Microsoft confirmed that they are rebranding Xbox Music to Groove. Groove describes what people feel and do with music, and is more intuitive for Windows 10 customers on what they’ll find with the app. Why they decided to change the name of Xbox Music? Joe Belfiore explained on Twitter.
Looks like lot of people have associated Xbox brand with gaming console and concluded that Xbox Music works only on Xbox. Actually, Microsoft’s argument for rebranding makes sense. What do you think?
Microsoft announced new Bing Maps preview with all new design. The new Bing Maps is designed so you can search, view and share multiple places at one time, see trusted reviews and photos from Yelp and others, get access to a rich set of visuals and information on the places you plan to visit, make it easy to plan your travel times and more. Bing Maps Preview is currently available in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, India, Indonesia, Malaysia and South Africa, and will be available to more markets in the near future. Read about the new features from the list below.
Beautiful and intuitive design
View information for multiple destinations with the new results cards: The Bing Maps Preview organizes your search results into “cards” that are displayed to the left of the map. The cards allow multiple destinations in a single view and each card displays relevant information, such as hours of operation, and similar businesses and services nearby. With every stop on your trip in one view, planning a night out is much easier.
Explore and plan using the new layout: The new Bing Maps Preview is touch-friendly and designed to be more intuitive. For example, choose your preferred map style (Aerial, Road) by clicking the button to the right of the map. Or, perform actions such as “save as favorite,” “add to route,” and “view streetside” by right-clicking on your screen.
Improved Search and Directions
Plan travel times with enhanced directions: Nobody wants to be stuck in traffic. Using predictive routing, Bing Maps Preview includes the option to input the day and time you plan to travel so you can view the estimated drive time. Now you can easily adjust plans if the roads look crowded.
Discover venues using Along the Route: Need to know where hotels, restaurants and gas stations are located on the way to your destination? Along the Route is the new feature that helps you find places you might want to stop at during your trip. Many have suggested this via Bing Listens, and we thank you for your feedback.
Easily explore with improved Streetside views: The new split screen layout gives a great street-side view of your destination while displaying the map directly below it. Take a 360-degree tour of the area or drag your mouse along the map to view a new location.
Personalized
Save your destinations in My Places: We’ve heard from many of our users that it’s important to have a quick way to access their most-visited and most-loved destinations. We made this easy with My Places. In one click you can save a location under work, home or favorite. It will even sync with Cortana and the Windows Maps app.
Share travel plans with others: Once you’ve planned your outing, share it with those who will be joining you. Your travel companions will receive an email with the set of results cards, which they can view on their desktop or from a mobile device. And speaking of mobile, stay tuned for updates coming to the Bing Maps mobile experience.
We're technology enthusiasts with a people-first approach. For over two decades, we've witnessed the profound impact that the right technology and support can have on businesses and individuals. Success, to us, is seeing our clients, partners, and team conquer challenges to achieve their greatest goals and build lasting connections. This relentless pursuit of inspiration drives us forward, pushing us to deliver innovative solutions that empower growth and lasting success.
Do You Like To Sleep At Night? by Mike Clinger, Senior Systems Engineer
For years RAID 5 has been the choice of SAN administrators who were looking for a high capacity fault tolerant RAID solution. RAID 5 does provide a high capacity storage solution with its N-1 capacity formula. This is a very attractive offering when storage capacity is your main focus when choosing a RAID type configuration. RAID 5 is also a fault tolerant RAID configuration with its single parity hard drive and this has given SAN administrators a sense that their data is safe even if a hard drive fails. A SAN administrator would even have a greater sense of safety for their data when a hot spare was setup in their SAN array. The online hot spare would start a rebuild operation as soon as the SAN array has detected that a hard drive failure has occurred within the RAID 5 set.
It is during this rebuild process that the SAN administrator’s data is at its most vulnerable state. With today’s hard drives becoming increasingly larger in RAID 5 data sets, the rebuild times are taking longer and longer to complete - at times even taking several days to complete. During the rebuild process the RAID 5 set has no fault tolerance and if a second hard drive fails during this process the data would be lost without any fault tolerance being present. That would cause me to suffer through some restless nights of sleep while the RAID 5 set was being rebuilt.
This is why RAID 6 with a hot spare is a much better high availability RAID configuration when compared to a RAID 5 configuration with a hot spare. RAID 6 can withstand a double hard drive failure because RAID 6 uses two hard drives for parity, so this gives the SAN administrator a higher level of comfort as when compared to the RAID 5 configuration. And if a RAID 6 data set does suffer a hard drive failure, a rebuild process is initiated with a hot spare. The array is not left in a vulnerable state during the rebuild process the RAID 6 data set can still withstand a hard drive failure during the rebuild cycle. It could also keep the data intact due to the two parity drives in use by the RAID 6 configuration.
