Nope. In the store they line the items up from economy item to premium category. Generally as you go up the quality scale the screens get larger, the processors get faster, the drives have more capacity. It's fine with me if Microsoft places their product on the ones that go three quarters of the way up the scale and then stops. But that's unexpectedly generous to the operating system platforms that aren't so limited. It stakes Microsoft out on the low end of the scale and presents the idea that if you want a premium netbook with a faster processor, more memory, more drive space and a bigger screen, of course you want one of the high end ones that are only Linux.
There are several things going on here. The first and worst is that of course they think they can put over their proposition by sheer force. As one of them once told me, "Vendors are coin operated". You can only get so far with that before you're being investigated.
Then there's advertising companies. Advertising companies recruit and train the most creative, intelligent and resourceful people they can find to fulfill their mission: to sell advertising. They have incredible surveys and statistics and magical advertising quadrants that tell you that the right thing to do is pay them more money, and they've got the numbers to prove it. That's right: they spend 90% of their time, intelligence and effort not to sell their customer's products, but to sell theirs. I have a story that goes with this. It's stolen, but I've filed the serial numbers off:
One day in northern Arizona I stopped at a one-pump gas station for a soda. As I walked to the lonely single cooler in the back, I passed by row upon row of salt. There was the picnic shaker, the kitchen cylinder we all know. There was rock salt, road salt, salt lick and salt brick. There was sea salt from 9 of the seven seas. There was powdered salt, granular salt, bacon salt and several kinds of cheese salt. I was amazed. I dragged my soda up to the counter, and said to the wizened old man sitting there, "man, you've got a lot of salt.".
"That's nothin'" he says. Look up here. He pulls down the hatch to the attic an it's full of bags and bushels and bins of salt. "And look down here" he says, pulling up a hatch to the basement, where it's chock full of barrels and bags and piles of salt.
"You must sell a lot of salt" I said.
"That's the funny thing" he tells me, "I don't hardly sell no salt at all. But that salt salesman that comes through here once a month, he sure does sell a good bit of the stuff."
Historically Microsoft's market dominance hasn't come from advertising. They got it by other means I'll leave you to investigate. You can start by checking out the Halloween Documents.
The answer to the third piece of this puzzle has to do with a discussion I was having yesterday with a friend of mine. He was frustrated with the constant reorganization of the company (not Microsoft) that he works for. After discussing it for a while, I came out with the idea that the permanent reorganization process was by design. With constant shuffling you might get the perfect mix of creative individuals unsupervised by a policy wonk long enough to have that perfect summer - the year where everything heterodynes into the magical project that delivers unexpected miraculous results. But most of the time you get a bunch of creative people frustrated by people who've risen to influence through the mastery of process. At the end we agreed (I think - I don't want to speak for my friend) that the churning was a necessary evil because left static the process geeks would build their empires and drive out the creative folk and the magic could not happen. Which would of course make the churning a brilliant piece of social engineering. Because Microsoft doesn't employ this bit of social engineering, once the founders took off the process geeks took over - with predictable results. Conservative and uncreative, these process geeks are the very target market for the advertising sharks I led with. Unfortunately for them, this disease is inevitably fatal.
You will be offered a free upgrade to a snappy new OS that supports unlimited virtual machines and is malware free. With it you can run your Vista in a VM, where it actually works, and you'll do that for a few days until the VM is inevitably corrupted by malware, and then you'll forget you ever had it. After that you'll discover the joys of getting your work done in half the time and with the free time you've got from not fighting your computer all day you can try browsing, which is the practice of clicking every link willy-nilly without worrying whether it's going to install some evil software. Then you'll no doubt discover something wonderful that they've blocked from you at work because it's so hazardous to Windows users. It's called Web 2.0, or Interactive User Generated Content. In time you'll learn to relax about things like buying stuff online or checking your bank account.
You'll also discover that there's this thing out there that's sort of like an Anti-Windows-Live-Search. You type in some words, and it shows you stuff that's somewhat related to those words. Amazingly, most of the search results have nothing to do with deploying malware on your computer. You can use it with IE on Windows, but they make it really hard to find. It's called Google and it's really cool. Some time later you'll find the Add or Remove Programs feature. This one is really amazing because unlike the Windows one with a similar name, this one actually adds programs. Thousands of them, if you want it to. It has so many programs to add, it has its own search engine.
