Nearly a decade after USB 2.0 was first introduced, this practically ubiquitous technology is poised for its first major upgrade in years. Symwave, a semiconductor startup, and hard-drive maker Seagate are showing the first working demonstration of SuperSpeed–otherwise known as USB 3.0–this week at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES 2009) in Las Vegas. The company’s demo setup includes an adaptation of an external Seagate FreeAgent hard drive equipped with the new interface, and shows the high read/write throughput and streaming video performance potential of USB 3.0.

Solid operating-system drivers and mature chip sets helped USB 2.0 evolve into a formidable and dominant interconnection technology for attaching devices to your system. However, in our increasingly high-definition world–a world where many households as well as businesses are verging on the use of terabytes of data, not just gigabytes–the case for greater bandwidth is clear.

Enter USB 3.0, which promises faster speeds and backward compatibility with the 10 billion USB devices shipped to date.

Early in 2008, Symwave began work on a USB 3.0 physical-layer device, the new cable that will be able to transport the format’s higher bandwidth, in anticipation of the spec being completed by late last year. When the spec went to its first public 1.0 release at the SuperSpeed USB Developers Conference last November, Symwave was the only company ready with a proof-of-concept product.

Faster Throughput

According to Symwave, the new cable dramatically improves throughput speed–even now, in its early development stages. Where USB 2.0 offers speeds of 480 megabits per second, USB 3.0 jumps to a theoretical 5 gigabits per second. “In our simulations, we’re seeing in the neighborhood of six to seven times the throughput, at least 150 megabytes per second [equivalent to 1.2 gigabits]. The theoretical improvement is 10 times,” says Craig Stein, vice president of engineering. “We think that, over time, as more software optimization is done, we’ll get closer to the theoretical improvement. We think somewhere near 250-300 megabytes per second [or up to 2.4 gigabits per second] is where USB 3.0 will top out when it matures.”

Stein says the company’s target is to enable peripheral devices with USB 3.0 to roll out in time for the 2009 Christmas shopping season. Even if PC adoption of USB 3.0 lags, he adds, “we think there’s opportunity for consumers to futureproof the products they buy.”

According to the spec, USB 2.0 cables and devices will be backward-compatible with the new USB 3.0 port. The cable, the host device (for example, the PC), and the peripheral device all must be USB 3.0 capable to achieve the 3.0 speeds; otherwise, the connector drops down to the lowest common denominator, USB 2.0 speeds.

USB Challenges eSATA

While USB 3.0 will have to challenge External Serial ATA (eSATA) as a connector on storage devices, Stein sees USB 3.0′s future as going beyond storage. “SATA is intended for storage only, whereas we believe 3.0 will, over time, become dominant in consumer electronics devices. We believe history is a good indication of future results. 2.7 billion USB ports shipped in 2007.”

One appeal of USB 3.0 over USB 2.0 for consumer electronics: The port can more efficiently handle power. “In 3.0, the power budget is up by 1.5 times that of USB 2.0. We believe that 3.0 will have a wider appeal to consumer electronics in that it offers greater flexibility in powering [devices].” The improved pin configuration of USB 3.0 could allow for a device to charge faster, for example.

First off, what is cloud computing? It’s an emerging style of infrastructure that allows companies to utilize the Internet (the “cloud” in cloud computing) for functions such as data storage, security, and enterprise applications. And you can implement the structure both internally or externally (which is conceptually similar to the way you might have an external Web server or an Intranet Web server). Visualize with cloud computing that data storage and software as a service (SaaS) relies on the Internet to hide from a user or company the underlying structure and worries that a normal set of applications and internal networks hold. And if you can grasp that, you will see how it will ultimately benefit the enterprise world.

Breakdown of Cloud Computing -

1. SaaS
This type of cloud computing delivers a single application through the browser to thousands of customers using a multitenant architecture. On the customer side, it means no upfront investment in servers or software licensing; on the provider side, with just one app to maintain, costs are low compared to conventional hosting. Salesforce.com is by far the best-known example among enterprise applications, but SaaS is also common for HR apps and has even worked its way up the food chain to ERP, with players such as Workday. And who could have predicted the sudden rise of SaaS “desktop” applications, such as Google Apps and Zoho Office?

2. Utility computing
The idea is not new, but this form of cloud computing is getting new life from Amazon.com, Sun, IBM, and others who now offer storage and virtual servers that IT can access on demand. Early enterprise adopters mainly use utility computing for supplemental, non-mission-critical needs, but one day, they may replace parts of the datacenter. Other providers offer solutions that help IT create virtual datacenters from commodity servers, such as 3Tera’s AppLogic and Cohesive Flexible Technologies’ Elastic Server on Demand. Liquid Computing’s LiquidQ offers similar capabilities, enabling IT to stitch together memory, I/O, storage, and computational capacity as a virtualized resource pool available over the network.

3. Web services in the cloud
Closely related to SaaS, Web service providers offer APIs that enable developers to exploit functionality over the Internet, rather than delivering full-blown applications. They range from providers offering discrete business services — such as Strike Iron and Xignite — to the full range of APIs offered by Google Maps, ADP payroll processing, the U.S. Postal Service, Bloomberg, and even conventional credit card processing services.

4. Platform as a service
Another SaaS variation, this form of cloud computing delivers development environments as a service. You build your own applications that run on the provider’s infrastructure and are delivered to your users via the Internet from the provider’s servers. Like Legos, these services are constrained by the vendor’s design and capabilities, so you don’t get complete freedom, but you do get predictability and pre-integration. Prime examples include Salesforce.com’s Force.com, Coghead and the new Google App Engine. For extremely lightweight development, cloud-based mashup platforms abound, such as Yahoo Pipes or Dapper.net.

5. MSP (managed service providers)
One of the oldest forms of cloud computing, a managed service is basically an application exposed to IT rather than to end-users, such as a virus scanning service for e-mail or an application monitoring service (which Mercury, among others, provides). Managed security services delivered by SecureWorks, IBM, and Verizon fall into this category, as do such cloud-based anti-spam services as Postini, recently acquired by Google. Other offerings include desktop management services, such as those offered by CenterBeam or Everdream.

6. Service commerce platforms
A hybrid of SaaS and MSP, this cloud computing service offers a service hub that users interact with. They’re most common in trading environments, such as expense management systems that allow users to order travel or secretarial services from a common platform that then coordinates the service delivery and pricing within the specifications set by the user. Think of it as an automated service bureau. Well-known examples include Rearden Commerce and Ariba.

7. Internet integration
The integration of cloud-based services is in its early days. OpSource, which mainly concerns itself with serving SaaS providers, recently introduced the OpSource Services Bus, which employs in-the-cloud integration technology from a little startup called Boomi. SaaS provider Workday recently acquired another player in this space, CapeClear, an ESB (enterprise service bus) provider that was edging toward b-to-b integration. Way ahead of its time, Grand Central — which wanted to be a universal “bus in the cloud” to connect SaaS providers and provide integrated solutions to customers — flamed out in 2005.