QNAP Systems, Inc., a leading computing, networking and storage solution innovator, today launched the TS-x53DU series NAS. Available in 4-bay, 8-bay and 12-bay models, the TS-x53DU series has two 2.5 GbE RJ45 ports to enable smoother multimedia playback and everyday usage. The TS-x53DU series also supports Snapshot backup and HBS (Hybrid Backup Sync) for local, off-site and cloud backup.

The TS-x53DU series are powered by Intel Celeron J4125 quad-core 2.0 GHz processors (burst up to 2.7 GHz) and support up to 8 GB DDR4 memory. With Intel AES-NI encryption and two 2.5 GbE RJ45 ports, the TS-x53DU provides users with fast and secure storage. The PCIe 2.0slot allows users to enhance core NAS functionality by installing a compatible PCIe card (such as a network card, a QM2 network/storage card for adding SSD caching/10 GbE connectivity).

Dell Technologies is exploring a potential spin-off of its 81% equity ownership interest in VMware. Although this exploration is in an early stage, Dell Technologies believes a spin-off could benefit both Dell Technologies and VMware shareholders, team members, customers and partners by simplifying capital structures and creating additional long-term enterprise value. Any potential spin-off would not occur prior to September 2021 and would be intended to qualify as tax-free for U.S. federal income tax purposes.

Additionally, Dell Technologies continues to evaluate a range of strategic options concerning its ownership interest in VMware, including maintaining its current ownership in the company. "The strategic relationship between Dell Technologies and VMware has never been stronger," said Michael Dell, chairman and chief executive officer, Dell Technologies. "For more than 20 years, we've innovated for our customers and created substantial growth and value for both companies and our teams. Regardless of the options we are exploring to create additional value, we are accelerating our strategy - which remains unchanged. We are focused on winning in the consolidating markets where we operate and innovating across the Dell Technologies portfolio to create integrated solutions that turn data into insights and action."

ASUSTOR Inc. today launched the Lockerstor 2 and 4 featuring a 2.0 GHz Gemini Lake Intel Celeron J4125 Quad-Core processor as well as with 4 GB of DDR4-2400 RAM. The DDR4 RAM found in the Lockerstor 2 and 4 is 30% faster and uses 40% less power than DDR3 RAM. As with the Lockerstor 8 and 10, the Lockerstor 2 and 4 come with two M.2 NVMe SSD slots and feature dual 2.5-Gigabit Ethernet ports to unlock maximum performance out of your NAS. The dual 2.5-Gigabit Ethernet ports also support Link Aggregation that increases performance to up to 5 Gbps.

The Lockerstor 2 and 4, building on the success of their predecessors features tweaked improvements to the rock-solid ASUSTOR chassis design. Hardware features include HDMI 2.0a with support for 10-bit 4K hardware decoding, 2.5-Gigabit Ethernet and Wake on LAN, Wake on WAN. Wake on LAN and Wake on WAN optimizes power usage, helping companies control costs and maximize hardware longevity. The Lockerstor 2 and 4 come with two and four bays and supports up to 32 and 64 TB respectively. An additional 192 TB can be installed with three AS6004U units. ASUSTOR's MyArchive cold backup technology turns hard drives into a hot swappable hard drive for offsite backups, ensuring data security.

Synology Inc. today launched a new generation of two and four bay Plus Series NAS, designed as a centralized data management solution for both home and business environments. "Plus series is one of our most popular and versatile product lines," said Hewitt Lee, Director of Synology Product Management Group."The series offers an ideal mix of processing power and advanced capabilities such as containers and virtualization support, in compact and quiet desktop form factors. It is also the starting point for our advanced data protection solutions, enabling small businesses to cost-effectively deploy solutions that can protect their entire IT infrastructure."

Up to 133% faster in website responsiveness and over 15% improvement in compute-tasks, the new Plus series enables you to get things done faster and more efficiently. Two M.2 NVMe slots2 enable accelerated I/O performance, especially in multi-user environments. Synology storage solutions are not only designed to fulfill data management requirements, but centralize backups for Microsoft Windows PCs and Servers, VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V VMs, and Microsoft 365 and G Suite accounts using our Active Backup suite.

Intel today introduced its 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors and additions to its hardware and software AI portfolio, enabling customers to accelerate the development and use of AI and analytics workloads running in data center, network and intelligent-edge environments. As the industry's first mainstream server processor with built-in bfloat16 support, Intel's new 3rd Gen Xeon Scalable processors makes artificial intelligence (AI) inference and training more widely deployable on general-purpose CPUs for applications that include image classification, recommendation engines, speech recognition and language modeling.

