Wolf Technology Group

Tech Term of the Day: Active Directory (AD) is a Microsoft technology used to manage computers and other devices on a network. It is a primary feature of Windows Server, an operating system that runs both local and Internet-based servers.

Tech Term of the Day: A sector is the smallest addressable unit of data storage on a disk drive. On traditional hard disk drives (HDDs), sectors were 512 bytes in size. However, modern drives now use 4,096-byte sectors (or "4K sectors"), also known as Advanced Format technology. The larger sector size improves performance and error correction, particularly on high-capacity drives (greater than 1 terabyte).

Tech Term of the Day: Stands for "Virtual Path Identifier."

A VPI is an 8- to 12-bit header in an Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) cell that identifies the path the cell should take to its destination. An ATM cell's VPI works in conjunction with its Virtual Channel Identifier (VCI) to guide a cell as it passes through multiple ATM switches. The size of a VPI depends on the size and scale of the ATM network; small networks use an 8-bit VPI that supports hundreds of paths, while large networks use a 12-bit VPI that supports several thousand unique paths.