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.
July 16th, 2018 by Adam Armstrong
Spectra Logic Enhances Its Enterprise Tape Library Offerings
Today Spectra Logic announced several updates it was making to its enterprise tape libraries. Today’s updates and enhancements are designed to benefit customers that need to preserve massive amounts of data for long periods of time, such as governments, scientific research, HPC, and M&E. The updates and enhancements include Time-Based Access Ordering System to speed up recall times, and Assisted Self Maintenance and Zoning.
July 16th, 2018 by Michael Rink
Fujitsu Expands Partnerships With Cloud Providers
Fujitsu has been collaborating with several cloud providers, such as Microsoft and VMware. To further meet customer demands and needs, the company announced that it is expanding partnerships with new cloud service providers (CSP), SAP and Oracle. These expanded partnerships help to strengthen and accelerate companies’ digital transformations and adoption of multi-cloud environments.
July 13th, 2018 by Michael Rink
Supermicro Launches Xeon E-2100 Optimized Workstation & IoT Systems
On the same day, July 12th, Intel announced their new 6-coreXeon E-2100 processor, Supermicro launched their product lineup optimized for it. In addition to their newest 1U IoT System and workstation, Supermicro also offers 4 new motherboards. With these releases the company shows that it is responding to the growing customers needs of IoT systems.
July 13th, 2018 by Adam Armstrong
Datera Releases Version 3.2 Of Its Platform
Datera Inc. recently announced the latest version of version of its platform, Datera 3.2 Platform. According to the company, the 3.2 version enables customers to automate data operations and capitalize on the transition to server-based architectures to solve their data challenges. The release also adds integration into container-based applications and expands its relationship with persistent memory technology leaders such as Intel and Samsung.
Dell has recently updated their mid-range lineup of monitors: P2219H (21.5-inch), P2319H (23.0-inch), P2419H (23.8-inch) and P2719H (27.0-inch). We will be looking at these new Dell displays in one sweeping review as there's virtually no difference between each model from this updated line, except for the display size, which is indicated in the first two numbers of their product name.
Huawei launched the 
Released today, the Intel SSD 660p Series is the company's first client SSD to ship with 64-layer QLC (quad-level cell) 3D NAND. What this means to the end user is a less expensive SSD that has a reasonable performance profile. As will be true for most QLC SSD launches, the conversation is going to be about finally having an SSD that can replace HDDs both in terms of price and capacity. The 660p for its part is positioned as an NVMe SSD in a single-sided m.2 form factor that will accelerate the demise of HDDs and value-based SATA SSDs in client computing. The 660p is part of the larger Intel portfolio play that include faster drives based on TLC and Optane that hit mainstream and performance use cases.
The Samsung PM1725a is a relatively minor update to the 
Intel's Optane SSD DC P4800X series was 
There's little doubt that Amazon is the leader when it comes to a variety of cloud services offered through their EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) web service. With a relatively simple provisioning process and the ability to easily scale instances and storage needs up or down, EC2 aims to deliver all the promise of the cloud at cost-effective price points. For some, though, the cloud isn't just about flexibility and ease of deployment; it's about performance. The business benefits of being able to spin powerful environments up or down for critical applications like analytics can often vastly outweigh the expense of doing so through OPEX instead of the long-term investment of CAPEX. To that end, in May Amazon GA'd the i3 bare metal instance family that provides direct access to CPU and memory resources of the underlying server. 