They're in a bind no matter what way you look at it. They've saturated their market three times over. There's no room left for growth in the places where people have money to pay for a desktop OS, and all the people in the other places have tried a pirated Vista already. In the supercompute market their share is 1% despite coming out with their own supercomputer OS(*), and in the server room they're not holding their own either. Their traditional hardware and software partners are starting to come out with their own branded Linux distributions. Because of the Sendo thing they're getting nowhere on the phone.
If Vista 7 tanks, they're in a world of hurt. Like a wise man once said... Outlook not so good.
(*)Some people say that Windows' place on this list is mostly a result of marketing, where the supercomputer sites were given some subsidy to build their supercomputer, with the caveat that they had to report to the Top500 with "Can Run" Windows HPC, and with the Windows HPC benchmark. But for serious work of course they run Linux.
What they're doing is defining the set of premium netbooks. They have one of a larger screen, more memory, a larger SSD, a dual core or faster processor. The one thing premium netbooks have in common is that they all run Linux.
That's mighty nice of 'em to put Linux on a pedestal like that. Quite generous, really - not at all what I was expecting.
And Vista 7 isn't out yet. The next generation of Atoms are in the pipe and they'll be equivalent or better and they'll hit that price when V7 is released.
I don't think the Microsoft's management or even marketing people listen to Slashdot
Somewhere up the thread you're replying to, one of their main guys disagreed with you. Please try and follow along.
I am quite sure that many technical people who work for Microsoft do and this would trickle down/up (depends on your perspective) to the people who make policy.
I find your notion of trickle-up engineering interesting, but I don't see what it has to do with Microsoft. Was there an Intel thread you intended to reply to somewhere around here?
There is one OS that all people in Microsoft are acutely aware off and that is Linux
I'm pretty sure they're more worried about OS-X on the desktop at the moment. Linux is probably a distant second. And by "worried" I mean "less oblivious" because part of their culture is faith in their invincibility - it's their greatest weakness.
In other arenas they're more aware of Linux. Since Linux owns the server room, they're fighting for every install there. Their latest pitch is "Every VMWare install needs a Windows Server Datacenter License (*)" - ignoring, of course, the people who don't run Windows at all. In supercomputing they've long since become irrelevant. On that field Linux has the same share the Windows has on the desktop, and Windows is close to being lumped in with "other". Perhaps June 23, 2009 is the year their slice of the pie disappears entirely.
Even more alarming is the number of people who buy excessive licenses (4-6 per desktop!) for products they're not even using (Vista?) just to be sure they don't get fired for failing an audit. Somebody from Microsoft is going around right now to explain to those folks that being oversubscribed by a factor of six for their desktops, they need to be oversubscribed by a factor of six on their server client licenses as well or it looks like they're stealing seats.
Even without a large install base, Linux continues to be a force in the market.
I'm not sold on this whole "small install base for linux" idea. There are over 1000 different distributions of Linux and hundreds of thousands of applications, not including versions. This is not the work of three guys in their mom's basement.
With regard to marketing netbooks, apparently The Register apparently thinks they're having another Seinfeld Moment with their "It's better with Windows" Asus comarketing campaign, which strangely enough doesn't require Silverlight. Apparently, "It's better with Windows" has something to do with XP, Microsoft Works, and your teen daughter uploading pictures of herself from wherever she's roaming unattended while you've abandoned her and your hot Latina wife to be on the road spilling coffee on yourself. Yeah, that's living the dream. For extra laughs, it's set to banjo music. Highly recommended, it's a must-see. They could have gotten a little edgier by showing the photos actual teens upload to the Internet, but that one's probably not even suitable for cable. Since the hot points are "trusted", "familiar" and "compatible" it's pretty clear they're trying to prevent sales of Vista 7. I can't wait to see how this works out.
You probably want the YouTube link. 802.11g is 50Mbps, and some vendors offer a Turbo-G that does twice that. It's more than sufficient, even without considering 802.11n. If you're really interested, check the related videos.
Keep in mind that copyright is supposed to be temporary:
For over 200 years, the basic role of the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has remained the same: to promote the progress of science and the useful arts by securing for limited times to inventors the exclusive right to their respective discoveries (Article 1, Section 8 of the United States Constitution).
