Wired broadband providers in the U.S. deliver speeds that are close to, and sometimes exceed, the service they promise customers, according to a report released Tuesday by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission.

During peak hours, providers of DSL-based service delivered download speeds that were 82 percent of advertised speeds, while cable providers delivered 93 percent of advertised speeds, and fiber-based providers delivered 114 percent of advertised speeds, said the FCC report, based on test results from 6,800 U.S. residents.

Upload speeds during peak hours were 95 percent of the advertised speeds for DSL, 108 percent for cable and 112 percent for fiber.

The tests, of 13 broadband providers serving 86 percent of the U.S. population, are “the most comprehensive and rigorous assessment ever of broadband performance in the United States,” FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said during a press conference at a Best Buy in Washington, D.C.

The new report represents a “significant improvement” over 2009 tests released in August 2010, Genachowski said. The earlier FCC report said U.S. consumers were getting download speeds that were half of the advertised speeds.

Some critics questioned the results and methodology the FCC used in the earlier study. The new report “corrects” the earlier study and shows the FCC’s commitment to use good data, said Richard Bennett, senior research fellow at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a tech-focused think tank.

“This report pretty well dispels the myth that many of my colleagues in the public-interest community have been peddling for a while that there’s a huge gap between advertised and actual speeds,” he said.

Genachowski and Parul Desai, communications policy counsel at Consumers Union, called on broadband providers to give customers more easy-to-understand information about broadband speeds provided. About 49 percent of the broadband customers who volunteered for the FCC study could not correctly report the advertised broadband speed their service offered, the report said.

“Consumers have been wandering in the wilderness for a long time, and we hope this information will help people cut through the confusion,” Desai said. “Broadband is becoming so essential for Americans in their daily lives.”

The FCC should also release a similar report on mobile broadband speeds, Desai said.

AT&T and the National Cable and Telecommunications Association, a trade group representing cable broadband providers, applauded the report.

“These results, based on data from monitoring equipment installed in consumer homes and in ISP networks, debunk the conventional mythology that ISPs are delivering far less than the speeds they advertise,” Bob Quinn, AT&T’s senior vice president for federal regulatory affairs, wrote in a blog post. “Perhaps now we can get past the rhetoric about advertised vs. actual speeds and focus on the important task of ensuring all Americans have access to these broadband services.”

Also on Tuesday, the FCC released a consumer guide to choosing broadband service.

Source

Congratulations to Integrity Bank’s Hazem A. Ahmed, WINNER of the Percento Technologies drawing at the 2011 IBAT Leadership Conference last week at the Hyatt Hill Country Resort in San Antonio, Texas. Mr. Ahmed won the Kodak PlaySport Zx5 Video Camera.

Thank you to everyone who joined our drawing.

Financial Technology Support

Congratulations to William R. Jenkins, III (Chip), Chief Executive Officer, Director of The First State Bank!

He is the WINNER of a new Apple iPad 2 from the Percento Technologies drawing at the 2011 Texas Bankers Association Annual Meeting – Conference in Austin, texas.

Thank you to everyone who joined our drawing.

Financial Technology Support

IBM will assume responsibility for the mainframe and data centre operations of National Australia Bank (NAB) in a new outsourcing deal. The move comes just after NAB suffered a massive disruption in its IT system, but the timing is linked more to closely to the expiry of an enterprise bargaining agreement at the bank. A total of 425 IT jobs will be transferred from NAB to IBM, with the latter not usually having to deal with a heavily unionized workforce. NAB is in the process of allocating $A1bn to a major IT overhaul. >more

Financial Technology Support

Because it is based on the established iOS mobile operating system — and because it is relatively cheap and increases productivity — the iPad has found uncharacteristically quick approval from many information-technology managers at U.S. corporations.

Highlighting the success of the iPad in the business world, The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday noted that while many companies would not approve the iPhone for corporate use when it debuted in 2007, the iPad has quickly found acceptance with IT departments at companies. Part of that is because the iOS mobile operating system, previously only available for the iPhone and iPod touch, has been updated with business-friendly features such as Exchange e-mail and remote erase capabilities.

