Today Lenovo announced a new ThinkStation, the P920 Rack. This is Lenovo’s new solution aimed at meeting the evolving demands of users and elevating the remote experience for professionals. With the changing modern workplace ditching offices and moving towards more flexible and on the go work environments there is a greater demand for airtight security and centralized resources. The need for mobility, speed and accessibility with the guarantee of maximum security is a universal demand across industries. 

Walt Disney Studios has announced a five year partnership with Microsoft to make movies in the Cloud. Through this partnership, Disney’s goal is to innovate and redefine it’s workflow for content creation, production, and distribution utilizing the Microsoft Azure cloud platform. The Walt Disney Studios’ StudioLAB, an internal technology test hub, will be taking charge of the collaboration between the companies as they work towards delivering cloud-based solutions to accelerate technological advancement at The Walt Disney Studios. 

Western Digital launched the Ultrastar DC SN630 in February of this year, as part of a refresh and rebranding of their Ultrastar line (formerly HGST) of data center drives. Within this portfolio Western Digital has several enterprise NVMe SSD offerings with the SN200 taking the throne as the performance leader and the new SN630 replaces the SN620 in the mainstream single port NVMe space, which is an increasingly popular alternative to SATA and SAS SSDs. The SN630, which is Western Digital's workhorse NVMe SSD comes tuned either for read-centric workloads or high-endurance mixed-use workloads. The drive construction in either case is the same, the functional difference in the level of overprovisioning that goes into the drive, which in turn produces the desired endurance rating.

Today Supermicro announced the launch of the SYS-5049A-T, a new solution expanding it’s high-performance SuperWorkstation System Portfolio. This server-grade high-end workstation is  fully-configurable and joins a range of other solutions supporting dynamic computational workloads for demanding requirements found in scientific research, deep learning (DL), artificial intelligence (AI), augmented reality (AR), and 3-D modeling with real-time simulation. Supermicro’s SuperWorkstations are optimized for applications requiring powerful computational or graphics capabilities including rendering, image processing, and engineering tasks and can be purpose built for many industries. The new solution announced today features significant performance improvements over previous system platforms. 

Today Rafay Systems announced its turnkey, SaaS-based offering for containerized app lifecycle management is now generally available. Rafay also announced that it netted $8 million in Series A funding. The funding was led by Ridge Ventures with NTT DOCOMO Ventures also participating in the round, along with Costanoa Ventures and Moment Ventures, both of which previously participated in the company’s $4.1 million seed round.

Today IBM Storage announced the new IBM DS9800F storage systems. This all-flash family of arrays brings performance, data protection, resiliency, availability and cost-efficiency to hybrid and multicloud environments while creating a strong synergy between IBM Z mainframes and the cloud. IBM also unveiled z15, its new enterprise platform delivering the ability to manage the privacy of customer data across hybrid multicloud environments. 

AWS announced its AWS Outposts back at its previous re:Invent event last year. The announcement generated a lot of buzz form customers wanting more details. The day of the details has arrived, with information around the launch date as well. 

So far we’ve dived deep into the Microsoft Azure Stack HCI, the on-premise implementation of Microsoft’s Azure cloud service. Azure Stack HCI can be seen as a best-of-both-worlds type of platform. It has all the management tools from Azure like Azure Monitor, Azure Security Center, Azure Update Management, Azure Network Adapter, and Azure Site Recovery, while housing the data on-prem and meeting certain regulations. Azure Stack HCI is broken down into three parts: software defined architecture, Azure services, and hardware. 

Today Spectra Logic introduced its new storage management software solution designed for data-driven organizations that need a modern storage lifecycle management workflow, StorCycle. The company makes the claim that its new software solution can reduce the overall costs of data storage by up to 70% through the creation of a Perpetual Tier of storage. Users will still have full access to their data and can combine StorCycle with existing NAS devices, or Spectra hardware or use as standalone software in a public cloud. 

Today Dell EMC announced that it will be leveraging Storage Class Memory (SCM) as true persistent storage. The Dell EMC PowerMax product will now ship with dual port Intel Optane drives. To further boost performance, PowerMax now supports NVMeoF, with 32Gb NVMeoF for Fibre channel connectivity.