Digital signage

A new form of advertising is growing with great speed in the current industry known as the Digital Signage. In digital signage the electronic data is handled and controlled from an administrative console running the digital signage software and is sent across to others terminals without changing their physical location.

The content or messages displayed on the sign are revealed on every electronic screen that ranges from simple text and still images to full-motion video, with or without audio. The screen exhibit the message in scrolling message boards, LCD or plasma display panels, electronic billboards, projecting screens or any other display types that can be controlled electronically using a computer, facilitating the user to remotely change and manage their content generally through internet. All the control is with the administrative console which is nothing but a form of a computer or a digital device which handles all this work remotely. This innovative technology offers high return of investment than their traditional counterparts such as, printed signs.

Digital Signage serve various purposes that includes, providing information, effective medium of enhancing sales, advertising by third parties, improve customer experience, influences customer behavior, cost effective means of building a brand and helps in the creation of better and superior environment.With relatively cheap prices of plasma and LCD screens and easy accessibility of internet connectivity, Digital Signage technology has gained immense popularity and has emerged as one of the most effective medium of contemporary advertising. Digital Signage is found in retail outlets, transit hubs, doctor’s office, fast food restaurants schools, universities, churches and even gas stations.

Green your existing data center

Do you know? Very soon the cost of providing energy to a server will exceed the server’s acquisition cost in its three years lifetime. Energy hogging data centers are constantly sending feelers to an enterprise to wake up and conserve power, especially since servers need to be up and running all the time.

There are several ways that can help you reduce the consumption of energy in data centers:

Reduce the number of servers with the help of various high-density alternatives available in the market that includes virtualization and blade servers. Minimize storage hardware by using SANs or NAS devices that helps in combining the storage space, which in turn reduces the power consumption in the data center and also signify reduced acquisition costs.

Installation of energy saving hardware like multicore CPUs minimizes unnecessary and external electronics. The latest innovation CPU performance-stepping technology enthusiastically adjusts the energy that processors needs in relationship to the processor load.

Dynamic control of a server’s internal fans can minimize the power required when the air in the data centre is cooler. Liquid cooling of server racks can confine the amount of energy required to eliminate heat from the data centre. Data centers can also use hot aisle/cold aisle configurations to improve cooling efficiency.

3LCD Micro-display Technology

3LCD technology refers to a video projection system that uses three LCD panels to produce an image. 3LCD is certainly the most admired micro-display projection technology globally, delivering high quality images for the most discerning business and consumer audiences. 3LCD technology uses active matrix that produces sharper and clearer images.

Highly reliable and sophisticated 3LCD technology is designed to project bright, clear and brilliant images even in high ambient light situations. 3LCD projector color reproduction range is extensive, and primary colors are authentically reproduced. Better gray scale in dark areas facilitates additional natural gradation. 3LCD projectors display constant images that do not suffer from color disintegration and facilitate high definition performance.

3LCD prominently figures among several present-day flat panel display technologies including; Plasma Display Panel (PDP), Organic Light Emitting Diode (OELD), Thin-film Electroluminescent (TFEL) and Field Emission Display (FED). Using 3LCD micro displays provides manufacturers with a projection solution for enhancing resolution while maintaining compactness.

With the advent of 3LCD in 1995 it has been adopted by several leading TV manufacturers including, Fujitsu, Hitachi, Panasonic, Sanyo and Sony for its compactness and high resolution image quality.

Liquid Crystal Display

LCD refers to a transmissive technology that needs a backlight source usually an ultra-high-pressure mercury lamp. The light generated by the backlight is controlled by liquid crystals. The liquid crystal solution is squeezed in between two sheets of a polarizing material (either glass or plastic). By altering the electric current passing through the solution transform the crystals opaqueness and enables the display of desired image on the screen.

HTPS (high-temperature polysilicon) Projection System

HTPS is an active matrix transmissive LCD that offers several advantages over LCDs using other systems such as, higher resolution and higher contrast and can even embed drivers. The light passes through an ultrahigh pressure mercury lamp which is split into red, green and blue using a dichromic mirror, which passes light with a certain wavelength while reflecting a particular wavelength which creates the required image. A prism amalgamates all three images back into a single image. Optical lenses are used to extend the images from the prism to an appropriate display size.

Continued Development

3LCD projection is swiftly catching the nerves of the consumers with their developing technology. The latest example of constant innovation is the introduction of HTPS panels using an inorganic alignment layer for better contrast levels and deeper blacks.

How do touch-screen monitors know where you're touching?

Touch-screen monitors have become a commonplace as their price has steadily dropped over the past decade. There are three basic systems that are used to recognize a person's touch: Resistive, Capacitive and Surface acoustic wave.

The resistive system consists of a normal glass panel that is covered with a conductive and a resistive metallic layer. These two layers are held apart by spacers, and a scratch-resistant layer is placed on top of the whole setup. An electrical current runs through the two layers while the monitor is operational. When a user touches the screen, the two layers make contact in that exact spot.

The change in the electrical field is noted and the coordinates of the point of contact are calculated by the computer. Once the coordinates are known, a special driver translates the touch into something that the operating system can understand, much as a computer mouse driver translates a mouse's movements into a click or a drag.

In the capacitive system, a layer that stores electrical charge is placed on the glass panel of the monitor. When a user touches the monitor with his or her finger, some of the charge is transferred to the user, so the charge on the capacitive layer decreases. This decrease is measured in circuits located at each corner of the monitor. The computer calculates, from the relative differences in charge at each corner, exactly where the touch event took place and then relays that information to the touch-screen driver software.

One advantage that the capacitive system has over the resistive system is that it transmits almost 90 per cent of the light from the monitor, whereas the resistive system only transmits about 75 percent. This gives the capacitive system a much clearer picture than the resistive system.

