Intel today announced AWS customers can access the latest 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors via the new Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) M6i instances. Optimized for high-performance, general-purpose compute, the latest Intel-powered Amazon EC2 instances provide customers increased flexibility and more choices when running their Intel-powered infrastructure within the AWS cloud. Today's news is a further continuation of Intel and AWS' close collaboration, giving customers scalable compute instances in the cloud for almost 15 years.

"Our latest 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors are our highest performance data center CPU and provide AWS customers an excellent platform to run their most critical business applications. We look forward to continuing our long-term collaboration with AWS to deploy industry-leading technologies within AWS' cloud infrastructure." -Sandra Rivera, Intel executive vice president and general manager, Datacenter and AI Group.

Championing the Zoned Storage initiative, Western Digital Corp. (NASDAQ: WDC) today announced at its Flash Perspective Event that it has teamed with Percona, a leader in open source database software and services, to unlock the performance benefits of Western Digital's Ultrastar DC ZN540 NVMe ZNS SSDs for MySQL Server, one of the most popular open-source transactional databases in the world.

"Many of our customers are using MySQL as a database for their online data services and this new partnership with Percona will allow customers to unlock the full capabilities of our innovative ZNS flash solutions. With our contributions to the Linux and MySQL open-source communities, MySQL users will be able to install the Percona Server for MySQL and get out-of-the-box support for Western Digital Zoned Namespaces SSDs," said Wim De Wispelaere, vice president, Strategic Initiatives at Western Digital. "This demonstrates our continued commitment to deliver innovative data center infrastructure products and to build our partnership ecosystem to make those easy to implement by our customers."

TerraMaster, a professional brand that specializes in providing innovative storage products, including network attached storage and direct attached storage, is announcing today the availability of its new storage solution for SME, professional and power users. The TerraMaster F5-422 features a powerful hardware configuration to bring excellent performance where it matters; for professionals and SME applications looking to maximize shared storage. Thanks to the introduction of the 10 GbE LAN, the TerraMaster F5-422 can deliver data faster. Backed by TerraMaster's latest TOS operating system, the F5-422 delivers an excellent feature set to any use. The TerraMaster F5-422 has an MSRP of $599.99 USD.

The F5-422 features a quad-core 1.50 GHz Intel CPU which has a boost clock of 2.30 GHz. 4 GB of DDR3 memory compliment the processor as well as built-in AES NI encryption. For maximum accessibility, the F5-422 features a 10 GbE port as well as 2x 1 GbE LAN, the F5-422 can be made available to a wide number of users without the bottleneck of traditional single LAN connections. The TerraMaster F5-422 is rated up to 670 MB/s write speeds and 650 MB/s read performance on a 5x 6 TB Seagate IronWolf RAID5 setup. Perfect for professionals like video editors working with 4K videos or others that need rapid access to large data with strict speed requirements.

Western Digital today announced two new 96-layer 3D flash NVMe SSD families, the Ultrastar DC SN640 and Ultrastar DC SN340. Both are purpose-built for either mixed-use-case workloads or very read-intensive applications, respectively. The new Ultrastar drives help meet the evolving, and increasingly specific workload demands placed on data centers today, while building a strong, flexible foundation for the zettabyte-scale era of the future. Leveraging Western Digital's in-house SSD controller designs, firmware development and vertical integration, these new solutions underscore the company's strengths in developing innovations that allow customers' data to thrive, from edge to core to cloud.

NVMe is having a great impact on enterprises and what they can do with data, particularly for real-time analytics, M2M and IoT, and emerging technologies like composable infrastructure. Data center customers understand the nature of their data streams and application workloads and are realizing that today's general-purpose architectures are inefficient and can carry resource and cost overhead.

Qualcomm, which holds a ton of ARM SoC patents, and put them to good use with its Snapdragon line of SoCs for smartphones, tablets, and convertible notebooks, is foraying into enterprise computing market. The company is ready with its first prototype of a 24-core high-performance CPU based on the 64-bit ARM machine architecture. ARM-based processors are picking up momentum in the server and micro-server markets owning to their low cost, low cooling requirements, and high energy-efficiency; and Qualcomm wants a slice of that pie. Most enterprise Linux and FreeBSD distributors have versions of their server operating systems for the 64-bit ARM architecture, as do most popular server software providers.

