ASUSTOR Inc., a leading innovator and provider of network storage solutions, today announced the release of four new enterprise-level 1U and 2U rackmount NAS devices. These new devices consist of the four drive bay AS-604RS and AS-604RD models and the nine drive bay AS-609RS and AS-609RD models. All devices come equipped with the Intel Atom 2.13 GHz dual-core processor which combines supercharged performance with low power consumption. Furthermore, all devices are verified as VMware, Citrix and Hyper-V ready, providing businesses with a flexible and cost-efficient virtual storage solution.

"Our new rackmount NAS models include the type of hardware specifications required by the most demanding business environments such as dual gigabit Ethernet ports, eSATA and SuperSpeed USB 3.0 interfaces and support for hard drive hot swapping." said Johnny Chen, Product Manager at ASUSTOR. "The AS-604RD and AS-609RD models also feature redundant power supplies meaning that should the primary power supply fail, a second one will automatically start running to keep the NAS powered on. This undoubtedly gives businesses the type of 24/7, round-the-clock, uninterrupted access that they need."

QNAP Systems, Inc. today announced that its latest business-class, 2U rackmount TS-x70 series Turbo NAS start shipping now. The new generation TS-x70 series, including the 12-bay TS-1270U-RP and the 8-bay TS-870U-RP, are aiming to offer the business users a superb high-performance yet budget-friendly NAS solution to smooth daily file operations with low total cost of ownership. The models fulfill various business applications including high speed backup, server virtualization, iSCSI IP-SAN, video storage and centralized shared storage, and outstand as an affordable 10GbE ready NAS.

Powered by a high performance Dual-core Intel 2.4GHz processor, the new TS-x70 series are equipped with 4GB DDR3 RAM, which can be upgraded to 16GB optionally. The dual USB 3.0 ports allow high-speed server data backup. Featuring 10GbE re ady, the TS-x70 series provide dual Gigabit Ethernet ports, which can be expanded up to six Gigabit Ethernet ports, or four 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports plus two Gigabit Ethernet ports, benefit in aggregating and boosting network performance. "The TS-x70 series are proficient to fulfill mission-critical storage needs of small and medium businesses with maximum system uptime," said David Tsao, product manager of QNAP. "The 10GbE network expansion options can satisfy high-speed data transmission required in the business environment," added Tsao.

AMD today unveiled nine new mid-range and entry-level AMD Opteron 4300 Series and 3300 Series server processors increasing performance per watt versus the previous generation to maximize compute capabilities in power-constrained environments1, while delivering outstanding value to cloud providers and web hosts. The AMD Opteron 3300 Series processors provide enterprise-class features in a low power envelope at a desktop processor price, making it ideal for web hosts and small- and medium-sized businesses.

The AMD Opteron 4300 Series processors offer up to 15 percent better performance versus the prior generation, based on SPECint benchmark results2. And SPECpower results show up to a 24 percent improvement in performance per watt. As with the AMD Opteron 6300 Series processors, these are socket compatible with the previous generation processor, providing an effortless upgrade path for customers.

Synology Inc. today launched RS3413xs+, the first XS+ series NAS server that boasts superior performance of 400,000+ read IOPS and high availability to provide a rigorous foundation for the mission-critical tasks of large-scale businesses.

Equipped with Xeon Quad Core 3.3 GHz CPU and dual 10GbE bandwidth capability, the RS3413xs+ is capable of delivering 2,000+ MB/s read throughput under RAID 5 configuration with link aggregation. The combination of SSD cache technology and SATA drives boosts throughput efficiently while minimizing cost per gigabyte. Besides, encryption acceleration with AES New Instructions ensures its performance stays uncompromised.

