Archive for February, 2009
Pen Drive and its Advanced Features – Not Just a Storage Device?
Embarked with all convenient features of a modern age storage device – atomic size, featherweight, gigantic storage capability and durable strength quality – pen drive is a near to must gismo for all technology freaks. The innovate creation of this evolutionary device – pen drive – has served a Larger than Life multi-functional unit for computer users, being compared to none -a mere storage device that suits all needs.
Average or modest users take pen drive for to be a simple mobile storage device for their data, ad scarcely bother the advanced features and mechanisms this device could other wise be sued for. However, the most tech-friendly and savvy users of pen drive are more careful about its features and understands its creators gift of technology in just these two words.
A pen drive is known for its storage capacity for its basic selection. But technical enthusiastics have built more than just storage capability to this device.
# Storage to size capacity ratio
The omnipresent device has earned its popularity die to its exceptional capability of massive storage in just a capsule sized shell. Pen drives were first equipped wit storage capacities of 512 MB to 1GB, but modern pen drives come up with gigantic storage capabilities from 32 GB to 80 GB, in just a plastic shell that is smaller than the size of your thumb.
Technology experts are yet renovating their formulas to create spaces in Terabytes (hundreds more than 1024 GB of space).
# Compatibility
Pen drive users found a great problem with compatibility options in their device. But recent pen drives are highly encrypted to suit and work best in almost all the operating systems available on the market. Pen drives are tuned nowadays to have the best data transmission between Windows, Mac, and Linux operating system.
# Built-in rechargeable battery
Baby boomers are of the greatest fan and users of this device as pen drive functionality provides a great backbone in their MP3 players. These users need a continues playback options though their earphones while they are out. Thus, this device comes with a rechargeable battery that charge itself when connected to the USB of a computer. MP3 lovers get the best use of pen drive at current world where they can keep their ears and mid busy while they are traveling or at work.
# Display options
Most pen drives of recent age come with LCD display technology that enables its user to browse through the contents of the pen drive direct hand.
# Camera options
Pen drives are also equipped with cameras and all the advanced features that need to be included to make it a modern age camera device. Usually, the camera is a still picture-capturing device, but when connected to a computer, it serves as a web cam.
# What more?
These days, pen drives are also squeezed with tiny speakers that allow you to listen to your songs even after you have lost your headphone.
Some devices also come up with card a reader facility that not only enhances your devices storage capacity, but also adds an extra mobile storage medium in this already mobile storage medium!
Finger spring detectors are also embedded with pen drives to add extra security to its owner.
SO, now you understand pen drive is not just, what you thought it was, it is the whole world out there when you consider this so tiny device built with adequate features and feasibility options to boost your purposes.
Employing A VPN
Virtual Private Networks, VPN, are becoming one of the most important business tools. A VPN service provides remote and mobile business personnel to access to their emails, documents and applications from their computers at a distance. The dependency rate of this VPN service for current age business is such that a VPN system failure can cause a significant risk for the business.
Without a VPN remote access, mobile sales staff place orders or set actions for customer mails. A staff at a distant and remote location cannot process shipments without a VPN service. Thus, a VPN service running in parallel with global the business demands fail, a significant interruption of business wills be seen and it would even result in serious loss in business.
From the number of reasons a VPN service breakdown can occur, two major reasons are to be highlighted,
1. VPN hardware failure
2. Communication links failure
These are the common system failures generally observed in a VPN outage. The time to recover from these system failures depends on how quickly a VPN technology expert can provide a system backup or a system replacement unit or how quickly the communication links are restored.
As a business has the least time to afford to lose or rebuilding or restoring a VPN failure, they have to ensure a confident VPN service. This is achieved either by appointing a personal VPN engineer or/and a backup system. Implementing a highly-available VPN service is just as a precaution to take control over the time that would otherwise be wanted for the recovery of a single VPN component.
Generally, implementing a highly available VPN system is to purchase two VPN hardware units and configuring both of them into a series connection with highly available pair using either a vendor supplied technology or a third party solution. With this system working practically, if one system fails, the other will respond immediately to provide back up.
The normal approaches for VPN communication failures are to install two different accessible hardware’s from two different service providers. It is more like an intelligent step as using service providers of different backgrounds removes the risk of any single operator carrying the fault that impacts each of the hardware. If one hardware fails, the remote users can re-connectivity immediately via a new one. The re-connectivity, however, can be done by the remote user itself who will be selecting an alternate VPN server manually.
Another approach would be to provide multiple internet routes to access VPN servers, although this approach is quite a complex bit of process.
Another alternative approach to doubling up hardware’s is to use hosted VPN service. It is a smart way to reduce the cost of doubling ups of hardware’s and also getting a high available VPN service. To use a hosted VPN in a high availability service, VPN server software needs to be installed on more than one existing windows server.
As hosted services use internet, business firms an install low costs internet circuits of multiple providers. This is just to ensure no internet connection breakdown or temporary failure. The hosted VPN services, however, provide a transparent failover for remote users with no discontent or reconnect required.
When considering high available VPN services, factors that need to be considered are complexity of the management, failover and recovery of the system and cost associated with these at a long term.