The prototype 24-core CPU is socketed, and ships in a large land-grid array (LGA) package, much like Intel's Xeon chips. The first production chips will have a lot more than 24 CPU cores, said Qualcomm senior vice president Anand Chandrasekhar. As a proof of concept, Qualcomm assembled three server blades using these chips, which were running Linux with a KVM hypervisor, streaming HD video to a PC using a LAMP stack (Linux + Apache + MySQL + PHP) built with OpenStack. Qualcomm's target consumers are big Internet companies like Google and Facebook, which purchase hundreds of thousands of CPUs each year to cope with growing user- and content-traffic.

Leveraging its data center storage insights, HGST, a Western Digital company (NASDAQ: WDC), is broadening its scope of innovation to capture new and growing opportunities in data center storage infrastructure. The company today announced six new offerings that will help organizations manage the increasing volume, velocity, variety and longevity of data in today's rapidly evolving data center.

In addition to maintaining its longstanding leadership in storage devices, the new offerings demonstrate HGST's commitment to transform the data center and itself through hardware and software solutions that elevate the value it provides to partners and customers. By creating innovative solutions that shape the emerging categories of Flash fabric solutions and active archive solutions, HGST is driving the data center evolution by helping organizations readily extract the information, knowledge and wisdom that lies within their data.

Dell today announced that customers such as Morphlabs and Vibrant Media are using Dell microserver technologies based on Intel Xeon processors to power business-critical web 2.0, cloud, and content delivery networks (CDN), as well as high-performance computing (HPC) applications. Driven by the emergence of a growing hardware and application ecosystem, x86-based microservers are rapidly evolving from a niche solution to one with widespread awareness and value.

"We're constantly inspired by the unique ways our customers are leveraging Dell microserver platforms to drive specialized web 2.0, HPC and cloud computing applications," said Forrest Norrod, vice president and general manager, Dell Server Solutions. "As the microserver market and ecosystem have matured, customers like Vibrant Media have validated that microservers are a cost-effective, scalable platform in web 2.0 environments."

QNAP Systems, Inc. today introduces the SS-839 Pro Turbo NAS, the world's smallest 8-bay, Intel Atom network attached storage solution supporting eight 2.5-inch hard drives or solid state disks (SSD). Targeted at business users who require a storage solution of high performance, stability, scalability, low noise and low power consumption, the SS-839 Pro adopts low power Intel Atom N270 1.6GHz CPU, disk on module (DOM) architecture, and 2GB DDRII memory. The total storage capacity of the NAS is up to 4TB. It also features 2 eSATA and 5 USB ports for storage expansion and external storage backup. With ultra silent and excellent energy-saving design, the power consumption of the NAS with 8 hard drives installed is about 34W, which is almost 60% less than general 8-bay, 3.5-inch NAS. Moreover, the SS-839 Pro is compatible with Windows, Mac, Linux, and UNIX operating systems. It offers abundant software features such as built-in iSCSI application (up to 8 iSCSI targets) with Thin Provisioning, Online RAID Capacity Expansion, Online RAID Level Migration, AES 256-bit volume-based encryption, Wake on LAN, automatic policy-based IP blocking, network share status report, instant SMS and email alert, BT download, Touch-N-Go RAID configuration by the LCD panel, scheduled power on and power off (max 15 schedules), 2 Giga LAN ports, 4 IP cameras for network surveillance, etc.