QNAP Systems, Inc. today officially launched its latest business-class TS-x69L series Turbo NAS. The new TS-x69L series, available in 2, 4, 5, 6, and 8-drive versions, is powered by a high performance dual-core Intel Atom processor, equipped with 1GB DDR3 RAM, which can be upgraded to 3GB optionally. With support for SATA 2.5", 3.5" HDD and SSD up to 4TB, and with dual USB 3.0 ports for high-speed backup, the TS-x69L NAS series is compatible with Microsoft Windows OS, Linux/UNIX, and the latest Mac OS X Mountain Lion, and provides the levels of performance and high-capacity storage required by SMB users.

The TS-x69L series is equipped with 512MB DOM (Disk on Module) with dual firmware image design for system downtime prevention. In the event of corrupted firmware caused by accidental power loss during system boot, the NAS will boot with the backup firmware and then automatically recover the failed one for continuous system uptime.

Today in a global online launch event Satya Nadella, president of Microsoft Server and Tools Business, announced the general availability of Windows Server 2012. In his keynote speech, Nadella described how Windows Server 2012 is a cornerstone of the Cloud OS, which provides one consistent platform across private, hosted and public clouds.

"The operating system has always been the heartbeat of IT and is now undergoing a renaissance in the new world of continuous cloud services, connected devices and big data," Nadella said. "Microsoft's unique legacy in the most widely used operating systems, applications and cloud services positions us to deliver the Cloud OS, based on Windows Server and Windows Azure, helping customers achieve a datacenter without boundaries."

Great news NAS lovers, a new high-value 7-bay NAS is now available on the market! Thecus put their hands together and added a new tower to the Vision series. Equipped with an Intel Atom processor, 2 GB of DDR3 RAM, HDMI output and offering incomparable data protection with the McAfee antivirus, this NAS will offer lots of power and lots of storage capacity without spending lots of money. With the 2-bay N2800, 4-bay N4800 and N4510U and the 5-bay N5550, the 7-bay N7510 completes the Vision series of Intel Atom NAS from Thecus.

QNAP Systems, Inc. today officially expanded its latest business-ready Turbo NAS family, the TS-x69U-RP series, with 2 new rackmount units that really mean business. The expansion includes 4 and 8-drive models, delivering up to 32TB (using 4TB drives) of high-performance networked storage, redundant power supplies for enhanced reliability, and a wealth of business-ready applications for cross-platform file sharing, network-wide backup, server virtualization storage, and much more.

At the heart of the new models is a Dual-core Intel Atom 2.13 GHz CPU, equipped with 1 GB DDR3 RAM on TS-469U-RP, 2GB DDR3 RAM on TS-869U-RP, and support for SATA 6 Gb/s 2.5" and 3.5" hot-swappable drives to provide the performance demanded by today's SMBs; critical for keeping businesses running at their highest productivity levels.

QNAP Systems, Inc. today announced its new additions for the high-end SMB market segment with two 16-drive 3U rackmount Turbo NAS models with up to 64TB storage capacity using 4 TB drives. The TS-EC1679U-RP and TS-1679U-RP, powered by the Intel Xeon processor and the Intel Core i3 processor respectively, are the highest capacity and highest performing NAS products ever developed by QNAP. Both models feature optional 10GbE networking and 6Gb/sec SATA interfaces, achieving incredible 2,000 MB/sec and 200,000 IOPS throughput; delivering sustained ultra-high performance suitable for demanding data center & high-end SMB environments. The new models feature cable-less disk drive backplanes, hot-swappable power supply, and cooling fan modules for maximum reliability and uptime.

At the sold-out Microsoft Management Summit, Corporate Vice President Brad Anderson spoke to nearly 5,000 IT professionals about their opportunity to deliver fast, reliable services with cloud computing. His keynote speech highlighted how customers around the world are already using Microsoft System Center 2012, available today for evaluation and purchase, to create private clouds. Anderson also discussed how IT professionals can evolve their roles with cloud computing to help their businesses be more competitive.

"Cloud computing gives IT professionals an opportunity to increase their strategic value to their businesses while building new skills," Anderson said. "Microsoft's private cloud solutions help IT professionals become cloud innovators for their companies, managing and delivering the applications people need to be productive across private, hybrid and public clouds."