On the monitor of a surface acoustic wave system, two transducers (one receiving and one sending) are placed along the x and y axes of the monitor's glass plate. Also placed on the glass are reflectors -- they reflect an electrical signal sent from one transducer to the other. The receiving transducer is able to tell if the wave has been disturbed by a touch event at any instant, and can locate it accordingly.

The wave setup has no metallic layers on the screen, allowing for 100-per cent light throughput and perfect image clarity. This makes the surface acoustic wave system best for displaying detailed graphics (both other systems have significant degradation in clarity).

Another area in which the systems differ is in which stimuli will register as a touch event. A resistive system registers a touch as long as the two layers make contact, which means that it doesn't matter if you touch it with your finger or a rubber ball. A capacitive system, on the other hand, must have a conductive input, usually your finger, in order to register a touch. The surface acoustic wave system works much like the resistive system, allowing a touch with almost any object -- except hard and small objects like a pen tip.

As far as price, the resistive system is the cheapest; its clarity is the lowest of the three, and its layers can be damaged by sharp objects. The surface acoustic wave setup is usually the most expensive.

Network infrastructure

Network infrastructure

Communications in data centers these days are most often based on various networks running the Internet Protocol suite. Data centers contain a set of routers and switches that transport traffic between the servers and to the outside world. Redundancy of the Internet connection is often provided by using two or more upstream service providers.

Some of the servers at the data center are used for running the basic internet and intranet services needed by internal users in the organization: e-mail servers, proxy servers, DNS servers, etc.

Network security elements are also usually deployed like firewalls (a firewall is a hardware/ software device which is configured to permit or deny proxy data through a computer network which has different levels of trust). VPN gateways, Intrusion detection systems, etc. Also common are monitoring systems for the network and some of the applications. Additional off-site monitoring systems are also typical, in case of a failure of communications inside the data center.

Applications

Multiple racks of servers, a modern data center and how it commonly looks

The main purpose of a data center is running the applications that handle the core business and operational data of the organization. Such systems may be proprietary and developed internally by the organization, or bought from enterprise software vendors. Such common applications are ERP and CRM systems.

Often these applications will be composed of multiple hosts, each running a single component. Common components of such applications are databases, file servers, application servers, middleware and various others.

Data centers are also used for off-site backups. Companies may subscribe to backup services provided by a data center. This is often used in conjunction with backup tapes. Backups can be taken of servers locally on to tapes. However, tapes stored on site pose a security threat and are also susceptible to fire and flooding. Larger companies may also send their backups off-site for added security. This can be done by backing up to a data center. Encrypted backups can be sent over the internet to data center where they can be stored securely.

Digital Signage: An overview

Digital signage is regarded as a virtual marketplace for out-of-home advertising where highly effective contents and messages are displayed on an electronic screen or in a digital format. , can be changed without modification to the physical sign, typically with the goal of delivering targeted messages to specific locations at specific times.

A biggest advantage is that Digital signage offers superior returns on the investments made. It is seen on the higher side when compared to traditional means like home TV, radio, newspapers etc. Digital signs may be scrolling message boards, LCD or plasma display panels, electronic billboards, projection screens, or other emerging display types like living surfaces or Organic LED screens (OLEDs) that can be controlled electronically using a computer, allowing individuals or groups to remotely change and control their content (usually via the web medium).

The content displayed on digital signage screens can range from simple text and still images to full-motion video, with or without the audio help. Some operators of digital signage networks --the retail industry in particular-- regard their networks as comparable to TV channels that display entertainment and information contents interspersed with advertisements.

Digital signage, where can it be different used?

1. Information (airports, stations and bus depots etc.);
2. Locational Advertising (in-store promotional advg. in a big retail establishment like malls, super bazaars);
3. Advertising by Third Parties (Digital Advertising Companies that sell advertising space to local merchants/service providers, media resellers and national advertisers);
4. Enhanced Customer Experience (include digital signage in restaurant waiting areas to reduce perceived wait-time and recipe demonstrations in food stores);
5. Influencing Customer Behavior (include post office digital signage that directs patrons waiting in line to automated stamp machines and retail digital signage designed to direct customers to different areas of the store, increasing the time spent on the store premises (dwell time)
6. Brand Building (include Niketown stores where digital signage in video form is used as a part of the store décor to build a story around the brand);
7. Follow-through campaign information to store manager (within chain establishment).

However, amidst all this developments, a point that deserves to be noted is the price-reduction of large plasma and LCD screens and the availability of Internet. These factors have, more or less, helped digital signage to gain in popularity, and displays can now be found in such diverse locations as retail outlets, transit hubs (like airports or bus stations), doctor's offices, fast food restaurants and even gas stations.

Moreover, the recent free digital signage software introduction will further expand the "pool" of potential users of this technology. It will now be attractive to smaller businesses (that may have otherwise found this technology too expensive), as well as to "non-profits" such as schools, universities and churches. Because of these reasons, the total emergence of digital signage is still a distance away.

Data center: definition & classification

Definition: A data center is a facility used to house computer systems and associated components, such as telecommunications and storage systems. It generally includes redundant or backup power supplies, redundant data communications connections, environmental controls (air conditioning, fire suppression, etc.), and special security devices.

Data center classification

The TIA-942: Data Center Standards Overview describes the requirements for the data center infrastructure. The simplest among the four tiers is a Tier 1 data center, which is basically a computer room, following basic guidelines for the installation of computer systems. The most stringent level is a Tier 4 data center, which is designed to host mission critical computer systems, with fully redundant sub-systems and compartmentalized security zones controlled by biometric access controls methods.