News

Tiger Technologoly Solutions Inc. Launches New Website

September 15, 2011

TIGER is pleased to announce the release of a new updated website. According to President Larry Lee: “With the growth of our business it is important for Tiger to include some additional information for our existing and new customers. One thing we wanted to present was a set of Frequently Asked Questions and a set of important Case Studies from our customer base. These Case Studies highlight our customer’s experiences with Tiger, reinforcing our unique value in today's competitive marketplace.”

Do You Need That Extended Warranty?

April 26, 2011

Whenever we configure a new desktop, laptop or server for our small business customers for computer service in Bozeman, Montana, one configuration option that often needs discussion is whether or not to purchase the extended warranty.

The answer differs based upon the system being purchased.

Servers – We ALWAYS purchase the maximum available warranty with 7 day, 4 hour service if available. Often, the client might say, “well, if a hard drive were to fail, wouldn’t it simply be cheaper to go out and purchase a new one, rather than pay so much to have the warranty cover the replacement?”

The cost of the hardware isn’t what the primary focus should be here. What’s important to realize is that every minute of downtime, where your entire office is completely inoperable could be costing you a fortune in lost productivity. The value in having a replacement part delivered to your office within 4 hours, without the risk of having a part being out of stock or unavailable for delivery is well worth whatever the cost of the warranty might be….

From Big Sky Computer Solutions, LLC is a provider of professional computer service in Bozeman, Mon

Facebook data centers weighing on server market

By Ian King and Kina Bass / Bloomberg News
Published: September 13, 2011

SAN FRANCISCO — When Facebook set out to build two new data centers, including one in Prineville, engineers couldn’t find the server computers they wanted from Dell or Hewlett-Packard. They decided to build their own.

“We weren’t able to get exactly what we wanted,” Frank Frankovsky, Facebook’s director of hardware design, said at a conference on data-center technology last month.

As sales of personal computers slump and consumers shift to tablets such as Apple’s iPad, computer makers are becoming more dependent on servers. Dell and Hewlett-Packard lose out when they’re shunned by large customers such as Facebook, which are outfitting data centers with thousands of servers.

“It’s definitely a threat to the traditional business model,” said Jim McGregor, chief technology strategist for researcher In-Stat in Scottsdale, Ariz. “Customers are finding solutions that the industry wasn’t ready to provide.”

The market for servers, which increased almost 20 percent in the second quarter, is outpacing growth in desktop PCs as companies upgrade their corporate networks and snap up the thousands of servers needed to run data centers.

That traditionally has spurred demand for machines made by Hewlett-Packard, Dell and IBM. Yet surging costs for running and maintaining data centers is causing Facebook and other companies to seek cheaper options.

Hewlett-Packard, which last month cut its profit forecast for the third time since November, can’t afford to lose momentum in one of its better-performing units. Hewlett-Packard’s revenue from the servers that are typically deployed in so-called cloud- computing data centers rose slower than the industry average in the second quarter, according to Gartner.

Dell, where sales have barely budged for two quarters, needs to keep server customers happy too. Dell’s sales of servers based on PC chips — the type most often used in cloud-computing data centers — grew 4.4 percent in the June period, according to Gartner. Cloud-computing networks store and deliver software and services via the Internet.

In one indication of the growing demand for servers that are being built from the ground up, Intel said its revenue from chips used to craft servers for data centers surged 50 percent in the second quarter.

Computer makers must come up with products that fit the new needs of data-center builders.