Migrating VMs can be a huge pain in the neck for companies wanting to move from traditional architectures to the cloud; live migration is even worse. From the service provider perspective, they need a quick and relatively painless way to migrate VMs to both make customers happy, but perhaps more importantly in their view, get to the point of billing. JetStream Migrate is designed exactly for this purpose, helping service providers migrate customer VMs to the cloud completely, reliably, and without appliction service interruption.

Eaton announced the North American launch of its High-Density Rack Power Distribution unit (PDU). The new PDU is the latest addition to Eaton’s ePDU G3 line and has everything you have come to expect from rackmount PDUs with the bonus of configurability.

Western Digital has announced the second-generation model of the WD Black SN750 NVMe single-sided M.2 SSD. Marketed specifically towards gamers and enthusiasts, the SN750 features a capacity range of 500GB to 2TB as well as a Gaming Mode option via the SSD dashboard, allowing users to disable low power mode and keep the SSD running at peak levels.

Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) announced a fully managed, centralized backup service for customers to back up their data across AWS services and on-premises, AWS Backup. AWS Backup protects storage volumes, databases, and file systems while making it easier for customer to meet their business and regulatory backup compliance requirements. Users will have a single service that allows them to configure and audit the AWS resources backed up, automate backup scheduling, set retention policies, and monitor recent backups and restores. 

GIGABYTE has announced the addition of two new AMD EPYC compute nodes to their RACKLUTION-OP line. These new products are based on the Open Compute Project's Open Rack Standards, a set of open source hardware design guidelines originally created by Facebook then adapted into an open source project in 2011. The TO22-Z61 and TO22-Z62 feature dual AMD EPYC Naples processor sockets for compute nodes with high core counts and memory capacity. The new models have flexible storage options (including all flash or mixed SATA / SAS + flash), up to 3 additional PCIe expansion slots, and each node can fit into a three bay, 2OU tray.

This week both Veeam and Rubrik announced massive funding hauls. Veeam secured a $500 million investment from Insight Venture Partners (with strong participation from strategic investor Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB)). Rubrik announced a $261 million yield from Series E funding. 

QNAP has announced the immediate availability of the TBS-453DX NASbook, a compact storage solution ideal for mobile workers and those with limited workspaces. It is highlighted by its ultra-compact design, four M.2 SATA SSDs slots, support for more than 20 mapped cloud storage spaces and local caching, the TBS-453DX features HDMI 2.0 4K 60Hz output, hardware transcoding and streaming. 10GbE N-BASET connectivity is also provided, which based on Aquantia's Multi-Gig controller.

Seagate has been making NAS-specific hard drives for over five years, rebranding as IronWolf in 2016 to reinforce messaging around the drives being “tough, ready, and scalable.” It's not enough though to architect a drive for a specific application like NAS though, Seagate wants to differentiate themselves in the market by offering more. In this case that means IronWolf Health Management (IHM). NAS vendors can integrate with Seagate's IHM gain more visibility into drive health and usage indicators like temperature, shock, vibration, intermittent connections, and signal integrity. From here, the NAS vendor or the user themselves can take action to ensure their data is always safe and secure.

This week’s News Bits we look at a number of small announcements, small in terms of the content, not the impact they have. Veeam acquires N2WS. Supermicro announces Early Shipment Program. Quantum announces new DXi backup appliances. QNAP introduces Fibre Channel connectivity. Virtual Instruments has a record year going into 2019. 

Today at CES 2019 in Las Vegas, Lexar announced its new family of M.2 SSDs, the NM Series. The NM series leverages SATA (III) interface for the NM200 as well as NVMe interface for the rest of the family. The company also introduced the Lexar Professional 633x SDXC UHS-I card with 1TB of capacity. Lexar will be exhibiting at this year’s CES, Las Vegas, Nevada January 8th – 11th.