Synology Inc. today launched RackStation RS2212+ and RS2212RP+, the reliable 10-bay rack mount NAS servers designed with seamless scalability for small and medium businesses.

"Synology RS2212+ and RS2212RP+, the newest addition to the Plus Series line-up, are a highly dependable and scalable solution for small and medium business owners. It delivers high system availability and storage capacity for mission-critical workloads, enabling clients to run business-critical applications with continual service uptime," said Peter Chen, Product Manager of Synology Inc.

Synology today announced RackStation RS812+ and RS812RP+, expandable 4-bay rackmount NAS servers bringing high performance, scalability, and reliability to small and medium businesses.

"Synology RS812+ and RS812RP+ are built to address the needs of businesses that require high performance and maximum system uptime to run mission-critical applications," said Peter Chen, Product Manager of Synology Inc. "They ensure business continuity with an array of redundancy and availability features," added Chen.

NEC Corporation of America (NEC), a leading provider of innovative IT, communications, and biometrics solutions, today announced the launch of NEC's new generation of servers based on the new Intel Xeon E5-2600 product family supporting ProgrammableFlow networking.

The new generation of Express5800 E5 Generation Series servers will benefit from the performance boost and energy-efficiency of the new Intel Xeon processor E5 family combined with NEC's own innovations for higher manageability, energy efficiency and higher scalability. Combined with NEC's new ProgrammableFlow support, these new features will become an important factor to help accelerate cloud computing by maximizing the effectiveness of operational expenditure, especially business critical applications and database consolidation at corporate data centers. The Express5800/R120d-2M and R120d-1M family of platforms will be powered by these innovative features.

OCZ Technology Group, Inc., a leading provider of high-performance solid-state drives (SSDs) for computing devices and systems, today announced it has acquired SANRAD Inc., a privately held provider of flash caching and virtualization software and hardware.

"This transaction is an important step in OCZ's enterprise solid state drive strategy," said Ryan Petersen, CEO of OCZ Technology Group. "It significantly enhances the ability for customers to increase datacenter performance and efficiency by putting more virtual machines (VM) on a server without slowing down the VM's ability to access stored data, thus substantially lowering the overall cost of deployment. SANRAD's VXL has the ability to optimize caching strategies based on the application and support for VMware's vMotion, which sets the solution apart from others in the industry, allowing enterprises to finally realize the benefit of running a single unified virtualized environment," concluded Mr. Petersen.

QNAP Systems, Inc., a leading manufacturer of world-class NAS servers, NVR Video Surveillance Systems, and Network-based Media Players today announced expansion of their popular Business Series lineup of Turbo NAS servers, to include the new TS-x59 Pro II series: the 4-drive TS-459 Pro II, the 5-drive TS-559 Pro II, and the 6-drive TS-659 Pro II. The TS-x59 Pro II lineup sports the powerful yet energy-efficient dual-core Intel Atom D525 1.8GHz processor along with 1GB of DDRIII RAM (expandable to 3GB). In addition to powerful processors, the new models are the first in the industry to support SATA 6Gb/s hard drives. Also new is USB 3.0 support, ensuring internal and external hard drives deliver the highest performance possible.

Microsoft today released Service Pack 1 for Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2, to all users. A Service Pack is a periodical cumulative of updates released between a period of time, that also introduces new features to the OS. For both operating systems based on the Windows 6.1 kernel, Service Pack 1 will provide all product and security updates released to date. A couple of new features that will benefit Windows 2008 R2 are also bundled. These include Dynamic Memory and RemoteFX.

Dynamic Memory lets Hyper-V administrators pool available memory on a physical host and dynamically distribute it to any virtual machine(s) running on that host, while RemoteFX lets Windows Server 2008 R2 administrators provide a rich end user desktop virtualization experience by delivering vivid content, independent of any graphics stack, to server-hosted virtual and session-based desktops. We put Windows 7 Service Pack 1 to test, to see how the updated OS benefits gamers, or if it does in the first place. Our performance analysis can be read here. A list of notable changes with SP1 can be read here.