"The ability to rapidly deploy AI and data analytics is essential for today's businesses. We remain committed to enhancing built-in AI acceleration and software optimizations within the processor that powers the world's data center and edge solutions, as well as delivering an unmatched silicon foundation to unleash insight from data," said Lisa Spelman, Intel corporate vice president and general manager, Xeon and Memory Group.

Infortrend Technology, Inc., the industry-leading enterprise storage provider, developed a cost-effective backup and restore solution of massive amounts of enterprise data. With both scale-out and scale-up expandability, it adds value for price-conscious data-rich applications, such as governmental institutions files backup, surveillance footages storing. As a Veeam Ready Repository, CS can be as well deployed in IT environments applying virtualization technologies.

System crashes, human errors, malicious attacks, viruses, and physical disasters always happen unexpectedly. Thus, it is difficult to overestimate the role of backup infrastructure with expandable capacity and reliable restore capabilities for ensuring business continuity. EonStor CS scale-out NAS is expandable up to 144 nodes to achieve 100GBps overall throughput and 100PB capacity for large-scale backup requirements or connecting JBOD to expand capacity only for saving costs. CS offers a rich selection of form factors, including high-density 4U 60-bay for space-constraint server rooms.

Kingston Digital, Inc., the Flash memory affiliate of Kingston Technology Company, Inc., a world leader in memory products and technology solutions, today announced its SSD business continues to grow at a strong rate following an astounding 2019. SSD demand through Q1 2020 remained high due to continued growth in the client, enterprise and OEM sectors. Since 2019, Kingston has broadened its SSD portfolio with three new client SSDs, five data center-specific drives - two of which achieved VMware Ready status - and launched its first U.2 NVMe PCIe solution.

Market share data for 2019 from analyst research companies Forward Insights and TRENDFOCUS showed Kingston in a strong leadership position. Forward Insights ranked Kingston in first place in worldwide channel SSD shipments with 18.3 percent market share, ahead of semiconductor manufacturers Western Digital and Samsung (16.5 percent and 15.1 percent, respectively). According to Forward Insights, almost 120 million SSDs were shipped in the channel in 2019.

Micron Technology, Inc., today announced new Micron 5210 ION enterprise SATA SSD capacity and features, solidifying Micron's leadership in QLC technology volume production. The world's first QLC solid-state drive (SSD), the Micron 5210 is based on the company's advanced QLC NAND technology and quickly replacing legacy hard disk drives (HDDs).

From SQL and NoSQL databases to big data and analytics, object stores and vSAN capacity tiers, customers are now reaping the benefits of NAND flash on performance-sensitive workloads that used to live on HDDs. Rapidly supplanting 10K HDDs, the Micron 5210 delivers 175 times faster random reads, 30 times faster random writes, two times more sequential throughput, and three times more energy efficiency than the largest 10K RPM HDDs - all at a compelling price point.

VMWare, one of the most popular virtualization solutions commercially available for businesses and the industry in general, has announced changes to its licensing model. From now on, licensees will have to acquire a license per 32 CPU cores, instead of the former "per socket" model. This effectively means that users who had made a migration to AMD's 64-core EPYC CPUs, for instance, and who saved on both price-per core and VMWare licensing fees compared to Intel customers (who would need two sockets to achieve the same core-count, and thus, two licenses) are now being charged for two licenses for a 64-core, AMD-populated socket. This was a selling point for AMD - the company stated that their high-end EPYC processors could act as a dual-socket setup with a single processor, thanks to EPYC's I/O capabilities and core counts. VMWare claims this change is in line with industry standard pricing models.

Of course this decision from VMWare hits AMD the hardest, and it comes at a time where there are already 48 and 64 core CPUs available in the market. Should this licensing change be done, perhaps it should be in line with the current state of the industry, and not following in a quasi-random core-count (it definitely isn't random, though, and I'll leave it at that). From VMware's perspective, AMD's humongous CPU core counts does affect their bottom line. The official release claiming customers license software based on CPU counts may be valid, and they do allow for free licenses for servers past 32 cores until April 30, 2020. Of course, VMWare is also preparing itself for future industry changes - Intel will obviously increase its core counts in response to AMD's EPYC attack on the expected core counts of professional applications.

