desired size of the iSCSI target, enable it, and give it a name. At this point, you can also enable CHAP (Challenge Handshake Authentication Protocol) authentication if you wish to add a layer of security, but we chose not to. Another note: If you decide not to dedicate all of the available space to a single iSCSI target, you can assign individual LUN (Logical Unit Number) identifiers to multiple targets should you want to connect multiple systems to a single NAS device or server, and give each client system its own iSCSI target.

You’ll need to set up an iSCSI target, which is basically a section of your NAS that serves as an extension of your PC hard drive.

Next Page: Connecting Through an iSCSI Initiator; Performance Comparison

BY JESSICA E. VASCELLARO

A race to liberate computer users from the mouse is kicking into high gear, inspired by the potential of turning hands and other body parts into digital controllers.

The goal: to manage computers and other devices with gestures rather than pointing and clicking a mouse or touching a display directly. Backers believe that the approach can make it not only easier to carry out many existing chores but also take on trickier tasks such as creating 3-D models, verifying whether clothes fit, training athletes and browsing medical imagery during surgery without touching anything.

Such possibilities have spurred furious action at …

BY JESSICA E. VASCELLARO

A race to liberate computer users from the mouse is kicking into high gear, inspired by the potential of turning hands and other body parts into digital controllers.

The goal: to manage computers and other devices with gestures rather than pointing and clicking a mouse or touching a display directly. Backers believe that the approach can make it not only easier to carry out many existing chores but also take on trickier tasks such as creating 3-D models, verifying whether clothes fit, training athletes and browsing medical imagery during surgery without touching anything.

Such possibilities have spurred furious action at …

21 May 2012
First inexact computer chip aimed at developing world
by Will Parker

Moving from theory to reality, US researchers have unveiled the world’s first inexact computer chip (pictured). Error checking on the chip is only enforced for applications that require accuracy; other less fussy applications – such as video rendering – are processed with errors that are not discernible to the user. The benefit is a chip that the developers claim is around 15 times more efficient than today’s computer chips. The development team, from Rice University, Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, Switzerland’s Center for Electronics and Microtechnology (CSEM) and the University of California, Berkeley, believe the chip could power computing devices in the developing world from only solar power.

“It is exciting to see this technology in a working chip that we can measure and validate for the first time,” said project leader Krishna Palem, from the Rice Institute for Sustainable and Applied Infodynamics (ISAID). “Our work since 2003 showed that significant gains were possible, and I am delighted that these working chips have met and even exceeded our expectations.”

The concept behind the chip is simple. Slash power use by allowing processing components – like hardware for adding and multiplying numbers – to make a few mistakes. By managing the probability of errors and limiting which calculations produce errors, the designers have found they can simultaneously cut energy demands and dramatically boost performance.

“Particular types of applications can tolerate quite a bit of error. For example, the human eye has a built-in mechanism for error correction. We used inexact adders to process images and found that relative errors up to 0.54 percent were almost indiscernible, and relative errors as high as 7.5 percent still produced discernible images,” explained researcher Christian Enz, who led the CSEM arm of the collaboration.

Another example of the inexact design approach is “pruning,” or trimming away some of the rarely used portions of digital circuits on a microchip. In previous research, the researchers showed that pruning some sections of traditionally designed off-the-shelf microchips could boost performance in three ways: The pruned chips were twice as fast, used half as much energy and were half the size. In the new study, the team delved deeper and implemented these ideas in the processing elements on the prototype silicon chip.

“In the latest tests, we showed that pruning could cut energy demands 3.5 times with chips that deviated from the correct value by an average of 0.25 percent,” said Rice’s Avinash Lingamneni. “When we factored in size and speed gains, these chips were 7.5 times more efficient than regular chips. Chips that got wrong answers with a larger deviation of about 8 percent were up to 15 times more efficient.”

The inexact chip is likely to be a key component in ISAID’s planned iPad-like I-slate educational tablet, designed for Indian classrooms with no electricity. Officials in India’s Mahabubnagar District are bullish about the device and have announced plans to adopt 50,000 I-slates into middle and high school classrooms over the next three years.

Rice’s Palem said the hardware and graphic content for the I-slate are being developed in tandem. The chips are expected to cut power requirements in half and allow the I-slate to run on solar power from small panels similar to those used on handheld calculators. The first I-slates to contain inexact chips are expected by 2013.

Related:
Discuss this article in our forum
Physicists explore negative entropy in computation
International team claim organic computing breakthrough
Chaos computing researcher touts new silicon “chaogate”
Harvested TV, radio signals power devices

Source: Rice University

A “lighter” version of Digital Rights Management (DRM) may be coming to e-books after an association of e-book publishers issued a statement outlining a new DRM package.

