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FEATURED by Michael Rink
Western Digital & Toshiba Separately Announce QLC 96-Layer NAND
Both companies announced QLC, 96-Layer, FLASH memory chips on July 19th. Toshiba and Western Digital are both expecting 1.33Tb (terabits) of storage per chip. Western Digital’s announcement covers that the chip was jointly developed with Toshiba in Yokkaichi, Japan. However, Toshiba’s announcement makes no mention of Western Digital at all. Possibly a sign of lingering poor relations between the two companies despite it having been more than half a year since Toshiba dropped its 120 billion Yen lawsuit against Western Digital in December 2017. In any case, the differences between the two announcements are a significant divergence from their behavior when Toshiba first began publicly speaking about QLC technology in 2016.
FEATURED by Michael Rink
Intel Now Producing QLC PCIe SSDs
Intel did a curious thing July 19th. It announced that they were now producing their QLC PCIe SSD on their Twitter news account with almost no accompanying details. Since then, Intel has released little additional information but it has confirmed that this will be part of Intel’s new D5 product family for data centers. We expect to learn more at next month’s Flash Memory Summit (August 6th-9th) in Santa Clara. One of Intel’s Sr. Vps, Robert B. Crooke, will be giving a keynote partially about 3D NAND on August 8th.
FEATURED by Lyle Smith
HP ZBook 15u G5 Review
HP has released the ZBook 15u G5, the 5th generation of their popular mobile workstation line. Announced back in April of this year, HP describes the 15u G5 as an entry-level, performance-driven workstation that is ideal for professionals on the go, which is pretty much in line with other 15u models we looked at over the past few years (we found that they are generally solid mobile rigs that offer a good bang for their lower price tag). The new 15u is highlighted by an optional 4K, touch display, quad core Intel Core processors and 3D professional graphics, all packed inside a thin mobile workstation.
July 18th, 2018 by Michael Rink
Lenovo & Cloudistics Launch ThinkAgile CP Series
Lenovo – together with Cloudistics – is further expanding its ThinkAgile portfolio with the CP series. Billed as a composable cloud platform or a ‘cloud-in-a-box’; the CP series aims to offer customers looking for the agility of the public cloud and the security of a private cloud all the conveniences and ease-of-use of a public cloud environment secured behind the customer’s own data center firewall.
July 18th, 2018 by Adam Armstrong
HP Refreshes Its Z Family Of Entry-Level Workstations
Today HP Inc. unveiled what it is calling the world’s most powerful entry workstations, with its updated HP Z Workstation lineup. These new entry workstations are aimed at product designers, architects, creative professionals, OEMs, educators, and financial workers. HP states that the new workstations will provide enhanced productivity and performance while being cost-effective and secure.
July 17th, 2018 by Adam Armstrong
Seagate BarraCuda SSD Review
Last week Seagate Technologies announced their latest SSD, simple named BarraCuda SSD. The naming follows in line with the rest of the company’s Guardian Series of drives and naming scheme. The BarraCuda SSD will serve as a drop in HDD SATA replacement that, due to the change in faster technology, will boost PC and laptop performance.
July 17th, 2018 by Adam Armstrong
AWS Announces High-Performance EC2 Instances Updates
Today at its annual AWS Summit in New York, AWS announced a new high frequency instance for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, Amazon EC2 Z1d. Z1d is designed for users that need the highest single-thread performance with a large amount of memory (such as electronic design automation (EDA), relational databases, and financial simulations). AWS is also releasing two other instances for memory intensive applications, the R5 and R5d.
July 17th, 2018 by Michael Rink
Samsung Announces First 8Gb LPDDR5 DRAM
Samsung are the first to announce that they have successfully developed a 10-nanometer class (process node between 10 and 20 nanometers). This announcement is not only ahead of Samsung’s competitors, but also ahead of the finalization of the specifications for DDR5 & LPDDR5. JEDEC, the standards group for the microelectronics industry, is still forecasting the release of the full DDR5 standardsfor later this year. Samsung similarly made their announcement for their LPDDR4 chips ahead of the associated standards in 2014. Since then, they tell us, they have been setting the stage to transition to the LPDDR5 standard for use in upcoming 5G and Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered mobile applications.
July 17th, 2018 by Adam Armstrong
Commvault Updates & Simplifies Product Packaging
Today Commvault announced that its had taken several of its solutions and offerings and consolidated them into simple product packages and pricing. The announcement today take the breadth of Commvault’s offerings and boils them down to four products aimed for complete, scalable backup and recovery as well as data management, regardless of the size of the company. The packaging is made to ease implementation and deployment as well as buying options.
July 17th, 2018 by Adam Armstrong
Unitrends Releases Recovery Series Gen 8
Today Unitrends released the new Gen 8 version of its flagship Recovery Series backup appliances. The latest version of the hardware appliances have built-in efficiencies that are designed to increase density, reduce power and cooling, and help customers save on costs. The Gen 8 Recovery Series are also pre-integrated with Unitrends Backup 10.2 software that can optimize cloud replication and performance.
Earlier this year, Dell EMC released 2 new single-socket PowerEdge servers with AMD EPYC processors - the PowerEdge R6415 and the PowerEdge R7415. The PowerEdge R7415 is a 2U single-socket server with enterprise-class AMD EPYC processors available. Being a single-socket server, users can expect a cost savings in both lower license costs and power costs, resulting in a better TCO. Of course, AMD has also stated that the price of the CPU is lower than the two CPU counterparts, giving the R7415 access to new workloads where conventional dual-socket systems may not be ideal. The R7415 can be loaded with up to 24 NVMe drives that not only can bring a large performance boost but with the ever increasing density of these drives, can potentially offer incredible capacity. This would position the server ideally for use cases such as software defined storage (SDS) or business analytics..JPG)
The QNAP TS-877 is the 8-bay model from the company’s TS-x77 line, which is touted as the industry’s first Ryzen-based NAS and designed specifically for video editing and other high-demand multi-threaded applications. 
Violin Systems isn't exactly a new company; we have been covering them for six years now. The company began as a pioneer in the all-flash arena and ran into a few woes after going public. However, the company has risen from the ashes with new investors backing the firm and has new deployment options along with the same cadre of high performing gear. We've been working with Violin in the lab for some time now; today we are looking at the 7650 array, which is the “extreme performance” all-flash model in the Violin Flash Storage Platform (FSP). 
The U3818DW is another slick-looking curved monitor offering from Dell, with a generous 37.5-inch size with a 21:9 aspect ratio, roughly 25% more screen real estate than the company's 34-inch monitor (
Last month Samsung launched the PRO Endurance line of memory cards, specifically designed for intensive video recording use cases. Offered in capacities up to 128GB, the microSDHC/microSDXC cards deliver what Samsung states is the industry-best for continuous video recording. The 128GB card delivers 43,800 hours while the 64GB card offers up to 26,280 hours and 32GB card offers up to 17,520 hours. The cards offer read speeds of 100MB/s, but in this case the writes are more important. The PRO Endurance cards support 30MB/s writes, meaning the cards can ingest full HD (1920×1080) streams with 4K support, which requires 26 Mbps. 
