Tag: NAS

Citrix buys intelligent storage firm

Posted on January 12, 2015 by - News

Citrix HQPrivately owned Sanbolic has been bought by Citrix for an undisclosed amount.
Sanbolic is effectively a company specialising in storage management, whether that be using SSD, flash or hard drives in NAS, SAN, server side or cloud deployments.
The company offers load balancing, application availability and high performance management.
Citrix said it will build the capabilities of Sanbolic into its XenDesktop, XenApp and ZenMobile product suites.
Citrix said the acquisition means that its customers can use virtual apps and VDI across their businesses, guaranteeing workload service level agreements.
It said over 200 of its customers already use Sanbolic to allow availability and clustering of XenApp and XenDesktop.
Momchil Michailov, the CEO of Sanbolic, said that it has 13 years of experience with enterprise customers using server side and converged storage management.
Citrix senior VP Geir Ramleth said the complexities of infrastructure hinder VDI and application delivery deployments. The acquisition of Sanbolic will help Citrix manage the problem head on.  Employees of Sanbolic will now work for Citrix.

QNAP brings AMD NAS to market

Posted on January 12, 2015 by - News

QNAP-tvs873-frontFor a while now AMD has been largely ignored by the makers of NAS x86 gear – who have tended to favour Intel or, more lately,  ARM.

QNAP has become the first vendor to bring an AMD-based x86 NAS to the market and was showing off its wares at CES over the weekend.

Dubbed the TVS-x63 lineup has four, six and eight bay models. Each of them has a four or eight GB of RAM. The 8-bay model also comes with a ‘+’ SKU and a 10GBASE-T NIC pre-installed in the spare PCIe slot. The ‘+’ version comes with either 8 or 16 GB of RAM.

What makes this NAS different from many of the others out there is that QNAP specifies the CPU in the TVS-x63 models as ‘AMD quad-core 2.4 GHz with Radeon Graphics.’ This turns out to be AMD’s GX-424CC SoC.

This 4C/4T Steppe Eagle configuration is based on the Puma microarchitecture and has a TDP of 25 W. The L2 cache is 2 MB in size. The cores run at 2.4 GHz while the integrated Radeon GPU runs at 497 MHz.

This can support DDR3 memory at 1866 MHz. Puma supports out-of-order execution and is expected to turn out a performance similar to Silvermont in the Bay Trail SoCs.

The TVS-x63 has two HDMI outputs to handle multi-media. It supports true 4K output for the UI as well as QvPC. Video playback is restricted to 1080p and the the VCE engine is supported by the firmware, enabling hardware-accelerated transcoding similar to what we saw with the TS-x51 and TS-x53 Pro units that used Quick Sync.

The AMD offering by QNAP is a bit of a surprise and could force a price drop in similar NAS specs in the next few months. This is assuming that Intel’s vendors are beating a path to Intel’s door demanding either a product or a price which matches what AMD has done.

The TVS-863+-8G is expected to retail for $1400 which is really cheap if you take into account that the . 10G port is pre-installed. More basic models cost $1200 for the TVS-863-4G, $1000 for the TVS-663-4G and $800 for the TVS-463-4G.