Note carefully that part about limited times, and the part about to promote the progress of science and the useful arts because by eliminating the former with ever extensible term length of copyright they've prevented the latter, which was its purpose. So it should be no surprise that people are ignoring the "exclusive rights" now that they serve to prevent "the progress of science and the useful arts", because the latter is what we must have and the former was just a tool, no longer effective, to achieve that necessary end.
I've been in a lot of datacenters lately that look like rec rooms. The servers have all been squished into a corner, and there's a vast open space where racks used to be where you could play hard drive shuffleboard if you wanted to.
It's not because of budgets. It's because you can virtualize 8 maxed out servers from 3 years ago, or a full rack of lightly loaded ones and put them in one 2U box now that draws less current than any single one of them. Demand for service has grown in those three years, but not nearly as much as consolidation and virtualization has served. So the vast growth in server rooms has stalled because... it's not needed. Unless the pace of progress slows, it'll never be needed.
/and that's good for carbon emissions and power production.
Don't I know it. While I've got you here... You do know that Microsoft's netbook definition also defines the Linux netbook that violates those rules as a premium item, right? Are you sure you want to do that?
You can sit by the pool and play Crysis or use Photoshop or Autocad on your netbook with wireless, even on Linux. You just RDP to the machine that's doing the heavy lifting. I would recommend external video and I/O for the fine work, but for getting some quality WoW time while you're making sure the kids don't drown the basic kit should be OK.
The day the tax is implemented, the publishers realize they're no longer market driven to provide quality content. They replace their reporters with a slave gang of offshore typists. Later, instead of dropping the tax it is made immortal with an ever increasing rate of increase. In addition, once they get people to pay they all institute private paywalls anyway for "Premium content" like news made available within a month of the covered event, or written by someone with Enlish as their first language.
Because this is America, and that's what campaign contributions are for.
Fair was 27 years from first performance, publication or for unpublished works, the death of the author or inventor. Give us back Huck Finn and you can keep Slumdog Millionaire.
Or be unfair to the public and the public will respond in kind.
Hypocrisy is stealing a hundred years worth of cultural content from every individual with a copyright extension, and then calling other people pirates because they take back a movie or an album.
For PCIe flash density is doubling and the price is quartering every nine months. With current price for capacity at less than $2500/TB, you can quarter that twice and get to $150, and double it twice to get 4TB. So... at the current rate of change it's inevitable. For density you will soon buy a 1TB flash drive in a 2.5" form factor. I could put four or six of those in the space of a full length add-in card and thermals are not problem so we're nowhere near the limit.
I don't expect the trend to continue to be this steep, but 3 years is a long time. If it double/quartered half as fast, that's time enough to get 'er done. In the enterprise market the performance and power savings are already there, and the storage density is almost there, and the money isn't as important - those poor folk pay thousands of dollars for one 450 GB FC drive.
The reliability and durability figures need to come up, but that's well underway also with most vendors taking an internal adaptive RAID approach that puts more of the burden on the board logic and less on the host - holding some storage in reserve to wear level the last block.
The final pieces are iSCSI, 10Gb Ethernet and SAN software that converts direct attach storage to SAN with all the features we know and love - because those SAN head boxes are just general purpose computers with fancy software and lots of direct attached storage. These are all here now. Spinning disk might become the next version of backup tape for a little while, but even for that it's doubtful as they're pushing the quality limits pretty hard to get the density they're getting now and people are getting tired of drives that fail so much.
So yeah, 2-3 years I think. For some people, sooner. The whole world is changing so fast it boggles the mind. You can already buy a workstation that supports 16 threads, and next year we get Larrabee.
You need to read up on the literature. And by the literature, I mean the stuff on the shelf at your local online store. Current SSD offerings can beat 1GB/s.
So the difference is the attach. Clearly, this new attach will be useful for people who aren't willing to pay for the premium PCIe attach, or who need volumes greater than 6TB per server.
Slashdot Mirror
Nope. In the store they line the items up from economy item to premium category. Generally as you go up the quality scale the screens get larger, the processors get faster, the drives have more capacity. It's fine with me if Microsoft places their product on the ones that go three quarters of the way up the scale and then stops. But that's unexpectedly generous to the operating system platforms that aren't so limited. It stakes Microsoft out on the low end of the scale and presents the idea that if you want a premium netbook with a faster processor, more memory, more drive space and a bigger screen, of course you want one of the high end ones that are only Linux.
