BT Business Direct

Fujitsu has done away with an optical disk drive in its latest LifeBook models and has replaced it with something that is much more impressive: a pico projector (or mini beamer). Just imagine having the option to press a button on the side of your laptop and being able to project a movie, presentation or [...]

Ever since the dawn of personal computing in the early eighties, the cost of data storage has been steadily decreasing. The first consumer hard drives cost thousands of pounds, and stored only a couple of megabytes, yet now most hard drives cost less than £100 for hundreds of gigabytes of storage space. Whether it’s internal [...]

We’ve recently taken delivery of OCZ’s latest generation of SSDs, the Synapse Cache. These aren’t just the latest speedy SSDs (they’re that too), but they do something rather new and brilliant. So new and brilliant that we felt they deserved their own blog post. The OCZ Synapse Cache (available in 64GB and 128GB versions) are [...]

The uptake of solid state drives (or SSDs) has increased significantly in recent years. Whereas previously they were seen as an expensive luxury for very niche tasks, especially in business, it is no coincidence that their move to the mainstream has coincided with their continual fall in price and rise to a ‘usable’ capacity. An [...]

Here we summarise the top 10 storage practices for building an SQL Server, as provided by Microsoft. If this whets your appetite, check out the full guide for even more detail.    Understand the IO characteristics of SQL Server and the requirements / characteristics of your application The fundamentals of a successful SQL deployment is [...]

In keeping with our storage theme for this month (see our NAS post from last week), this week we thought it would be useful to offer some tips on how to swap out the hard drive in your blade server, in the event that the drive has failed or you simply want to upgrade it. [...]

As is typically the trend with IT, enterprise-class technology finds its way to smaller businesses over time, and even eventually to consumers. This ‘trickle down’ effect is common in many industries, but perhaps it’s never more true than in IT. As Moore’s Law has stayed true and ensured the cost of technology halves every 18 [...]

Ok, so most businesses tend to buy their machines ready built. But why? The chances are you’re reading this blog because you’re the more tech savvy one in your business. If you’re an IT manager you may already know how to build a PC. In that case this post isn’t for you, but we would [...]

Kicking off the new Top 10 section of the blog, we thought we’d start with a list driven entirely by you – a list of the top 10 selling products at BT Business Direct today, categorised by the top 10 products that businesses need. Lots of the popular names in here – LG, Samsung, Epson, [...]

Data backup is critical to any business and there are loads of different ways to go about it: on-site back up to portable hard drives, NAS etc or remote backup to offsite servers. But the hot topic at the moment is undoubtedly “the cloud”. Backing up on the cloud means that, similar to using a [...]