Photovoltaic technology - or the direct conversion of light into electricity - is the fastest growing means of electricity generation today, however it is generally used outdoors. Relatively little attention has been focused on the many obstacles to overcome when designing efficient indoor products. As a result, indoor products are more often...

The purpose of Top-Down Network Design, Third Edition, is to help you design networks that meet a customer’s business and technical goals. Whether your customer is another department within your own company or an external client, this book provides you with tested processes and tools to help you understand traffic...

SAP can help you capture better information and deliver it more quickly, allowing you to make better decisions and maximize the business value of everything you do. However, SAP implementations require massive effort, total buy-in, and significant change throughout the organization. In SAP Implementation Unleashed,...

For many types of organization, the ultimate information handling aspiration is to have an integrated database system so that common files can be consulted by various sections of the organization, in an efficient and effective manner. However, database systems are not just pertinent to organizations or even large sections of enterprises. Many...

Nagios is a tool for system and network monitoring. It constantly checks other machines and various services on those machines. The main purpose of system monitoring is to detect and report any system not working properly as soon as possible--so that you are aware of problems before a user runs into them. It is a modular and flexible solution...

Thanks to its inherent resilience to failure and the increasing availability of open-source cloud infrastructure software and virtualization software stacks, services delivered from the cloud have expanded past web applications to include storage, raw computing, and access to specialized services. The possibility of satisfying maintenance and...

PostgreSQL is a powerful, open source object-relational database system. An enterprise database, PostgreSQL includes features such as Multi-Version Concurrency Control (MVCC), point-in-time recovery, tablespaces, asynchronous replication, nested transactions (savepoints), online/hot backups, a sophisticated query planner/optimizer, and...

Millions of SQL Server instances run in the offices of small and medium-sized organizations and there are many "accidental" DBAs out there whose job it is to maintain them. Often, they find that they don't have the knowledge, experience, or critically the time, to perform the correct level of maintenance on their SQL Server...

Research into grid computing has been driven by the need to solve large-scale, increasingly complex problems for scientific applications. Yet the applications of grid computing for business and casual users did not begin to emerge until the development of the concept of cloud computing, fueled by advances in virtualization techniques, coupled...

Studying the history of consumer electronics is nothing short of fascinating. The landscape is filled with countless stories of product successes and failures— fickle consumer adoptions, clever marketing campaigns that outsmart the best technologies, better packaging winning over better technology, and products that are simply...