If you haven't updated your AMD Radeon drivers in a while, here's one major reason to. The company secretly patched four major security vulnerabilities affecting Radeon GPUs, in its recent Adrenalin 20.1.1 drivers, with no mention of doing so in its changelog. Talos Intelligence reports four vulnerabilities, which are are chronicled under CVE-2019-5124, CVE-2019-5146, CVE-2019-5147 and CVE-2019-5183. This class of attacks exploits a vulnerability in the AMD Radeon driver file ATIDXX64.dll, which can lead to denial of service or even remote code execution. What makes things much more serious is that this attack vector can be used to exploit the host machine from a VM (tested with VMWare). It even seems possible to trigger the vulnerability from a web page, through WebGL (which allows running 3D applications on a remote website). The vulnerabilities were tested on Radeon RX 550 / 550 Series VMware Workstation 15 (15.5.0 build-14665864) with Windows 10 x64 as guest VM, but there is no reason to assume that the issue is limited to just RX 550 as the AMD shader compiler shares a common code basis for all recent DirectX 12 GPUs.

All vulnerabilities rely on a common attack vector: specially crafted shader code that exploits bugs in the shader compiler. Even though HLSL shader code looks similar to assembly, it actually is a relatively high-level language that gets optimized and compiled by the graphics driver. VMWare's graphics acceleration lets you run 3D graphics in virtual machines, by passing along rendering info to the host GPU and then funneling the output back into the VM. Since the shader code gets compiled using the graphics driver of the host OS, this creates interesting opportunities for attacks.

NVIDIA today reported revenue for the third quarter ended Oct. 27, 2019, of $3.01 billion compared with $3.18 billion a year earlier and $2.58 billion in the previous quarter. GAAP earnings per diluted share for the quarter were $1.45, compared with $1.97 a year ago and $0.90 in the previous quarter. Non-GAAP earnings per diluted share were $1.78, compared with $1.84 a year earlier and $1.24 in the previous quarter.

"Our gaming business and demand from hyperscale customers powered Q3's results," said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. "The realism of computer graphics is taking a giant leap forward with NVIDIA RTX. "This quarter, we have laid the foundation for where AI will ultimately make the greatest impact. We extended our reach beyond the cloud, to the edge, where GPU-accelerated 5G, AI and IoT will revolutionize the world's largest industries. We see strong data center growth ahead, driven by the rise of conversational AI and inference."

Intel today announced shipments of new Intel Stratix 10 DX field programmable gate arrays (FPGA). The new FPGAs are designed to support Intel Ultra Path Interconnect (Intel UPI), PCI-Express (PCIe) Gen4 x16 and a new controller for Intel Optane technology to provide flexible, high-performance acceleration. VMware is one of many early access program participants.

"Intel Stratix 10 DX FPGAs are the first FPGAs designed to combine key features that dramatically boost acceleration of workloads in the cloud and enterprise when used with Intel's portfolio of data center solutions. No other FPGA currently offers this combination of features for server designs based on future select Intel Xeon Scalable processors," said David Moore, Intel vice president and general manager, FPGA and Power Products, Network and Custom Logic Group.

QNAP Systems, Inc. today introduced the new QXG-10G2T-107, a dual-port PCI Express (PCIe) 10GBASE-T/NBASE-T NIC that supports 5 network speeds. It can be installed in a compatible QNAP NAS or a Windows /Linux PC with PCIe 2.0 x4 slots, providing organizations or individuals with a flexible and economical 10 GbE network connectivity solution.

The QXG-10G2T-107 uses the Aquantia AQtion AQC107S Ethernet controller that supports 10/5/2.5/1 Gbps and 100 Mbps network speeds. The RJ45 connector design also allows users to use existing cables. Transmission speeds can reach up to 5 Gbps when using CAT-5e cables, or up to 10 Gbps when using CAT 6 (or advanced versions) cables, unleashing the full potential of the QXG-10G2T-107.

At a launch event today, AMD was joined by an expansive ecosystem of datacenter partners and customers to introduce the 2nd Generation AMD EPYC family of processors that deliver performance leadership across a broad number of enterprise, cloud and high-performance computing (HPC) workloads. 2nd Gen AMD EPYC processors feature up to 64 "Zen 2" cores in leading-edge 7 nm process technology to deliver record-setting performance while helping reduce total cost of ownership (TCO) by up to 50% across numerous workloads. At the event, Google and Twitter announced new 2nd Gen AMD EPYC processor deployments and HPE and Lenovo announced immediate availability of new platforms.