Never mind. That'll work out fine. Carry on.
No, it means that the premium netbooks will ship with Windows 7 Home Premium.
Not if the OEM wants the volume discount and the co-marketing dollars from Intel and Microsoft. Or the stickers. Stickers are very important.
There are several things going on here. The first and worst is that of course they think they can put over their proposition by sheer force. As one of them once told me, "Vendors are coin operated". You can only get so far with that before you're being investigated.
Then there's advertising companies. Advertising companies recruit and train the most creative, intelligent and resourceful people they can find to fulfill their mission: to sell advertising. They have incredible surveys and statistics and magical advertising quadrants that tell you that the right thing to do is pay them more money, and they've got the numbers to prove it. That's right: they spend 90% of their time, intelligence and effort not to sell their customer's products, but to sell theirs. I have a story that goes with this. It's stolen, but I've filed the serial numbers off:
One day in northern Arizona I stopped at a one-pump gas station for a soda. As I walked to the lonely single cooler in the back, I passed by row upon row of salt. There was the picnic shaker, the kitchen cylinder we all know. There was rock salt, road salt, salt lick and salt brick. There was sea salt from 9 of the seven seas. There was powdered salt, granular salt, bacon salt and several kinds of cheese salt. I was amazed. I dragged my soda up to the counter, and said to the wizened old man sitting there, "man, you've got a lot of salt.".
"That's nothin'" he says. Look up here. He pulls down the hatch to the attic an it's full of bags and bushels and bins of salt. "And look down here" he says, pulling up a hatch to the basement, where it's chock full of barrels and bags and piles of salt.
"You must sell a lot of salt" I said.
"That's the funny thing" he tells me, "I don't hardly sell no salt at all. But that salt salesman that comes through here once a month, he sure does sell a good bit of the stuff."
Historically Microsoft's market dominance hasn't come from advertising. They got it by other means I'll leave you to investigate. You can start by checking out the Halloween Documents.
The answer to the third piece of this puzzle has to do with a discussion I was having yesterday with a friend of mine. He was frustrated with the constant reorganization of the company (not Microsoft) that he works for. After discussing it for a while, I came out with the idea that the permanent reorganization process was by design. With constant shuffling you might get the perfect mix of creative individuals unsupervised by a policy wonk long enough to have that perfect summer - the year where everything heterodynes into the magical project that delivers unexpected miraculous results. But most of the time you get a bunch of creative people frustrated by people who've risen to influence through the mastery of process. At the end we agreed (I think - I don't want to speak for my friend) that the churning was a necessary evil because left static the process geeks would build their empires and drive out the creative folk and the magic could not happen. Which would of course make the churning a brilliant piece of social engineering. Because Microsoft doesn't employ this bit of social engineering, once the founders took off the process geeks took over - with predictable results. Conservative and uncreative, these process geeks are the very target market for the advertising sharks I led with. Unfortunately for them, this disease is inevitably fatal.
You will be offered a free upgrade to a snappy new OS that supports unlimited virtual machines and is malware free. With it you can run your Vista in a VM, where it actually works, and you'll do that for a few days until the VM is inevitably corrupted by malware, and then you'll forget you ever had it. After that you'll discover the joys of getting your work done in half the time and with the free time you've got from not fighting your computer all day you can try browsing, which is the practice of clicking every link willy-nilly without worrying whether it's going to install some evil software. Then you'll no doubt discover something wonderful that they've blocked from you at work because it's so hazardous to Windows users. It's called Web 2.0, or Interactive User Generated Content. In time you'll learn to relax about things like buying stuff online or checking your bank account.
You'll also discover that there's this thing out there that's sort of like an Anti-Windows-Live-Search. You type in some words, and it shows you stuff that's somewhat related to those words. Amazingly, most of the search results have nothing to do with deploying malware on your computer. You can use it with IE on Windows, but they make it really hard to find. It's called Google and it's really cool. Some time later you'll find the Add or Remove Programs feature. This one is really amazing because unlike the Windows one with a similar name, this one actually adds programs. Thousands of them, if you want it to. It has so many programs to add, it has its own search engine.
Microsoft is an excellent marketing organization.
1999 called, and they don't want their opinion back because it didn't work out well for them.