Sure Raid 6 does use an additional hard drive resource with its N-2 storage capacity formula, which does reduce storage capacity by the total size of one additional hard drive as when compared to the RAID 5 configuration. The performance is comparable to the RAID 5 configuration but the higher availability of the RAID 6 data set more than makes up for a little less capacity.
So if you like to sleep at night even when your SAN array has encountered a hard drive failure make RAID 6 your choice for a high capacity and fault tolerant RAID configuration.
About the author:
Mike Clinger has over thirty years of experience working in the information technology field. As a Senior Systems Engineer at Managed Solution, Mike contributes his strong technical expertise for projects focusing on storage, cloud and virtualization solutions.
Making the Internet even more useful with Microsoft Edge
Microsoft Edge is a next-generation web browser that allows you to find more information on whatever you’re searching for and presents it to you in a more useful format. Microsoft Edge will debut as part of Windows 10 on July 29th, and will provide new ways to interact with the Internet.
It’s easier to see what Microsoft Edge looks like in action than describe it, so check out this short video about some of its features:
Microsoft Edge turns the Internet into something you can interact with, share with friends, and communicate more clearly. Whether you need to meet someone at a restaurant, do some shopping, or just about anything else, Microsoft Edge makes it possible.
Application Compatibility Part 2: There Are Answers - By Jason M. Donahue, MCITP, Systems Engineer
In my last article, I discussed some of the obstacles faced when looking at issues of application compatibility, such as when upgrading an existing application or operating system in your enterprise. Whether installing the latest version of Windows, running into a problem with a new application breaking one of your existing apps, or that new printer deciding not to play well with others, there are a number of pitfalls you may find yourself trying to avoid.
The good news is you’re not alone, and there are solutions.
For those of us looking to upgrade to a new version of Windows, a good place to always start is with the Windows Compatibility Center, which can give you an idea if your critical business application or piece of hardware has been tested, and any issues you may run into.
The Compatibility Center is only the first step, though. Certainly, it can tell you if something’s going to work or not, but it’s not going to give you an in-depth look at everything your users may run into. The next step, then, is to run Microsoft’s Upgrade Assistant on one of your PCs, which will give you a more in-depth look at potential issues you might face. The Upgrade Assistant looks at three main things:
Will your computer’s hardware support the new version of Windows you’re looking to install?
Are your applications or devices going to be supported?
What features of the new OS won’t be supported on your PC?
This automates a lot of the work you might otherwise have done using the Windows Compatibility Center, and can give you a much more customized, in-depth look at potential compatibility issues you may have with a new operating system upgrade.
While both of these are good solutions when looking at operating system upgrades, what neither will really tell you is potential pitfalls you might run into with potential incompatibility issues between applications.
One example I mentioned last time is Java: while the goal behind Java might have been “write once, run anywhere”, it’s really not that simple. I’ve seen more than one case of one application requiring a version of Java that will break another application on the PC. That’s not something you want to find out after you’ve rolled out a new Java update to all your workstations, and may well result in your end users gathering torches and pitchforks.
This, then, is when you need to test on an actual PC that duplicates your work environment. Whether you’re using a single virtual machine, or a bank of physical PCs, you’ll need to test your lab as closely as possible to your physical environment as you can. Depending on your environment, this could easily extend into needing to duplicate a portion of your server infrastructure to test upgrades against.
Depending on your current environment, right now, you might be breaking into a cold sweat. Maybe you don’t have the physical resources to set up your test lab right now. Maybe you simply don’t have the staffing required to do it. Don’t worry. At Managed Solution, we’re here to help, and we can steer you clear of the potential pitfalls you may encounter when doing an upgrade.
Holograms are the next evolution in computing. With this vision in mind, hardware, software, and design came together to create the first fully untethered holographic computer.
Go beyond the screen.
Shape holograms to fine-tune a design. Interact with them to learn something new. When you share ideas, show and tell from multiple perspectives. Microsoft HoloLens enables you to make decisions more confidently, work more effectively, and bring ideas to life before your eyes.
Microsoft HoloLens intelligently maps your room, mixing holograms with the environment around you. Pin holograms in physical locations as easily as you would place a physical object in a room. Interact with holograms and everyday objects together.
There isn’t a screen to touch or a mouse to click. Create and shape holograms with gestures. Communicate with apps using your voice. Navigate with a glance. Microsoft HoloLens understands your gestures, gaze, and voice, enabling you to interact in the most natural way possible.
Transform the ways you communicate, create, collaborate, and explore. Your ideas are one step closer to becoming real when you can use holograms to show your designs, collaborate remotely, and learn new things in relation to the real world.
