Appliance Deployment Featured Article

Appliance deployment specialist NEI (News - Alert) is keeping up with the fast moving industry. In a recent blog post titled, “The Technology Trifecta,” NEI President and CEO Greg Shortell wrote that his company has been adopting the latest advances in technology to keep with the fast changing industry. Some of these changes are not small or incremental; instead they are giant leaps forward.

In fact, according to Shortell, “They are hard to believe and sometimes even harder to conceptualize.” Nevertheless, to describe the technologies used in NEI solutions, the NEI chief attempts to tie the progress to concepts that are a part of his company’s products.

His column starts with key components like processors that NEI must deal with every day and how they have impacted the company’s products over the years. For example, Shortell highlights the Intel (News - Alert) processor, which is in the nanometer (nm) era.

To give the reader some perspective on how much these processors have changed since the turn of the century, Shortell illustrates improvements in process geometries from 1999 to 2011. As shown, the processor technology shrunk from 180 nm in 1999 to 22 nm in 2011. By comparison to the 1971 4004 Intel processor, the 22 nm Ivy Bridge processor is 4,000X faster, consumes 5,000X less power per transistor, and is 50,000X cheaper per transistor.

He wrote that if the auto industry would have followed Moore’s Law as the processors have done, then the speed of an automobile would have increased from 81 mph in 1971 to 324 mph in 2012. And the fuel economy would have improved from 36 mpg in 1971 to 130 mpg in 2012. Likewise, the cost of a car would have dropped from $2,500 in 1971 to $.05 in 2012.

Next, the blog investigates advances in disk drives. From $10,000 per Megabyte (MB) of disk storage in 1956 to a remarkable $10 per Gigabyte in 2000, disk drives have come a long way. Today, suppliers are talking in terms of megabytes per cent. By August 2010, it was 122 MB for a penny, and capacity has only continued to rise from there.

“Today we are just beginning to enter the age of solid state memory which will be faster and someday in the future, even cheaper,” according to Shortell.

Memory was the final part of the technology trifecta blog, where it was indicated that memory technology has also made dramatic improvements in density and cost in the last 50 years.

As this evolution continues, “the processors are computing ever faster, disks are spinning ever quicker and memory is simply accessing at lightning speed,” Shortell concluded.

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