QNAP Systems, Inc., a leading manufacturer of world class NAS servers today announced the latest refresh of its rack-mounted Business Series Turbo NAS servers which are hugely popular with corporate and entry-level enterprise customers for their sheer performance and business-ready features. Announced today are two new 4-drive units, the TS-459U-RP+ and the TS-459U-SP+ with up to 8TB of networked storage, and the TS-859U-RP+ with up to a whopping 16TB of online storage (using 2TB hard drives).

These new rack-mounted Business Series TS-x59U-RP+ models incorporate the new dual-core Intel Atom processor D525 with 1.8GHz clock speed and 1GB RAM, which can achieve up to 113MB/s transfer rates (FTP/Samba reads) via dual Gigabit LAN ports while maintaining guaranteed low power consumption.

QNAP Systems, Inc., a leading manufacturer of world class NAS servers today refreshes its popular mid-range NAS business lineup with new 2- and 4-drive desktop models, TS-239 Pro II+ and TS-439 Pro II+. The Turbo NAS servers adopt Intel's new D425 single-core Atom CPU with 1.8GHz clock speed and 1GB RAM, which delivers superior performance and high reliability with versatile business features. The new models provide maximum storage of 8TB (using four 2TB hard drives and single disk volume/JBOD configuration). The TS-239 Pro II+ and TS-439 Pro II+ NAS servers are compatible with VMware, Citrix and Windows 2008 Hyper-V clusters virtualization platform, ideal for file sharing, backup, and advanced server applications in the office environment.

QNAP Systems, Inc., a leading manufacturer of world class NAS servers today expanded their hugely popular Business Series Turbo NAS lineup with the addition of a new 8-drive desktop model, TS-859 Pro+ Turbo NAS. The TS-859 Pro+ incorporates Intel's new D525 dual-core Atom CPU with 1.8GHz clock speed and 1GB RAM, which can achieve up to 116MB/s transfer rates (FTP/Samba reads) while maintaining guaranteed lower power consumption. The Turbo NAS provides up to 16TB of extremely large storage capacity (using 2TB hard drives and single disk volume/JBOD configuration), and is targeted for business users and workgroups who need a tower server to fit in their office environment for backup and sharing of enormous amount of documents, digital pictures, videos, and applications.

Meanwhile, the TS-859 Pro+ has been certified as compatible NFS and iSCSI datastore with fully VMware Ready, Citrix Ready and Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V clusters compliant. QNAP continues its industry-leading iSCSI support for server clustering and virtualized environments including support for MC/S, MPIO, SPC-3, and thin provisioning. With built-in iSCSI initiator and target service, network storage can be virtually expanded by simply adding additional QNAP Turbo NAS units to the network and adding virtual volumes, up to 8 per device.

QNAP Systems, Inc., a leading manufacturer of world class NAS servers today announced the Fall 2010 refresh of its Business Series Turbo NAS servers which are hugely popular with SMB and corporate users for their sheer performance and business-ready features. Announced today are the 2-drive TS-259 Pro+, the 4-drive TS-459 Pro+, the 5-drive TS-559 Pro+, and the 6-drive TS-659 Pro+ with up to a whopping 12TB of online storage (using 2TB hard drives). The new Business Series Turbo NAS Pro+ models incorporate new dual-core Intel Atom processor D525 with 1.80 GHz clock speed and 1GB RAM, which can achieve up to 116 MB/s transfer rates (FTP/Samba reads) while maintaining guaranteed low power consumption.

QNAP Systems, Inc., a leading manufacturer of world class NAS servers, NVR Video Surveillance Systems, and Network-based Video Players today announced the TS-859U-RP Business Series Turbo NAS server enclosure, the most affordable 2U rack-mounted unit with 8 hot-swappable 2.5-inch or 3.5-inch hard disk drives and a redundant power-supply for maximum up-time in corporate and entry-level enterprise datacenters where high performance, high data-availability, and maximum reliability are paramount. QNAP is the only network appliance company to currently offer 8-drive NAS enclosures, and does so in desktop and rack-mounted configurations.