It’s easier to show than to tell. With HoloNotes in Skype, friends and colleagues can help you with difficult tasks. They can see your environment as you see it and from their tablet or PC they can draw instructions that appear as holograms in your world. Get real-time help from someone who sees what you see.
Create your own holograms and share them with others. Use holograms to visualize how something will look in the physical world whether it’s a new piece of furniture in your home, a toy for your kids, or a new creation for work. HoloStudio will even let you turn your holograms into physical objects with 3D print compatibility.
Go beyond what a 2D render can do by working in three dimensions. Pin holograms to physical objects so you can size and scale them in real time. Make smarter decisions when you see your work from every angle, in relation to the world around you.
Go somewhere you’ve never been and examine it from every angle. See holograms from your colleague’s perspective if he’s in the next room or on the other side of the world. Explore a new dimension grounded in, but not limited to, the physical world.
Transparent lenses and no wires let you interact freely with holograms without losing sight of your world
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Microsoft HoloLens is the world’s most advanced holographic computer. Advanced optics, multiple sensors, a custom holographic processing unit, and more enable you to interact with holograms in your world. Learn more.
The Mythical, Magical Cloud By Kate Frasure, Customer Development Manager
I was standing in Verizon Wireless the other day to upgrade my phone. The salesman I was working with was describing to me the process of transferring the data from my current phone to the new one via the cloud back-up.
When I started to speak, I noticed my hand made a gesture as if I was talking about a physical ‘cloud’ in the sky. It’s amazing how the branding of essentially data that is just located in a big data center, offsite, has been made to appear more like a mythical, magical world where our data lives.
As one of our engineers pointed out to me, ‘the cloud’ has been around longer than you may think. If you ever setup a Hotmail or Yahoo email account, or even if you have a Gmail account today, you are utilizing the cloud for your mail because the email data is housed on a server in a datacenter somewhere in the United States.
Of course today, it is not just email anymore. You can now setup your entire business network infrastructure in the cloud and not only that, there are various services you can choose from. So who should you choose?
Unfortunately, there is not a one-size-fits-all solution. Each service offers you a variety of options and it is up to you to determine which mix of services best fits your business needs.
Lucky for you, we have put together a quick side-by-side comparison to help you get started. While there may be a variety of options out there, we decided to look at three of the most well-known, Amazon Web Service (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
Amazon Web Service (AWS)
Microsoft Azure
Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
Year entered market
2006
2010
2014
Hours of downtime in 2014
2.69 hours
50.74 hours
Under 5 hours
Linux OS Support
Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and Fedora
Ubuntu
CentOS Linux
SUSE Linux (SLES and openSUSE) Enterprise
Canonical Ubuntu
CentOS by OpenLogic
CoreOS
Oracle Linux
SUSE Linux Enterprise
openSUSE
Not currently available
Pricing & Models*
Per hour – rounded up
On demand, reserved, spot
Per minute – rounded up commitments (pre-paid or monthly)
On demand – short term commitments (pre-paid or monthly)
Per minute – rounded up (10 minute minimum)
On demand – sustained use
Compliance
GovCloud – meets ITAR (International Traffic in Arms Regulations), HIPAA, SOC 1-3, ISO 27001, FIPS 140-2 compliant endpoints, etc.
Azure Government – still very new
Pros
Scalability
Auto-scaling offered at additional cost through CloudWatch
Large partner ecosystem, having been in the market the longest
Larger offering of third-party applications
Archiving capability through Glacier
Seamless integration for heavily invested Microsoft users
More modern, familiar and easy to use interface for those familiar with Windows
Vast hybrid capabilities
Primarily targets PaaS**
Single sign-on (SSO) option for many applications
Better networking, with each instance living on its own network
Instant auto-scaling for no additional cost
Data storage and analytic tool capabilities
Cons
Requires cloud architecture knowledge
Has experienced significantly more downtime than AWS and GCP in the last year
Not as much support for Linux, especially Red Hat
Not as geographically widespread
Not as many offerings
*Pricing Models: on demand – customers pay for what they use without any upfront cost; reserved – customers reserve instances for 1 or 3 years with an upfront cost that is based on the utilization; spot – customers bid for the extra capacity available
**PaaS (Platform as a service): Vendor provides the infrastructure and an application development platform that generally includes the operating system, database and web server. Customers managed only their applications.
About the author:
Kate Frasure is a Texas-born, Colorado-raised project manager. In her role as Customer Development Manager at Managed Solution, she oversees the process of bringing new clients on board and various other IT projects. Her diverse communications background and attention-to-detail contribute to her passion to improve processes to see businesses succeed. She is continuously looking to find the organization and flow that accompanies a streamlined business.