Seriously, have you seen their marketing in the last decade?
They're in a bind no matter what way you look at it. They've saturated their market three times over. There's no room left for growth in the places where people have money to pay for a desktop OS, and all the people in the other places have tried a pirated Vista already. In the supercompute market their share is 1% despite coming out with their own supercomputer OS(*), and in the server room they're not holding their own either. Their traditional hardware and software partners are starting to come out with their own branded Linux distributions. Because of the Sendo thing they're getting nowhere on the phone.
If Vista 7 tanks, they're in a world of hurt. Like a wise man once said... Outlook not so good.
(*)Some people say that Windows' place on this list is mostly a result of marketing, where the supercomputer sites were given some subsidy to build their supercomputer, with the caveat that they had to report to the Top500 with "Can Run" Windows HPC, and with the Windows HPC benchmark. But for serious work of course they run Linux.
What they're doing is defining the set of premium netbooks. They have one of a larger screen, more memory, a larger SSD, a dual core or faster processor. The one thing premium netbooks have in common is that they all run Linux.
That's mighty nice of 'em to put Linux on a pedestal like that. Quite generous, really - not at all what I was expecting.
And Vista 7 isn't out yet. The next generation of Atoms are in the pipe and they'll be equivalent or better and they'll hit that price when V7 is released.
Um, no.
I don't think the Microsoft's management or even marketing people listen to Slashdot
Somewhere up the thread you're replying to, one of their main guys disagreed with you. Please try and follow along.
I am quite sure that many technical people who work for Microsoft do and this would trickle down/up (depends on your perspective) to the people who make policy.
I find your notion of trickle-up engineering interesting, but I don't see what it has to do with Microsoft. Was there an Intel thread you intended to reply to somewhere around here?
There is one OS that all people in Microsoft are acutely aware off and that is Linux
I'm pretty sure they're more worried about OS-X on the desktop at the moment. Linux is probably a distant second. And by "worried" I mean "less oblivious" because part of their culture is faith in their invincibility - it's their greatest weakness.
In other arenas they're more aware of Linux. Since Linux owns the server room, they're fighting for every install there. Their latest pitch is "Every VMWare install needs a Windows Server Datacenter License (*)" - ignoring, of course, the people who don't run Windows at all. In supercomputing they've long since become irrelevant. On that field Linux has the same share the Windows has on the desktop, and Windows is close to being lumped in with "other". Perhaps June 23, 2009 is the year their slice of the pie disappears entirely.
Even more alarming is the number of people who buy excessive licenses (4-6 per desktop!) for products they're not even using (Vista?) just to be sure they don't get fired for failing an audit. Somebody from Microsoft is going around right now to explain to those folks that being oversubscribed by a factor of six for their desktops, they need to be oversubscribed by a factor of six on their server client licenses as well or it looks like they're stealing seats.
(*)Software Assurance is required of course.
There are plenty more. I didn't bother to google the one that I was sure of. It's probably in the related videos. Have fun.
Even without a large install base, Linux continues to be a force in the market.
I'm not sold on this whole "small install base for linux" idea. There are over 1000 different distributions of Linux and hundreds of thousands of applications, not including versions. This is not the work of three guys in their mom's basement.
With regard to marketing netbooks, apparently The Register apparently thinks they're having another Seinfeld Moment with their "It's better with Windows" Asus comarketing campaign, which strangely enough doesn't require Silverlight. Apparently, "It's better with Windows" has something to do with XP, Microsoft Works, and your teen daughter uploading pictures of herself from wherever she's roaming unattended while you've abandoned her and your hot Latina wife to be on the road spilling coffee on yourself. Yeah, that's living the dream. For extra laughs, it's set to banjo music. Highly recommended, it's a must-see. They could have gotten a little edgier by showing the photos actual teens upload to the Internet, but that one's probably not even suitable for cable. Since the hot points are "trusted", "familiar" and "compatible" it's pretty clear they're trying to prevent sales of Vista 7. I can't wait to see how this works out.
You probably want the YouTube link. 802.11g is 50Mbps, and some vendors offer a Turbo-G that does twice that. It's more than sufficient, even without considering 802.11n. If you're really interested, check the related videos.
Keeping in mind that copyright is temporary
Keep in mind that copyright is supposed to be temporary:
For over 200 years, the basic role of the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has remained the same: to promote the progress of science and the useful arts by securing for limited times to inventors the exclusive right to their respective discoveries (Article 1, Section 8 of the United States Constitution).