"Today, we set a new standard for the modern datacenter with the launch of our 2nd Gen AMD EPYC processors that deliver record-setting performance and significantly lower total cost of ownership across a broad set of workloads," said Dr. Lisa Su, president and CEO, AMD. "Adoption of our new leadership server processors is accelerating with multiple new enterprise, cloud and HPC customers choosing EPYC processors to meet their most demanding server computing needs."

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.

Toshiba Memory America, Inc. (TMA), the U.S.-based subsidiary of Toshiba Memory Corporation, today announced that its newly released PM5 Series of 12Gb/s (gigabits per second) enterprise SAS SSDs has earned VMware vSAN 6.7 certification. This certification enables TMA's flash-based PM5 storage devices to be shared across connected hosts in a VMware vSphere cluster. With the vSAN 6.7 certification, users can pool PM5 Series SSDs together in a single, distributed shared data store. This allows users to define the storage capabilities required (such as performance, capacity and availability) for each connected virtual machine (VM) within the VMware vSAN cluster. These capabilities not only further hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) options in virtual environments, but also ensure that storage policies are administered and maintained within the PM5 Series with the utmost vSAN compatibility.

The certification of the PM5 Series enables VMware vSAN support for both hybrid and all-flash configurations using a two-tier storage architecture (capacity tier and cache tier). All write operations are sent to the cache tier and are subsequently de-staged to the capacity tier over time. When a PM5 Series SSD is deployed within a hybrid configuration, its cache tier is used as both a read and write cache, keeping hot data to improve performance. In an all-flash configuration, 100 percent of the cache tier is used for the write buffer. Given the benefits of tiered storage, PM5 Series SSDs are capable of meeting the demanding requirements of both enterprise and data center customers.

QNAP Systems, Inc. today unveiled the new dual-port 25GbE QXG-25G2SF-CX4 and 10GbE QXG-10G2SF-CX4 network NICs. Featuring Mellanox ConnectX -4 Lx SmartNIC controllers, these cards can greatly boost file transfer speeds and also support iSER (iSCSI Extension for RDMA) to optimize VMware virtualization. Both cards are PCIe Gen3 ×8 and can be installed in a Windows /Linux PC or compatible QNAP NAS.

Cloud, big data, high-speed storage, virtualization, and AI are strongly pushing 25GbE into the mainstream," said Dan Lin, Product Manager of QNAP, adding "QNAP now provides users with a scalable solution for adopting 25GbE infrastructure by leveraging the industry-leading Mellanox Ethernet solution to deliver a next-gen 25GbE NIC for NAS, servers and workstations."

Synology Inc., a leading maker of network-attached storage, video surveillance and networking products, unveiled the company's latest hardware and software innovations at their annual event Synology 2019 in New York. Synology debuted its first mesh Wi-Fi router, MR2200ac, along with the updated Synology Router Manager (SRM) 1.2. Another focus of the event was Synology's new enterprise-level data protection solution, Active Backup for Business.

Synology's first mesh router, MR2200ac, comes with a Qualcomm IPQ4019 quad-core CPU, tri-band Wi-Fi, and the latest version of its operating system SRM 1.2, which includes more granular configurations, such as user profile creation, detailed traffic management, advanced web filters, and whitelisting features aimed at providing tools for users to further understand, monitor and protect their network. The MR2200ac can work alone as a single router or be added to a RT2600ac or additional MR2200ac units to extend Wi-Fi coverage.

AMD today at VMworld in Las Vegas announced their new, high-density computing, dual-GPU Radeon Pro V340 accelerator. This graphics card (or maybe accelerator) is based on the same Vega that makes AMD's consumer graphics card lineup, and crams its dual GPUs into a single card with a dual-slot design. 32 GB of second-generation Error Correcting Code (ECC) high-bandwidth memory (HBM) greases the wheels for the gargantuan amounts of data these accelerators are meant to crunch and power through, even as media processing requirements go through the roof.

Dell Technologies announced today that it has reached an agreement with its Special Committee of independent directors to exchange the outstanding Class V tracking stock for Class C common stock of Dell Technologies or an optional cash election. Dell Technologies Class C common stock will become publicly listed on the New York Stock Exchange.

Dell Technologies will propose to exchange each share of Dell Technologies Class V tracking stock for 1.3665 shares of Dell Technologies Class C common stock, or at the holder's election, $109 in cash, subject to the aggregate amount of cash consideration not exceeding $9 billion. All of the shares of Class V tracking stock of holders who do not opt to receive cash will be converted into Class C common stock, and the Class V tracking stock will be eliminated.

