HP today extended its HP ProLiant Generation 8 (Gen8) portfolio with new servers that deliver increased performance, simplified maintenance and improved data center uptime.

HP also announced new financial, support and partner programs, including the HP ProActive Insight Architecture Alliance, which brings together some of the world's leading technology companies to eliminate manual maintenance tasks and significantly improve data center efficiency.

Intel Corporation today announced the expansion of the Intel Xeon processor portfolio with new products designed to address a broad and emerging set of server requirements and provide IT managers with additional choice and flexibility.

To offer a range of energy-efficient and affordable solutions for server and workstation customers, the company introduced twenty-eight processors across three product families: eight processors from the Intel Xeon processor E5-4600 product family and nine processors from the Intel Xeon processor E5-2400 product family designed to complement the already available Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 product family. The company also announced availability of eleven processors from the Intel Xeon processor E3-1200 v2 product family.

Dell today announced additions to the PowerEdge portfolio with new blade, rack and tower servers designed to deliver value and performance in demanding enterprise and mainstream environments. The new blade servers offer strong performance gains and improved efficiencies from the shared power, cooling and network infrastructure, and professional IT services. The new tower and rack servers are built to enhance customer IT infrastructures with enterprise-class capabilities and tailored chassis designs for small and midsize businesses.

Dell introduced industry-leading innovations in the PowerEdge 12th generation servers based on input gathered from more than 7,700 customer interactions in 17 countries across four continents. The company was the first-to-ship servers based on the Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 product family with the first wave of PowerEdge 12th generation servers in March 2012.

Dell today announced that customers such as Morphlabs and Vibrant Media are using Dell microserver technologies based on Intel Xeon processors to power business-critical web 2.0, cloud, and content delivery networks (CDN), as well as high-performance computing (HPC) applications. Driven by the emergence of a growing hardware and application ecosystem, x86-based microservers are rapidly evolving from a niche solution to one with widespread awareness and value.

"We're constantly inspired by the unique ways our customers are leveraging Dell microserver platforms to drive specialized web 2.0, HPC and cloud computing applications," said Forrest Norrod, vice president and general manager, Dell Server Solutions. "As the microserver market and ecosystem have matured, customers like Vibrant Media have validated that microservers are a cost-effective, scalable platform in web 2.0 environments."

Applied Micro Circuits Corporation today announced the world's first web server implementation running on a 64-bit ARM v8-compliant processor. This demonstration of an open-source web server application represents another critical milestone for X-Gene, AppliedMicro's "Server-on-a-Chip" solution designed to power next-generation cloud-computing data centers and reduce total cost of ownership (TCO). It also represents the first 64-bit ARM development vehicle for the ecosystem community that will aid in the acceleration of server system development.

Since first announcing X-Gene in October of 2011, AppliedMicro has evolved the initial multi-core server-on-a-chip (SOC) implementation to a full-scale server running real applications. This enables OEMs, ODMs, Cloud Service Providers, Independent Software Vendors and other development partners to conduct early stage performance benchmarking and software development in parallel with silicon development.

Acer America today announced a new commercial offering, the Acer AC100 micro-server. It delivers the latest server-class features and utilities in a compact form factor to suit the needs of small and medium businesses.

Featuring an easy to configure micro-tower enabling quick upgrades, the new Acer AC100 not only reduces the time and costs associated with maintenance, but also provides excellent expandability in its class. In addition to Energy Star certification, it boasts a high-efficiency 200W 80 PLUS power supply, which makes the AC100 more than 80 percent energy efficient at 20, 50 and 100 percent rated loads, reducing electricity use and bills.

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 introduced the Plex Media Server package, which provides selected DiskStation and RackStation users with a complete media solution, hundreds of channels of online content, and the capability to stream the content to user's iOS and Android devices, Windows and Mac computers, and Roku Media Streamers. The Plex media server is developed by Plex.

Plex Media Server package seamlessly streams media content stored in DiskStation and RackStation to various devices, offering users with the convenience of browsing and watching their video collections anytime, anywhere. "We appreciate Plex's effort to develop a package for DiskStation and RackStation users. The Plex Media Server package brings users unified and unsurpassed media experience which is cost effective, flexible, and easy-to-use," said Darren Lin, product manager of Synology Inc.

Hitachi Data Systems Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd., today announced that it has expanded its portfolio of Hitachi Compute Systems with the addition of the new Hitachi Compute Blade 500. The new blade server is the first Hitachi Data Systems product to incorporate the latest Intel Xeon processor E5-2600. The open, flexible architecture and high-performance, high-availability features of Hitachi Compute Blade 500 make it an ideal platform for virtualized infrastructures and demanding cloud applications.

