Category: Products

Brits just want to keep taking the tablets

Posted on November 11, 2013 by - News, Products

Santa CalusIn the buildup to Christmas it seems that the hot item for Santa’s stocking are tablets.

That’s according to nevouchercodes.co.uk, which today reports there’s an 18 percent increase for people searching for tablets.

But the white box buys may not fare so well, because the company says most of the searches are for iPads, Samsung Galaxy tablets and Amazon Kindles.

MD of the company Steve Barnes said that whiole people are searching they’re not buying yet.  Tesco and Argos entering the fray makes tablets more affordable as a gift, he said.

People are also searching for deals on Xbox360s and PlayStation 3s because they’re expecting older models to be discounted in advance of the release of new consoles.

White box tablets make the grade

Posted on November 11, 2013 by - News, Products

ipad3A report said that shipments of unbranded tablets amounted to 25 million in the third quarter of this year.

Digitimes Research said that figure is up by 56.3 percent sequentially and up 40.4 percent year on year.

Most of the shipments went abroad and seven inch screens accounted for most of the growth.

Yet the research outfit believes it won’t be all plain sailing for the white box suppliers because big brands will, and are, offering Android units at prices that compete with the white box units.

Mediatek continues to make progress in the sector, with its chips accounting for 70 percent of application processors.

Sales in Europe and the US of white box units often accompany other bundling deals, but the Chinese manufacturers of the tablets can expect to make headway in Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia and Latin America, according to the research.

Huawei, HGST intro 6TB systems

Posted on November 7, 2013 by - News, Products

huawei-liveHitachi Global Storage Technologies (HGST) and Chinese comms company Huawei said that they will deploy the Ultrastar He6 terabyte helium filled hard drives.

Huawei said that it is one of the first vendors to use the helium filled hard drives.

The use of helium instead of air lets the hard drives reduce shea resistance caused by the platter movement as well as letting standard 3.5-inch drives to include more platters.

Huawei claims that the drives improve capacity density by 87/5 percent, cuts power consumption by 23 percent and reduces temperature by four degrees Celsius.

The advantage of the drives also allows new designs for storage systems and datacentres, Huawei claimed.

Microsoft uses Thales to protect Azure

Posted on November 7, 2013 by - News, Products

clouds3Software giant Microsoft is using Thales’ technology to protect its Rights Management service  – Azure.

Thales said that Microsoft is using its nShield hardware security modules.

Rights management, said Thales, was largely handled by infrastructure within enterprises.  But shifting to a cloud model allows more accessibility and ease of use.

Microsoft thinks that by using an nShield MSM to allow the transfer of individual critical keys more security will be available to companies.

Microsoft partner management Dan Plastina said that because it was working with Thales its customers can generate and upload master keys to a cloud based HSM.

AMD bullies Nvidia with $399 Hawaii card

Posted on November 5, 2013 by - News, Products

radeon-r9-290A few weeks ago AMD introduced its Volcanic Islands products at an event in Hawaii. Most of the line-up were just rebrands, but the flagship R9 290X and R9 290 weren’t. 

The Hawaii cards are based on all new silicon, 6.2bn transistors crammed onto a 28nm die. AMD did not announce the prices at the event, but a couple of weeks later it launched the R9 290X at $549. The price was lower than expected and it forced Nvidia to slash the price of the GTX 780 by $150.

Just as Nvidia countered the R9 290X, AMD decided to make its life miserable once again. The Hawaii Pro version of the card, the R9 290, launched at $399 – making it $100 cheaper than the GTX 780, which went down from $649 to $499 last week.

There is, however, a slight problem for Nvidia. The R9 290 ends up significantly faster than the GTX 780 and in some cases it can even give the $999 GTX Titan a run for its money.
So, the new card is $100 cheaper than what Nvidia has to offer, yet it’s faster. There is one problem though, reviewers report the R9 290 can get very loud, but it seems like a small price to pay considering the price/performance ratio. In addition, it’s only a matter of time before AIB partners come up with non-reference designs, with custom coolers to keep the noise down.

Nvidia was already forced into two price cuts following AMD’s launch. First it slashed the prices of its sub-$199 products to compete with AMD’s rebranded R7-series. Then it slashed the prices of the GTX 780 and GTX 770, only to be undercut by AMD’s new $399 card. Most punters were expecting the R9 290 to end up at ~$449, but like we said last month, AMD had a couple of good reasons to launch it at $399 – and it did.

Nvidia simply doesn’t have much wiggle room left. Perhaps it’s feeling a bit like Guy Fawkes, and hoping bonfire night is merely a damp squib.