The TS-859U-RP features a dual-core Intel Atom D510 1.66GHz CPU and 1GB DDRII RAM, delivering exceptionally fast performance coupled with ultra-low power consumption that translates into lower total cost of ownership without sacrificing performance. The TS-859U-RP contains two power units. Should one power supply fail, the other will continue to supply the power for the entire system and alert the administrator via email or SMS to the failure. The TS-859U-RP is chock full of advanced networking features including dual Gigabit LAN ports with 7 bonding modes, including failover (if one network port fails, the other LAN port is still active), load-balancing (aggregates the network load to boost transfer speed), multiple-IP settings. The fail-safe dual OS DOM architecture for positive system boot ups, and single, JBOD, RAID 0/1/5/6/5+ hot spare/6+ hot spare with online RAID capacity expansion and online RAID level migration, and RAID recovery. The TS-859U-RP also features iSCSI for business, which allows easy network storage capacity expansion by simply attaching other QNAP Turbo NAS units to the network and establishing virtual volumes, a feature not offered by other competitors currently in this product segment.

QNAP Systems, Inc., a leading manufacturer of world class NAS servers, NVR Video Surveillance Systems, and Network-based Video Players today expanded their popular Business Series Turbo NAS lineup with the addition of a new 5-drive desktop model, the TS-559 Pro. The TS-559 Pro provides up to 10TB of storage (using 2TB hard drives and single disk volume/ JBOD configuration), has been certified as compatible with VMware's vSphere 4 (ESX 4.0) virtualization platform, ideal for departmental file sharing, storage, and advanced server applications in the office environment.

The TS-559 Pro incorporates the Intel Atom D-510 1.66Ghz dual-core processor and includes 1GB of DDRII RAM, delivering exceptional performance and high reliability for multiple concurrent tasks and intensive data transfer with lower power consumption. Businesses of all sizes are able to enjoy the interoperability between VMware virtual machines and QNAP high performance storage to take the advantages of VMware cloud computing environments.

Across generations of its Windows operating systems based on the NT architecture, Microsoft has been courteous enough to pack application compatibility layers that let users run applications in compatibility modes for older versions of the OS. The company seems to be taking this to the next level with Windows 7. The release candidate of the OS slated for April 30, will pack an "XP mode" virtualization feature. The feature quite literally runs a Windows XP environment inside a sandbox complete with support for applications such as Internet Explorer 6, etc.

The environment will work on a virtual machine created by Windows 7. Native Windows XP applications you install in the environment, along with your documents and settings will further be accessible from the host OS. Client variants of Windows 7 may feature a Hyper-V hypervisor that handles applications such as these. The feature makes Windows 7 especially something to look forward to, for those complaining lack of Windows XP features. In short, it's the OS some probably clung onto, and refused to move to Vista, running as an application.

Continuing its momentum and leadership in virtualization technology, Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. today released the first video and images demonstrating live migration across three generations of AMD processors on VMware ESX 3.5, including the Six-Core AMD Opteron processor code-named "Istanbul." Live Migration of virtual machines across physical servers is key to providing superior flexibility for managing today's data centers. Additionally, AMD is highlighting its continued, cooperative development efforts with Microsoft as evidenced in Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V, which is available today as a beta and adds support for AMD-V technology with Rapid Virtualization Indexing. The new 45nm Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor provides scalable performance for both Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V and Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 and has received support from all four global OEMs.

Microsoft Corp. today announced revenue of $15.06 billion for the fiscal quarter ended Sept. 30, 2008, a 9% increase over the same period of the prior year. Operating income, net income and diluted earnings per share for the quarter were $6.00 billion, $4.37 billion and $0.48, respectively.

Microsoft showed particular strength in multiyear annuity sales, which grew more than 20% during the quarter from the combined businesses of Client, Microsoft Business Division and Server and Tools.