I-O Data unveiled a new USB 3.0 host card (model: USB3-PEX2S), which is designed to be server-grade, with out of the box support for Windows Server, including USB 3.0 SuperSpeed support for Windows 2003, 2003 R2 64-bit/32-bit; Windows 2008, and 2008 R2 64-bit/32-bit. The low-profile capable card provides two USB 3.0 SuperSpeed ports, and appears to be driven by a Renesas-made chipset. It connects to the system bus over PCI-Express 2.0 x1, and draws auxiliary power from a SATA power connector. Slated for market launch in late-April, the USB3-PEX2S from I-O Data is priced at 3,885 JPY (US $48).

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.

LSI Corporation today introduced the Nytro portfolio, a comprehensive family of solutions that combines PCIe flash technology with intelligent caching and management software to achieve accelerated application performance in datacenters and cloud environments.

The amount of data being stored and accessed worldwide is growing at an exponential rate, outpacing the ability of traditional storage architectures to keep up. This creates bottlenecks, throttling application performance and making it harder for companies to extract the full value from data. Nytro solutions allow datacenters to contend with massive data growth and speed the ability of databases and other applications to access data and provide real-time analytics and reporting.

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.

ADATA Technology, a leading manufacturer of high-performance DRAM modules and NAND Flash application products, today launched a new line of DDR3L ECC SO-DIMM server memory modules, boasting low voltage, large densities, and rapid processing capability. They are designed and engineered especially for cloud computing solutions, and can greatly minimize the power consumption of a wide range of network systems.

A new kind of server is becoming increasingly needed for website hosting and mission critical applications. Micro-servers are a new type of server suited for the special workloads of data centers. Starting in the second half of 2009, many large data centers and information service suppliers have begun to use micro-servers. Micro-servers are taking an increasingly important role in small site dedicated hosting, lightweight web serving, and simple content delivery. Many semiconductor manufacturers have announced plans to enter the micro-server market, and are expected to release new low-power processors for use with high density servers.

Worldwide factory revenue for the high performance computing (HPC) technical server market increased by 8.4% in full-year 2011 to reach a record $10.3 billion, up from $9.5 billion in 2010, according to the newly released International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide High-Performance Technical Server QView. The 2011 results exceeded IDC's forecast of 7.2% year-over-year revenue growth.

Unit shipments in 2011 declined 6.9% year over year as average selling prices grew, indicating a continued shift to large system sales. IBM and HP ended the year in a statistical tie for leadership with 32.6% and 32.1% of overall factory revenue market share, respectively. (Note: IDC declares a statistical tie in the worldwide server market when there is less than one percent difference in the factory revenues of two or more vendors.)

Transcend Information, Inc. (Transcend), a worldwide leader in storage and multimedia products, is proud to announce its launch of 16 GB DDR3-1600 Registered DIMM (RDIMM) and 8GB DDR3L-1333 Low Voltage RDIMM modules. Fully compatible with the latest generation of Intel Xeon and Core i7 processors, the cost-effective DDR3 memory modules provide increased memory density and higher performance, while significantly reducing power consumption.

As Transcend's highest density DDR3 module, the 16GB DDR3-1600 RDIMM is constructed with top quality 4 Gb DDR3 1 Gbx4 35nm DRAM chips that deliver stable performance and durability. A single 16 GB memory module can lower power consumption by a staggering 75% compared with using four 4 GB modules, thereby saving energy and costs. The 16GB DDR3 module is rated at 1600 MHz with low latency of 11-11-11-28 and an operating voltage of a mere 1.5V. Offering memory bandwidth up to 12.8 GB/s and the flexibility to expand maximum capacity to 96 GB (per processor), the 16GB DDR3-1600 RDIMM module allows administrators to create a robust infrastructure that runs memory-intensive applications such as virtualization and cloud computing with ease.

AMD today announced the latest solution as part of its ongoing Web/Cloud initiative with the launch of the new AMD Opteron 3200 Series processor. Dedicated Web hosting customers seeking enterprise-class reliability have a new choice that delivers:

- Great value with up to 38% better price performance and up to 19% less power per core than the competition;
- ECC memory and server reliability features at a low price-point;
- Fast hardware payback -- in as few as 7 months hosting fees can cover hardware costs -- up to 14% quicker than with the competition;
- Efficient economics for the Cloud with twice the core density per rack.

Synology Inc. today launched DiskStation DS112j, the most economical, power-saying and quiet 1-bay NAS server designed to serve as users' private cloud and multimedia center.

"Synology DS112j comes at an entry-level price point, but makes no compromise in the richness of features offered by Synology," said Darren Lin, a product manager of Synology Inc. "It is a gateway to Synology's unique cloud services and applications, making it easy for users to keep their data in sync across all their PC, mobile devices and DS112j, and carry terabytes of multimedia files anywhere," Lin added.

OCZ Technology Group, Inc., a leading provider of high-performance solid-state drives (SSDs) for computing devices and systems, today announced that Colfax International will deploy OCZ Z-Drive R4 PCIe SSDs into Colfax's new lines of enterprise servers based on Intel's recently announced dual socket Sandy Bridge-EP platform.