The Itanium lives on in HP kit

Posted on November 4, 2013 by - News, Products

HPWe don’t know how many Itanium microprocessors Intel still manufactures in its wafer manufactories.

The chip hasn’t been an Intel runaway success but today HP said it lives on its mission critical HP Nonstop technology for X86 servers.

According to HP, eight of the top 10 world banks use HP Nonstop and now the company is selling Integrity blade servers based on the Itanium 9500 series.

HP is, it said already developing tech to extend Nonstop to the X86 but it willtake several years before adoption, the company said.

Blade systems NB56000c-cg and NB56000c are already available, with prices varying. Resellers should contact their HP account manager for more information.

Ciena tweaks its channel

Posted on November 4, 2013 by - News, Products

CienaThe BizConnect programme from Ciena is being modified.

That’s the message from Nigel Williams, VP of global channels and strategic alliances.

He said in his blog that Ciena is now letting its solution provider partners offer its branded services directly to enterprise customers.

Ciena will provide support, training, lab equipment, evaluations, certifications, customer upsell and other services to its solution providers.

He said Ciena partners from regional VARs to global system integrators wanted to layer branded services combined with equipment sales, and that was the reason for the change.

Notebook market continues to plunge

Posted on October 31, 2013 by - News, Products

notebooksWhile the notebook PC showed sequential growth in the third quarter the news is not good.

That’s according to market research company IHS, which said shipments “plunged” on a year to year basis.

IHS said that mobile PC shipments were 47.9 million worldwide, a rise of six percent from the quarter before. But despite this sequential growth, the market has now shrunk for five consecutive quarters on a year for year basis.

Craig Stice, senior principal analyst at HIS, said: “Amid the onslaught of tablets, the notebook PC market now is desperately seeking any reason for optimism. However, even with a respite from the sequential decline and a few other hopeful developments, the mobile PC business still on track to decline for the full year of 2013.”

He said the global PC market is forecast to fall again this year, repeating its decline in 2012. That was the first decline in 11 years.

Quantum creates channel cloud services

Posted on October 29, 2013 by - News, Products

Clouds in Oxford: pic Mike MageeData management firm Quantum said it has introduced a new channel programme.

The programme – aimed at managed service providers (MSPs) and value added resellers (VARs) offer a cloud back up service using Quantum’s virtual dedupe appliances and vmPro back up software.

The programme uses capacity based, all software subscriptions services which lets VARs and MSPss brand, market and sell Backup as a Service (BaaS).  The offering scales as revenue grows and so Quantum thinks that reduces up front capital hardware expenses.

The programme includes online sales and pre-sales training at no charge; customisable matering material; free access to Quantum software for trial and demonstration and technical and support training.

AMD shakes up high-end GPU market

Posted on October 24, 2013 by - News, Products

radeon-r9-290AMD has lifted the NDA veil off its new flagship Radeon card and the first reviews and products announcements are popping up on the interweb. The press loves the R9 290X. AMD went to great lengths to keep the launch price a secret until the last possible moment, which appears to have been a very good move.

Most observers were expecting the new card to launch with a $599 or even $699 price tag, but it ended up at $549. This sounds like a very good deal as it wipes the floor with Nvidia’s $649 GTX 780 and it can even take on Nvidia’s $999 Titan card in some tests. Clearly Nvidia will have to do something to counter AMD’s launch and it already has a new version of the GTX 780 in the works, but pricing will be a problem and the R9 290X will erode Nvidia’s margins on GK110 products.

As far as specs go, the R9 290X is the first card based on AMD’s new Hawaii GPU. It features GCN 2.0 architecture, 512-bit memory bus, 2,816 shaders and it’s the biggest GPU AMD has ever built. Reviews indicate that performance is not an issue, although the card tends to get hot and loud in AMD’s high performance “Uber” mode. The cooler is not that great, which leaves a lot of room for AIB partners to play around with custom designs.

Another question is the Pro version, or the R9 290. The NDA will reportedly be lifted in a week and there is still no word on the price. The XT-based R9 290X is shaping up to be quite a performer, but the Pro version will offer plenty of performance at a much more attractive price point. However, it is still unclear how AMD plans to price it. At $449 it would be a nice deal, but if AMD really chooses to stick it to Nvidia and sacrifice margin, it might end up at $399, which would be very disruptive.

Nvidia has already reduced the prices of its sub-$199 cards to counter AMD’s rebranded R7 and R9 series products. Now it remains to be seen how low it can go and it won’t be easy – Nvidia’s GK110 GPU has about a billion transistors more than AMD’s Hawaii, which makes it quite a bit more expensive to produce, yet it ends up slower in most versions.