Current DRM systems require proprietary hardware and software to decrypt e-books, meaning books bought on an Amazon Kindle won’t work on a Barnes & Noble Nook.

The new DRM system would lower production costs of e-reader hardware, and reduce client-server interactions to verify the e-books are on the correct reader.

A statement released by the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) said, “DRM is subject to a single over-arching limitation: the entities that want DRM (i.e. publishers and copyright owners) do not typically pay for it.”

“Instead, the cost of DRM is usually passed on to content distributors and retailers. Apart from its use for ‘lock-in,’ these downstream entities have no incentive to protect content other than as a contractual obligation to content licensors,” they continued.

“Thus it is understandable that distributors and retailers have been highly reluctant to pay for DRM-related features that do not directly benefit them.”

The IDPF said they would prefer to build the light DRM out of an existing format, but would consider building a new format from the ground up if there was enough interest and support.

Read the full story at: Ars Technica

Tags: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, e-books, e-publishing, e-reader, IDPF, kindle, Nook

Ohio school officials are regrouping school expenses in the existing five spending categories to create only two: classroom or non-classroom. The determination is not always clear cut. Some examples include:

NON-CLASSROOM STAFF AND SUPPORT PERSONNEL: Teacher aides, reading intervention specialists, guidance counselors, special education teachers, speech therapists, school nurses, librarians. They work outside the classroom, but directly with students.

CAPITAL/DEBT SERVICE: Cafeteria tables, gym equipment, mulch for the school garden, buses, payments on debt. Items shared by the whole school, not specific to any one classroom.

COMPUTER TECHNOLOGY: Computer hardware and software, district-wide technology upgrades, online learning environments. Technological costs are often shared among buildings within a district, as well as being made available to students, teachers and administrators.

SOURCE: AP Research

Tremendously powerful new processors toiling away in the cloud could make it irrelevant what kind of screen you connect with, ushering in a new age of computing.

Last week, Nvidia launched the first graphics processing unit (GPU) designed for the cloud, dubbed Kepler. Supporting vendors include a who’s who of server providers, such as HP, Dell, Cisco, and IBM — all of which will have products on the market shortly.

The whole concept behind these servers is to serve up a desktop experience from the cloud. This means delivering games, applications, utilities, and media to any device that will run the client: iPads, iPods, Android tablets, smartphones, and even cars and smart TVs. As this technology comes to market, it will increasingly not matter what you are using — you’ll be able to get your stuff on it as long as it is connected with decent bandwidth.

Let’s talk about some of the results.

Gaming from anything

On stage at its GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, Nvidia had one person on an iPad gaming head to head with another on a new LG TV using a service called Gaikai. The demo game was Hawken, a mech-oriented title that isn’t even in market yet. These two were gaming on hardware that couldn’t hope to run top-line graphics intensive game locally. Yet both where pounding away at each other, and the amazing thing was, the guy on the tablet was winning, showcasing that screen size didn’t matter as much as gaming skill.

This is often the problem with games: If it comes out on one platform and you or your friends don’t have that platform, not only can’t you play the game, the developer gets a fraction of the available revenue. But if games were delivered like streamed movies, then they could go everywhere. You could play from your connected AV system in your car, your iPad, or your TV in the home.

This is truly cloud computing, though Nvidia calls it GeForce Grid.

Windows on an iPad

I was out to breakfast the other day, and I have a nasty habit of listening in on the conversation at neighboring tables if it has to do with tech. The guy talking had been a recent convert from Windows to the Mac, and was talking about switching back because the Mac sucks. (His words not mine, no desire to peg the hate-mail meter this week.) He was complaining because he was going to have to dump his near-new MacBook Pro for an Ultrabook, and he was going to lose on that investment.

Well, what if you could run Windows on a Mac, or an iPad, or anything that would host a tiny client? If you like Apple hardware but hate the Apple platform, you can still run Windows. If you want to run Windows on your big smartphone or tablet in an emergency, you can do that, too.

Citrix demonstrated new hardware that could scale to support 100 desktops off one tower that looked smaller than my (admittedly rather large) PC.

This is the freedom to run what you want wherever you want. To not be tied to Apple or anyone else. To have software delivered like it was electricity. Someone else worries about malware, and backups, and making sure a catastrophic event doesn’t destroy your digital life along with your real one.

