Time is money, and for businesses experiencing downtime due to electrical outages, the money lost can be astronomical. Power management and protection is paramount for small businesses and enterprises alike. StorageReview is no exception. We depend on a UPS that offers comprehensive management and power protection for the testing we do in our lab, including all servers and connected hardware, and also for accurate data testing results. The Eaton 5PX1000RT UPS is just one among many UPS products we rely on to keep our lab up and running.

Today Seagate Technology reported financial results for the quarter ended September 28, 2018. Overall the company had a fairly strong quarter, which is good news as the tech sector has been a bit sluggish as of late. It’s stock started off with a fairly sharp drop and some bouncing back and forth. 

The Lenovo ThinkSystem SR850 is a 2U server that offers a lot of flexibility under the hood that can lead to massive performance for demanding applications. Announced earlier this year, the S850 is set to go leaps and bounds over previous Lenovo servers with 233% more cores with the addition of up to four Intel Xeon Scalable CPUs, 400% more memory, and 76% faster performance. The SR850 is built for general business use cases, but with all of that performance, it can also handle the most demanding database, virtualization and artificial intelligence workloads.

QNAP today released it’s AI-Ready NAS, the TS-2888X. The TS-2888X provides a complete solution for machine learning AI, allowing organizations to implement AI applications through combining robust storage and a ready-to-use software environment. This unit comes equipped with next-generation Intel Xeon W processors with up to 18 cores. Additionally, it sports a hybrid storage architecture with twenty SSDs (including 4 U.2 SSDs) and eight hard drives. The TS-2888X also supports 4 high-end graphics card installations and runs QuAI, QNAP’s proprietary AI developer package.

Morpheus Data won the Best of VMworld Award for Agile Operations and Automation this year (2018). Not content to rest on their laurels; they are rolling out enhancements to their multi-cloud management platform (CMP) that won them the award. The new release adds simplified OpenStack support, better AWS CloudFormation, and integration with Dell Technologies storage and cloud.

The QNAP TS-332X is the second model of the company's multifaceted 3-bay NAS family, featuring three M.2 SSD slots and support for RAID5. Like all QNAP consumer devices, the TS-332X seems simple on the outside. However, the new NAS comes equipped with a comprehensive range of useful features. This includes SSD Caching, Auto Tiering, a 10GbE SFP+ port and three M.2 SATA 6Gb/s SSD slots, all of which help to make this an integrable device for new businesses and SMB environments looking for a NAS solution.

Toady Excelero announced the latest edition of its software-only storage solution, NVMesh 2. Excelero states that NVMesh is the lowest latency block storage platform with the new version to only improve upon this. According to the company, NVMesh 2 will make it easier for enterprises and service providers to deploy shared NVMe storage at local performance across a far wider range of network protocols and applications.

The Netstor NP631N is a PCIe 3.0 m.2 adapter that brings m.2 SSD compatibility to just about every desktop and server, and does so while delivering up to 32Gbps in performance via any PCIe x4, x8, and x16 slot. M.2 adapter cards are a great way for users to get the speedy NVMe performance if they don`t have a modern motherboard with a built-in M.2 slot. They're also handy for those looking to install more than one M.2 drive, as most new consumer-grade motherboards only have one or two slots available. In the enterprise space, M.2 adapters bring cost-effective boot-drive alternatives to servers without taking a front-mount slot and offer higher performance than other alternatives.

Over the weekend IBM announced that it would be acquiring Red Hat for $34 billion. I believe this is the largest tech acquisition of 2018 and perhaps the largest software acquisition to date. The acquisition will make IBM the largest Hybrid Cloud Provider in the world. 

Veeam announced that Update 4 of Veeam Backup & Replication, expected later this year, will add native storage integration with Element Software,the storage operating system that powers NetApp HCI and SolidFire. Veeam first joined NetApp's Alliance program four years ago, in 2014. Since then they've been steadily increasing support and integration. Earlier this month the two companies worked together to allow NetApp to resale Veaam Availability Solutions.