Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last few months or mistook it for a new version of Wolf, you’ve probably heard of the Wolfram Alpha engine and the (wrong) comparisons to Google.

For starters, Wolfram Alpha is NOT a search engine – its (what they call) a “computational knowledge engine” – it generates output by doing computations from its own internal knowledge base, instead of searching the web and returning links.

Slight detour to StoreGrid…

StoreGrid has a feature called “Local to Remote Migration” (LtoR) wherein you can ’seed’ a backup server with the 1st full backup and can therefore start with doing only incremental backups from day 1 itself. You’d typically take advantage of this feature for ‘first full backups’ that you think would take a long time.

How much time will the first backup take? Ask Wolfram Alpha…

For example, if you had 10GB and wanted to know how long it would take over a 1Mbps line (For asymmetric broadband plans, remember that you should need to look for the upload speed – NOT download), simply enter “data transfer time 10GB, 1Mb/s” – try it out using the box above.

See the answer, and if you don’t have the time, go the LtoR way! Go ahead, give it a spin.

Click here for more examples of “Web & Computer” stuff you can use Wolfram Alpha for. A larger list of possibilities is here – and includes things like knowing how many calories you had for breakfast and getting information about satellites.

What’s more, it even knows the meaning of life!

Have fun!

The above post was written by Lakshmanan (Lux) Narayan of Vembu Technologies. Vembu Technologies is a backup software vendor whose product, StoreGrid, powers the online backup services of a large number of service providers across the globe. Besides remote backup, StoreGrid is also used for on premise backups of workstations and servers at various companies & universities.