See Also
AMD declares war on Nvidia

Dell Precision M3800 workstation raises the bar

Posted on October 23, 2013 by - News, Products

Dell logoDell has rolled out a new Dell Precision mobile workstation and it’s a very interesting piece of kit. Dell claims the new M3800 is the world’s lightest and thinnest workstation, which is hard to dispute as it weighs in at just 4.15 pounds and it’s a mere 18mm thick.

But the really good stuff is under the bonnet. It features a 15.6-inch IPS display with a staggering 3200×1800 resolution, or 205 pixels per inch. Only the Samsung ATIV Book 9 Plus and Lenovo’s new Yoga 2 Pro offer such a resolution on a Windows machine. The screen is tucked away under a sheet of Gorilla Glass and it has five-finger multitouch support.

dell-m3800

It’s got the brains to back it up, too. It is powered by an Intel Core i74702HQ processor and Nvidia’s Quadro K1100M professional GPU. It can be configured with up to 16GB of DDR3 and there’s no shortage of storage options, as it has two standard 2.5-inch bays and a mini-card SSD option.

The M3800 goes on sale November 14 in the US, with prices starting at $1,799. Not exactly cheap, but similarly specced products from Lenovo and Samsung don’t come cheap, either.

Partners line up to give MS an 8.1 gong

Posted on October 17, 2013 by - News, Products

windowscomputexWindows 8.1 goes on general release today as a free upgrade for people with Windows 8, and it will also be on new Wintel machines worldwide too.

As we reported from Computex earlier this year, Microsoft was essentially forced to re-institute the start button and to make other improvements following a more than lukewarm welcome from the channel and from end users at launch.

Microsoft has a partner blog, here, and according to The Final Step, to CCS Media and to Centrix software. James Hardy, at CCS Media says: “I genuinely believe that Windows 8 offers more in a touch device that can be found anywhere else on the market. Windows 8.1…. provides IT departments with the ability to customise devices to suit the needs of their business.”

We’d be interested to hear from other partners what they believe to be true about Windows 8.1 – we suspect that not all of them are going to be quite so gung ho about the upgrade as the three companies listed above.

Hitachi improves its cloud services

Posted on October 15, 2013 by - News, Products

cloud 1Hitachi Data Services (HDS) said that it has introduced private cloud services and other improvements.

The private cloud services include consulting and transition services to companies and a cloud automation suite to its Unified Compute Platform, reference architectures with Cisco and data security capabilities for its Unified Storage.

The company said that the private cloud services use an open architecture with storage, compute and network layers; APIs; open interfaces; portals and global services.

It claims that using its private cloud services will bring customers savings, and is up 70 percent faster to deploy than traditional approaches.

HDS costs the materials by a pay-per-use model driven by service levels and including all hardware, software and services.

Salesforce integrates multiple IDs

Posted on October 15, 2013 by - News, Products

Salesforce_Logo_2009Giant CRM company Salesforce said it has released a service connecting employees, customers and partners to any app on any device.

Called Salesforce Identity, the service is intended to make accessing data universally, wherever it is stored.

The company said that the service lets firms create a connected app and strategy, which can then be managed from a central location.

The service includes a single sign on, authorisation identities for mobile devices for Salesforce CRM and custom applications built using its Platform Mobile Services.

It also lets social collaboration be built into a system, including Facebook and Google. Pricing starts at $5 per user a month, including single sign on, mobile identity, cloud directory, multi-factor authentication and other services.

Argos takes on Tesco with tablet

Posted on October 14, 2013 by - News, Products

Argos MyTabletRetail outlet and online firm Argos has launched the MyTablet for less than £100 – in a bid to challenge Tesco’s recent tablet introduction, the Hudl.

The seven inch unit comes with pre-loaded games and apps and also includes an Argos app so you can shop for items including, er, tablets.

The unit has a 1024×600 LCD, and 8GB of memory – but you can expand the memory to 32GB using a Micro SD card. The processor is a 1.6GHz dual core chip, while the OS is Google’s Android Jelly Bean 4.2.2.

Argos said the unit is aimed at teenagers and has built in parental controls. It comes in pink or silver colours. The unit has two megapix camera and a front facing camera. It supports wi fi and Bluetooth and apps pre-loaded include the BBC iPlayer, Angry Birds, an e-book reader, Facebook and Twitter.

The unit goes for sale tomorrow from argos.co.uk and argos.ie, as well as the 700 shops it has in the UK and Ireland.

Nermin Hadjarbegovic, our Bosnian reported:: “This is just a publicity stunt.”