- USPTO
Note carefully that part about limited times, and the part about to promote the progress of science and the useful arts because by eliminating the former with ever extensible term length of copyright they've prevented the latter, which was its purpose. So it should be no surprise that people are ignoring the "exclusive rights" now that they serve to prevent "the progress of science and the useful arts", because the latter is what we must have and the former was just a tool, no longer effective, to achieve that necessary end.
I've been in a lot of datacenters lately that look like rec rooms. The servers have all been squished into a corner, and there's a vast open space where racks used to be where you could play hard drive shuffleboard if you wanted to.
It's not because of budgets. It's because you can virtualize 8 maxed out servers from 3 years ago, or a full rack of lightly loaded ones and put them in one 2U box now that draws less current than any single one of them. Demand for service has grown in those three years, but not nearly as much as consolidation and virtualization has served. So the vast growth in server rooms has stalled because... it's not needed. Unless the pace of progress slows, it'll never be needed.
/and that's good for carbon emissions and power production.
Don't I know it. While I've got you here... You do know that Microsoft's netbook definition also defines the Linux netbook that violates those rules as a premium item, right? Are you sure you want to do that?
You can sit by the pool and play Crysis or use Photoshop or Autocad on your netbook with wireless, even on Linux. You just RDP to the machine that's doing the heavy lifting. I would recommend external video and I/O for the fine work, but for getting some quality WoW time while you're making sure the kids don't drown the basic kit should be OK.
Time to stop posting so many helpful tips.
The day the tax is implemented, the publishers realize they're no longer market driven to provide quality content. They replace their reporters with a slave gang of offshore typists. Later, instead of dropping the tax it is made immortal with an ever increasing rate of increase. In addition, once they get people to pay they all institute private paywalls anyway for "Premium content" like news made available within a month of the covered event, or written by someone with Enlish as their first language.
Because this is America, and that's what campaign contributions are for.
Fair was 27 years from first performance, publication or for unpublished works, the death of the author or inventor. Give us back Huck Finn and you can keep Slumdog Millionaire.
Or be unfair to the public and the public will respond in kind.
Hypocrisy is stealing a hundred years worth of cultural content from every individual with a copyright extension, and then calling other people pirates because they take back a movie or an album.
But I am afraid that the cure would be worse than the disease.
Sad, but true.
Way to think inside the box.
A SAN is a set of redundant computers with a bunch of direct attached storage and some fancy software. There is nothing magical in that box.
For PCIe flash density is doubling and the price is quartering every nine months. With current price for capacity at less than $2500/TB, you can quarter that twice and get to $150, and double it twice to get 4TB. So... at the current rate of change it's inevitable. For density you will soon buy a 1TB flash drive in a 2.5" form factor. I could put four or six of those in the space of a full length add-in card and thermals are not problem so we're nowhere near the limit.
I don't expect the trend to continue to be this steep, but 3 years is a long time. If it double/quartered half as fast, that's time enough to get 'er done. In the enterprise market the performance and power savings are already there, and the storage density is almost there, and the money isn't as important - those poor folk pay thousands of dollars for one 450 GB FC drive.
The reliability and durability figures need to come up, but that's well underway also with most vendors taking an internal adaptive RAID approach that puts more of the burden on the board logic and less on the host - holding some storage in reserve to wear level the last block.
The final pieces are iSCSI, 10Gb Ethernet and SAN software that converts direct attach storage to SAN with all the features we know and love - because those SAN head boxes are just general purpose computers with fancy software and lots of direct attached storage. These are all here now. Spinning disk might become the next version of backup tape for a little while, but even for that it's doubtful as they're pushing the quality limits pretty hard to get the density they're getting now and people are getting tired of drives that fail so much.
So yeah, 2-3 years I think. For some people, sooner. The whole world is changing so fast it boggles the mind. You can already buy a workstation that supports 16 threads, and next year we get Larrabee.
You need to read up on the literature. And by the literature, I mean the stuff on the shelf at your local online store. Current SSD offerings can beat 1GB/s.
So the difference is the attach. Clearly, this new attach will be useful for people who aren't willing to pay for the premium PCIe attach, or who need volumes greater than 6TB per server.