“Apple has addressed these and other issues, including the ability for companies to encrypt information on iPhones and set up secure ways for employees to connect to corporate networks,” author Ben Worthen wrote. “The latest version of the operating system used by the iPhone and iPad adds features that make the devices easier for a tech department to manage, including the ability for businesses to distribute internally developed apps without going through Apple’s App Store.”

The report noted that more than 500 of the more than 11,000 applications currently available for the iPad are business-oriented. One free application from Citrix, which allows employees to access corporate programs on the iPad, has seen more than 145,000 downloads.

Other advantages to the iPad: its $499 starting price makes it less expensive than a traditional business laptop, and more functional for activities like working standing up or giving a presentation.

The paper recalled that Mercedes-Benz dealers have been equipping employees with iPads to help them sell cars. The car maker began using the iPad at 40 dealerships in May, and earlier this summer said it was considering using the iPad at all 350 of its U.S. locations.

Other specific corporate uses of the iPad mentioned in the Journal’s report include:

• Baush & Lomb Inc., maker of eye-care products, had about 50 employees using an iPad soon after its launch. The company built its own application for salespeople. The company likes the fact that the device starts quickly and has a long battery life.
• Kaiser Permanente, an Oakland, Calif., health-care organization, has been testing the iPad in a 37,000-square-foot technology lab for viewing medical images such as X-rays and CT scans.
• Though Chicago law firm Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal LLP banned the iPhone when it first came out, it preordered 10 iPads before it was released. The company now has more than 50 attorneys equipped with iPads, and plans to issue them as an alternative to laptops next year.

Earlier this summer, Apple revealed that the iPad is at use in more than 50 percent of Fortune 100 companies. Companies such as SAP and Wells Fargo.

Source

At the turn of the century, large data centers still relied mostly on direct-attached storage systems, which offer abysmal data utilization rates — 25% to 30% of hard drive capacity.

Since then, many enterprise IT managers have at least begun to study technologies that could vastly improve data utilization, like Fibre Channel, IP storage-area networks, thin provisioning and virtualization. A recent survey by TheInfoPro found that almost half of Fortune 1,000 companies now use thin provisioning or plan to do so.

Nonetheless, data utilization rates at most large companies remain at 40% or lower, resulting in a significant waste of electricity and floor space, analysts say.

“Most people I talk to don’t even know how many terabytes of capacity they have on the floor, much less what the utilization is,” said Andrew Reichman, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc.

Average storage utilization rates will remain in the 20% to 40% range until more IT managers start implementing the several storage management technologies available today, he added.

Over the past five years or so, thin provisioning, or provisioning only as much storage as an application server needs, has been among the most popular ways to boost IT storage utilization.

Slumberland Inc. has seen a significant improvement in data utilization since adopting the technology in 2004, said Seth Mitchell, an infrastructure team manager at the furniture retailer.

Since Slumberland installed arrays from Compellent Technologies Inc. with thin provisioning tools, the company’s disk capacity utilization rate has reached 66%, Mitchell said. Without thin provisioning, the rate would hover around 30%, he estimated.

Texas Christian University, which rolled out a 3Par Inc. SAN with thin provisioning capabilities two years ago, has seen its data utilization rate increase to 50% of capacity, said Bryan Lucas, executive director of technology resources.

The university had previously used direct-attached storage systems, which Lucas said were easy to deploy and manage — until the school’s server farm began to grow. “The direct-attached model didn’t scale well,” he said.

Gartner Inc. analyst Adam Couture suggested that corporate implementations of thin provisioning technology have likely been slowed by a flagging economy.

Comprehensive storage monitoring and reporting tools can cost $250,000 to $1 million, Reichman said, and in many cases a full-time employee is needed to manage such a system.

Source

Assistance in Network Storage Planning