Scale Computing releases the HC3, its data-center-in-a-box
Clustered storage vendor Scale Computing today upgraded its scale-out storage cluster to include compute resources dedicated to applications and a hypervisor component that allows storage and memory to be easily managed and allocated.
Scale Computing calls its new HC3 appliance "infrastructure-in-a-box," saying it eliminates the need to buy virtualization software, external servers and shared storage. That can mean significant reductions in both costs and complexity.
Scale Computing is part of an industry trend of all-in-one products built to reduce set-up time and ease management of virtual machine (VM) environments.
The company, which was launched in 2007, has so far shipped 1,000 clustered storage nodes to around 750 customers. But those appliances were only a precursor to the company's goal of creating an all-in-one appliance for small to mid-sized companies with upwards of 500 employees and up to to six IT generalists. Many such firms don't have virtualization or storage specialists.
"We finally delivered on our vision for Scale Computing from the beginning, and why it's called Scale Computer and not Scale Storage," said Scale Computing CEO and co-founder Jeff Ready. Read more...
Firefox 7 reaches beta, promises faster browsing
Mozilla yesterday released a beta of Firefox 7, putting the lighter-weight browser in front of a large number of users for the first time.
According to Mozilla, Firefox 7 uses significantly less memory than Firefox 4 through Firefox 6, cutting consumption by as much as 50%.
The savings come courtesy of a two-month-old project dubbed "MemShrink" designed to drive down Firefox's memory consumption and close "memory leaks," bugs that prevent memory from being released to the system when tabs are closed. Over time, those bugs can degrade the browser's performance, or in extreme cases, cause it to crash or lock up.
In a blog post 10 days ago, Nicholas Nethercote, the Mozilla engineer who manages MemShrink, said that Firefox 7 "uses less memory..., often 20% to 30% less, and sometimes as much as 50% less" than earlier versions.
Nethercote also claimed that the memory changes make Firefox 7 faster than its predecessors. Read more...
Mozilla shrinks Firefox’s memory appetite
Mozilla's Firefox 7, slated to ship in late September, will be significantly faster because of work done plugging the browser's memory leaks, a company developer says.
Mozilla developer Nicholas Nethercote credited the "MemShrink" project for closing memory bugs in the browser and producing a faster Firefox.
"Firefox 7 uses less memory than Firefox 6 (and 5 and 4): often 20 percent to 30 percent less, and sometimes as much as 50 percent less," Nethercote said in a blog post Tuesday. "This means that Firefox 7 is faster (sometimes drastically so) and less likely to crash, particularly if you have many websites open at once and/or keep Firefox running for a long time between restarts." Read more...
Seniors use computer program to try to stay sharp
Imagine being able to improve your brain health and fight memory loss and dementia by playing a series of games on a computer.
Fifty seniors, ages 65 to 95, who live independently at the Beacon Hill retirement community in Lombard are doing just that. They've been trying out the Dakim BrainFitness software system first introduced to the Beacon Hill community a little more than a year ago. Read more...