QNAP Systems, Inc. today announces the first 2.5" SATA HDD, 4-bay, Intel Atom-based SS-439 Pro Turbo NAS dedicated to SMB and SOHO users. Designed with Intel Atom N270 1.6GHz CPU, 1GB DDRII memory, and DOM (Disk on Module) architecture, the SS-439 Pro is the most compact, powerful, and power-saving 2.5" 4-bay NAS that supports RAID 5/ RAID 6 for highly secure data protection. The NAS supports four 2.5" SATA hard drives which are featured with high stability, low power consumption, low vibration, and longer life expectancy. With excellent cooling and energy-saving design, the power consumption of the NAS with four hard drives installed is as low as 18W. Moreover, the SS-439 Pro supports 3 USB 2.0 ports and 2 eSATA ports for storage capacity expansion and backup destination, and advanced features such as built-in iSCSI target service (max 8 iSCSI devices) with Thin Provisioning, Online RAID Capacity Expansion, Online RAID Level Migration, AES 256-bit volume-based encryption, Wake on LAN, automatic policy-based IP blocking, instant SMS and email alert, BT and eMule download, schedule power on and power off, 2 Giga LAN ports, 4 IP cameras for network surveillance, etc.

"The SS-439 Pro is a compact, silent, and power-saving server which is ideal to work for long hours in the office. When four low power 2.5" hard drives are installed, the power consumption of the NAS is only 18W, which is almost the same as an energy-saving light bulb. It is an environment-friendly storage solution that largely saves the electricity expense of the users and minimizes pollution to the earth," says Jerry Deng, Product Manager from QNAP.

QNAP Systems, Inc. today introduces the enterprise-grade TS-809U-RP Turbo NAS, the 2U chassis 8-bay NAS with high redundancy, performance, and reliability. Featuring the powerful Intel Core 2 Duo 2.8 GHz CPU and 2GB DDRII memory, the giant TS-809U-RP delivers superior performance in high density data access environment. It supports 8 hot-swappable SATA hard drives and is able to serve up to a whopping 16TB storage capacity. Designed with excellent power and network redundancy, the NAS supports redundant power supply and two Giga LAN ports for load balancing or failover. Other advanced features include RAID 0/ 1/ 5/ 6/ 5+spare/ 6+spare, Online RAID Capacity Expansion, Online RAID Level Migration, iSCSI with Thin Provisioning, AES 256-bit volume-based encryption, automatic policy-based IP blocking, hard disk drive S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology) etc.

"The TS-809U-RP is equipped with two power supply units, which share the load equally in normal operation. When one of them fails for any reasons, the other one will take over to supply the power of the entire NAS to ensure continuous operation. The IT administrator can replace the failed unit without turning off the server. This largely enhances the productivity of the business environment and minimizes the system maintenance cost," said Troy Lin, Product Manager from QNAP.

QNAP Systems, Inc. today announces the enterprise-grade TS-809 Pro Turbo NAS-the new high performance and high volume NAS (network attached storage). The TS-809 Pro is powered by Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4 GHz CPU and 2GB DDRII memory, supports 8 SATA drive bays that accommodate up to 12TB storage capacity (16TB possible when 2TB hard drives are available), and offers advanced RAID features, e.g. RAID 0/1/5/6/5+spare, Online RAID Capacity Expansion and Online RAID Level Migration. Other advanced business features include iSCSI with Thin Provisioning, AES 256-bit volume-based encryption, automatic policy-based IP blocking, instant SMS and email alert etc.

"The TS-809 Pro adopts Intel Core 2 Duo high performance CPU which brings extremely high speed experience for multiple business applications. It is an excellent choice for storage-hungry enterprises who demand for outstanding system performance in an intensive data access environment," remarked by Laurent Cheng, Product Manager from QNAP. According to the IOmeter test in QNAP lab, the read/ write performance of the TS-809 Pro reaches more than 126MB/s and 111 MB/s respectively. The TS-809 Pro can also be used as a mass data storage center, especially for SOHO and home users, to store and share millions of multimedia files.

Sun Microsystems recently announced the pending general availability of MySQL 5.1, a new version of the world's most popular open source database, designed to improve performance and simplify management of large database applications. A near-final release candidate of the GPL software is available for download now here.

Sun Microsystems today announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire MySQL AB, an open source icon and developer of one of the world's fastest growing open source databases for approximately $1 billion in total consideration. The acquisition accelerates Sun's position in enterprise IT to now include the $15 billion database market. Today's announcement reaffirms Sun's position as the leading provider of platforms for the Web economy and its role as the largest commercial open source contributor.