Galaxy-class performance

One of the most fascinating demonstrations had to do with modeling galaxy-class events. No I’m not referring to something out of Star Trek (the Enterprise was a Galaxy Class Starship). What Nividia showed was the progress from its existing Fermi platform, which can model the birth of the universe, to the Kepler platform, which can model what’s going to happen in a few short years when the Andromeda Galaxy runs into our own. Granted, a few short years in galaxy-class events is 3.5 billion years, so no need to jump under a table (not this would do you any good, mind you). As you can imagine, the scale is massive, and the capability is a magnitude (10 times) greater than what it was with the older hardware.

We often get excited about 20 percent performance leaps, so 10 times the performance is amazing. If this level of advancement keeps up, heck, we’ll be obsolete in a few years.

Universal robotics

You may think I’m joking on this last one, but one of the other Nvidia presenting at the show was Universal Robotics. This is the company bringing to market thinking robots that can respond to sensor-based events. In short, they can see and change their actions based on what they see. I’m hoping the eventual result is more like Robbie the Robot than Terminator, but I have my doubts. In any case, at the Nvidia conference, we once again saw major progress with regard to what you can do in the cloud, and even what machines will be able to do in the near-term future. Granted, they may be the only thing that is left of us in 3.5 billion years to say “oh crap” when the galaxies do collide.

And on that festive note, I’ll leave you to ponder our near, and far, future.

Guest contributor Rob Enderle is the founder and principal analyst for the Enderle Group, and one of the most frequently quoted tech pundits in the world. Opinion pieces denote the opinions of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views of Digital Trends.

NEW YORK -(Dow Jones)- Hewlett-Packard Co. (HPQ) is expected to post another quarter of weaker profits and revenue when the technology giant reports its fiscal second-quarter results next week.

Data on existing home sales and new home sales next week will provide the first look at the important spring home selling season, while data on durable goods will shed light on the factory sector.

Skincare products maker Tria Beauty Inc. and gaming hardware company Corsair Components Inc. are expected to go public next week.

Investors will look signs of a turnaround at Hewlett-Packard Co. (HPQ) when the No. 1 personal …

NEW YORK -(Dow Jones)- Hewlett-Packard Co. (HPQ) is expected to post another quarter of weaker profits and revenue when the technology giant reports its fiscal second-quarter results next week.

Data on existing home sales and new home sales next week will provide the first look at the important spring home selling season, while data on durable goods will shed light on the factory sector.

Skincare products maker Tria Beauty Inc. and gaming hardware company Corsair Components Inc. are expected to go public next week.

Investors will look signs of a turnaround at Hewlett-Packard Co. (HPQ) when the No. 1 personal …

Back when computers where a shiny new concept, the hardware and software were inseparable because of the immaturity of technology. The most powerful computers in the 1970s had less computing power than a smartphone has today. As hardware became more powerful and less expensive, tech companies began decoupling the software. This led to a software renaissance—ultimately giving rise to Web-based approaches that have transformed the technology industry, our social life, and business itself.

Once again, there is potentially profound change coming that will alter the way businesses use computers. Rather than create one-size-fits-all machines, computer systems increasingly are being custom designed to perform specific tasks. The most obvious examples are Google (GOOG), Amazon.com (AMZN), and Facebook (FB). These companies have built their own systems that are scalable and optimized to help them conduct (and invent) businesses: Google can support a seemingly unending number of Gmail customers; Amazon can rent out computing space without running out of room; and Facebook can support nearly a billion friends without skipping a beat.

They represent a new breed of companies—not simply technology purveyors—that create their own computing hardware and related software purposely designed to support the exact services they are delivering to customers. And they add tremendous amounts of automation so it takes fewer people to manage their computing environment.

CEOs began to notice a few years ago that these companies were able to produce results faster and at a lower cost than their own IT organizations. But Google, Amazon, and Facebook are not the only ones changing the way they offer computing services. This marriage of hardware with strategic software to work in concert on a specific task is becoming the business strategy for such companies as IBM (IBM), Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), EMC (EMC), and Oracle (ORCL). The business value is clear: It makes the products more efficient, easier to manage, and easier to change—saving time, personnel costs, and money.

Today, a new generation of systems is under way that incorporates best practices for a specific industry. A computer can be designed for a health-care research firm that needs to manage—and analyze—massive amounts of data but doesn’t manage commercial transactions, which require a different type of software and different level of performance. In another scenario, an online retailer may need to close transactions very quickly while keeping track of available inventory. The type of hardware and software combination will be very different than the heath-care organization’s needs. A hedge fund, on the other hand, may need a system that is tuned to analyze huge volumes of data to decipher patterns instantly.

This is a back-to-the-future trend that should excite corporate customers, but be cautious: The system has to have a flexible, modular design so the technology can evolve with the business. What helped to doom the digital dinosaurs of an earlier computing epoch was an inflexibility that locked customers into a technology approach that was difficult to alter as market changes dictated a new approach to business.