QNAP Systems, Inc. (QNAP ) today unveiled the TS-963X, a 9-bay NAS with an AMD quad-core 2.0 GHz processor, up to 8 GB RAM (upgradeable to 16 GB), and 10GBASE-T connectivity supporting five connection speeds (10G/5G/2.5G/1G/100M). The compact TS-963X is the size of a 5-bay NAS but accommodates five 3.5-inch HDD bays and four 2.5-inch SSDs bays that deliver high-performance, high-capacity storage potential including automatic file/data tiering based on access frequency (Qtier Technology). The TS-963X is ideal for small businesses and organizations to boost data access efficiency, network transmission speed and to meet demands of mission-critical tasks.

"The TS-963X is designed to enhance the everyday workflows of small businesses and organizations at a budget-friendly price," noted Jason Hsu, Product Manager of QNAP. "The 10GBASE-T/NBASE-T port and four 2.5-inch bays for SSDs can all significantly improve performance, allowing the total cost of ownership to remain reasonable and affordable for most businesses," he added.

QNAP Systems, Inc. today launched the cost-effective high-performance 4-bay (TS-473), 6-bay (TS-673), and 8-bay (TS-873) TS-x73 series NAS featuring an AMD RX-421ND quad-core CPU with Turbo Core up to 3.4GHz and two PCIe slots for installing a QNAP QM2 card, wireless network card or a graphics card to extend NAS functionalities. The TS-x73 series provides small and medium businesses with an ideal NAS solution to build a private cloud for applications including high-speed data transfer, backup/recovery, virtualization, media playback and graphics display.

The TS-x73 NAS series presents a budget-friendly solution by allowing users to add more value to their NAS based on their individual needs. Through the two PCIe slots, users can install a QNAP QM2 card to add SSD caching/10GbE connectivity for boosted performance; a wireless card with WirelessAP Station app to turn the NAS into a wireless access point; or even an PCIe bus-powered graphics card to enable 4K transcoding and HDMI output for a greater media multimedia experience," said Jason Hsu, Product Manager of QNAP.

NVIDIA will host thousands of the world's leading AI experts at its ninth annual GPU Technology Conference (GTC) on March 26-29 at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center. NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang will deliver a keynote address on Tuesday, March 27, at 9 a.m. Pacific time to an expected 8,000 attendees representing the diverse, rapidly expanding AI and GPU computing community.

"GTC is where the world's leading researchers and business leaders learn how to harness the power of AI," said Greg Estes, vice president of Developer Programs at NVIDIA. "As GPU computing continues to drive the AI revolution, GTC is where you'll see the future take shape."

HP announced its first narrow bezel HP t310 G2 All-in-One Zero Client with seamless visuals, improved ergonomics and maximum data security. Powered by Teradici and compatible with VMware and Amazon virtual workspace environments, the HP t310 G2 AiO Zero Client allows customers to take their work to new heights with the design and performance they want, and the security they need.

With a virtually borderless full HD display, customers can enjoy an impressive visual experience with one or more monitors to create a seamless and aesthetically beautiful workspace. The comfort designed stand can be adjusted up, down, tilted, swiveled or rotated to support landscape and portrait mode, so customers can customize their workspace to meet their unique needs.

QNAP Systems, Inc. has joined forces with Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) to roll out the world's first Ryzen-based NAS - the high-end business TS-x77 series (available in 6 , 8 , and 12 -bay models). Featuring processors with up to 8-cores/16-threads (with Turbo Core up to 3.7 GHz), SSD caching, and with support for graphics cards, the TS-x77 delivers incredible processing power for driving resource-demanding applications such as VDI, server virtualization, private cloud, and 4K video playback/transcoding.

The TS-x77 series includes models with AMD Ryzen 7 1700 (8-cores/16-threads) and AMD Ryzen 5 1600 (6-cores/12-threads) processors that support AES-NI encryption acceleration and up to 64 GB DDR4 RAM. Two M.2 SATA 6 GB/s SSD slots are provided for cache acceleration or high-performance storage pools. Every model in the series provides USB 3.1 Gen2 10Gbps Type-A and Type-C ports, and three PCIe slots for incredible expansion potential. Supported PCIe devices include a graphics card, 10GbE/40GbE NICs, PCIe NVMe SSD, USB 3.1 expansion cards, and QM2 cards (that add additional M.2 SSDs or 10GbE connectivity). Incorporating incredible performance, reliability and scalability, the TS-x77 series provides an exceptional storage solution for diverse business IT environments.