Providing a compact, power-efficient solid-state solution that fits directly into a system's PCI Express (PCIe) slot, OCZ's Z-Drive R4 dramatically increases server application performance while delivering fast and reliable access to data without burdening host CPU and memory resources. OCZ's combination of high-performance, low latency, and high storage capacity make the Z-Drive R4 ideally suited for the new Colfax Sandy Bridge EP-based servers targeted towards demanding enterprise applications that include cloud computing, server virtualization and consolidation, high-performance computing (HPC), and Online Transaction Processing (OLTP).

The design of the E5 Xeon processor is directly related to the vastly growing data center industry as we know it. Oriented toward new cloud-connected features, the Xeon E5 processors will help drive the server and workstation industry like never seen before. E5 processors are offered in three variants: Quad-core, Six-core, and Eight-core chips will help end-users decide what should be utilized for the task in mind.

Intel offers a wide variety of E5 Xeon processors, the E5-2603 quad-core being the low-end of the spectrum, and the E5-2690 eight-core providing high-ranked performance over previous Xeon processors. It is also very important to note power consumption will increase with the capabilities of each chip, but this also creates numerous possibilities for a multitude of configurations. To introduce a more unique experience for each end-user, AVADirect provides over 1000 different combinations of components for configurations that feature the E5 Xeon processors.

QNAP Systems, Inc. today officially launched the next generation of its extremely popular and award-winning Turbo NAS server lineup, the TS-x69 Pro series, and showcased the new NAS Firmware 3.6 and the latest VioStor NVR video surveillance systems.

New TS-x69 Pro Turbo NAS: 220+ MB/s throughput, virtualization ready, USB 3.0 support

The new TS-x69 Pro series, available in 2, 4, 5, 6, or 8-drive versions, are powered by a high performance dual-core Intel Atom processor D2700, equipped with 1 GB DDR3 RAM, and support SATA 6 Gb/s 2.5" and 3.5" HDD, to provide the levels of performance required by SMB users. All models have 2 Gigabit Ethernet ports. "The QNAP lab test statistics reveal that both writing and reading speeds in a Windows environment exceed 220 MB/sec in network trunking mode," commented Laurent Chang, product manager of QNAP.

GIGABYTE introduces its latest dual socket 1U rack server based on Intel's brand new Xeon E5-2600 generation. With the significant computing speed boost brought by these new processors, the GS-R12PE deploys powerful computing capabilities which, coupled together with a large and fast memory platform, makes it an ideal product for cloud computing and speed demanding applications such as finance or oil industries.

With up to 8 cores / 16 threads per socket, TDP up to 135W, cache size increased up to 20MB, increased QPI frequency, and doubled inter-socket QPI links, this new Xeon generation brings a significant increase in computing power for demanding server and datacenter applications.

Puget Systems, a boutique integrator of custom PC systems for enthusiasts, gamers, consumers and SMB markets, today announced availability of Intel Sandy Bridge-E to its line of workstations and servers.

Sandy Bridge-EP incorporates improved memory bandwidth, more PCI-E lanes, and uses Intel's Turbo Boost Technology 2.0, providing even more performance when needed. For more information, a full Sandy Bridge-E technology primer is available from Puget Systems.

NextComputing, a leading manufacturer of portable and small footprint workstations and servers, announces the addition of the Intel Xeon E5-2600 processor product family to its line portable workstations, compact towers, and high-density rack-mount computers. Intel Xeon E5-2600 processors offer up to eight (8) processor cores per CPU, plus leading edge features like PCI Express 3.0. With support for up to two of these processors (16 cores), and multiple PCI Express slots, NextComputing has delivered the industry's highest performance computing platforms in the most compact form-factors available.

ADLINK Technology, Inc., a leading provider of trusted telecom computing products, today announced availability of the aTCA-6200, a next-generation AdvancedTCA (ATCA) processor blade that demonstrates ADLINK's leadership in the development of high performance compute blades with flexible expansion capabilities.

The aTCA-6200 features two 1.8 GHz eight-core Intel Xeon processors E5-2648L, the Intel C604 chipset, DDR3-1600 memory up to 128 GB, and a PICMG mid-size AMC bay. On-card connectivity includes dual 10GBASE-KX4 Fabric Interfaces, dual GbE Base Interfaces, dual front panel GbE egress ports, CFast socket, and quad SAS channels, which provide leading-edge network performance and storage capabilities. The aTCA-6200 is ideal for carrier-grade applications such as media servers in IPTV, IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) broadband networks, and wireless infrastructures, providing telecom equipment manufacturers (TEMs) and network equipment providers (NEPs) with a flexible, cost-effective solution for mission-critical applications and a reliable, smooth path for scalability and expansion.