2009 Technology of the Year Awards: Systems and Storage

Systems and Storage

The 12 winners in systems and storage include the Test Center's top picks among smartphones, laptops, workstations, servers, low- and high-end NAS, fixed-content archiving solutions, and datacenter cooling and power distribution systems.

InfoWorld Test Center Staff

Apple iPhone 3G

2008 yielded a cornucopia of new smartphones, establishing the combination of 3G cellular radio, GPS, Wi-Fi, widescreen, and camera as the baseline configuration. The iPhone 3G outguns cheaper competitors with free native code dev tools, frequent and voluntary firmware updates, and best of all, the App Store. The App Store and the uniquely talented third-party developers who stock it put the iPhone 3G at the head of the pack and equip it to remain there.

See the original review and Tom Yager's followup

 

Apple MacBook Pro

Apple MacBook Pro

What this economy needs is a mainstream commercial notebook that can last five years, and the unibody MacBook Pro is it. Apple's new flagship notebook is drop- and crush-resistant, user-expandable, user-serviceable, and power efficient, with switchable low-power/high-performance graphics. The MacBook Pro is well worth the upgrade for Mac and PC notebook users alike.

See the review

 

Apple MacBook Air

Apple MacBook Air

There's really nothing like the MacBook Air on the market today. It's ultrathin, ultralight, and ultrasmall, yet provides solid performance and usability. There are sacrifices, to be sure, such as the single USB port and the lack of an internal optical drive, but they're minor when the Air's size and weight are taken into consideration. You might not choose the Air as your only computer, but as a traveling companion, it's simply stellar.

See the review

 

Dell Precision M6400 Mobile Workstation

Dell Precision M6400 Mobile Workstation

Dell's M6400 epitomizes the kitchen-sink approach to system design. Its three-spindle configuration allows you to equip the unit with both a two-disk RAID (a major advantage during disk-intensive tasks) and an integrated optical drive, while four DIMM slots support up to 16GB of RAM.

See the review

 

HP xw4600 Workstation

HP xw4600 Workstation

The HP xw4600 is our first choice among workstations -- unless you have really high-end needs. The xw4600 boasts solid performance, low cost, easy service, and good expandability, save for being limited to a single quad-core processor. But core for core, it nearly matches the performance of midrange workstations costing twice as much.

See the review

Sun Fire X4150

Sun Fire X4150

The Sun Fire X4150 is a "2U" workhorse squeezed into a 1U chassis. Sporting two quad-core Intel Xeon CPUs, up to 64GB of RAM, and eight internal 2.5-inch 10K SAS drives, it's a monster of a system, blazing through database and Web-serving benchmarks in the lab. Even the little details are there, such as internal USB 2.0 ports (in addition to two in the front and two in the rear), redundant power supplies, four built-in gigabit Ethernet ports, and more. Thin is definitely in with the X4150.

See the review

 

Dell PowerEdge R905

Dell PowerEdge R905

The PowerEdge R905 is a robust, well-priced, virtualization-optimized server. Equipped with four Opteron processors, 32 DIMM sockets, and seven PCIe slots, the R905 boasts the best performance in its market segment and excellent expandability. This is the server to beat when choosing enterprise virtualization hosts.

See the review

Synology Cube Station

Synology Cube Station

Synology has broken new ground with a completely open, commercial NAS device targeted at the SMB and home market. If you want 4TB of Linux-based RAID 5 NAS storage with SMB/CIFS, NFS, FTP, HTTP, AFP, rsync sharing, automated network and local backups, root access, and much more, you can have it here for less than $2,000. And in sharp contrast to most SMB NAS devices, which lock you into an untouchable system, the Cube Station is as open as if you built it yourself -- but you didn't have to.

See the review

BlueArc Titan

BlueArc Titan

Combining exceptional scalability, stellar performance, powerful storage applications, and management tools that make even the most complex tasks seem easy, the BlueArc Titan 3000 sums up the best of what you can expect in a file serving system. The Titan doesn't come cheap, but compares favorably on many levels with several competing solutions. For a company that needs unified storage offering fast performance, reliability, good management tools, and top-notch scalability, the Titan 3000 should top the list.

See the review

Sun StorageTek 5800 "Honeycomb"

Sun StorageTek 5800 "Honeycomb"

Sun's StorageTek 5800 addresses fixed-content archiving needs with a reliable and scalable cell-based architecture. Impressive resilience together with excellent performance and powerful administrative tools make the "Honeycomb" one of the most interesting solutions in the emerging fixed-content archiving space. And with a foot in the open source community, Honeycomb promises to deliver more software features faster than competing proprietary solutions.

See the review

APC InfraStruXure InRow RP

APC InfraStruXure InRow RP

The star of our "Pimp my datacenter" project, the APC InfraStruXure InRow RP cooling system stands apart from the crowd in its use of variable compressors and truly intelligent cooling. The InRow brings the cold air directly to the datacenter's heat source -- the server rack -- and its integration with the InfraStruXure Central management system gives real-time control over power, cooling, and security in a single console.

See the review

Starline Track Busway

Starline Track Busway

An impressive leap forward in the art of providing electrical power to the equipment in the server room, Universal Electric's Starline Track Busway completely eliminates the tangle of high-power rubber cables that typically snake under a datacenter floor or coil up on top of racks. Using standard sockets and circuit breakers, you can cobble together even the weirdest power connection without calling an electrician.

See the review and "Pimp my datacenter"