NAS devices aren't particularly glamorous, nor are they intended to be, just don't tell that Mvix. That's because Mvix's new HDHome NAS box not only looks sharp, it converges home theater, gaming, and home computing into a single box.

"This high-end, comprehensive system fills a void in the market where users demand versatility and system flexibility. Our customers have been asking us for a device where they can store terabytes of their movie collection and have access to it from anyplace, anywhere. HDHome is a response to such a market feedback." Said VP of Business Development, Mike Mallon.

Mvix said the HDHome is targeted primarily at movie buffs and multi-taskers. By leveraging Windows 7 Media Center, HDHome owners are able to browse tons of Internet TV stations, watch Netflix and Hulu, and share media across the home network, Mvix said.

Hardware-wise, Mvix's flagship product comes with an embedded slot-load Blu-ray player, RAID-enabled, hot-swappable HDD bays, Wireless-N, media card slots, HDMI out, TV Tuner, Intel Atom 330 dual-core (S2) or AMD Athlon 4200+ (S4) processor, 2GB (S2) or 4GB (S4) of DDR2-800 memory, Nvidia ION GPU (S2) or ATI 3200HD graphics (S4), and Windows 7 Home Premium.

Pricing starts at $1,000 for the S2 and $1,600 for the S4.

QNAP this week expanded its Business Series Turbo NAS lineup with a pair of new 1u rack-mounted- 4-drive models, the TS-459U-RP and TS-459U-SP.

Both new models offer up to 8TB of storage (using 2TB drives) and have been certified as compatible with VMware's vSphere4 (ESX 4.0) virtualization platform, QNAP said.

"QNAP's commitment to delivering SMB, Corporate, and entry-level Enterprise customers exactly what they need, and nothing they do not shine through with the TS-459U-SP and TS-459U-RP models" said Laurent Cheng, Product Manager of QNAP Systems, Inc. "These new Business Series models provide businesses of all sizes a solid foundation for their network storage needs and a host of business-critical applications."

The RP model includes a redundant power supply, so should one of them fail, the other will keep things running with enough power to juice up the entire system. The SP model includes one power supply, but can be upgraded to the RP configuration.

Both models support RAID 0/1/5/5+ hot spare/6, and JOBD, 256-bit AES volume level encryption, 5 USB ports, 2 eSATA portas, DOM architecture with fail-safe dual OS, scheduled power on/off, Wake on LAN, and other goodies.

Dell is apparently hoping to reach out into the enterprise storage space and has placed a bid to acquire clustered storage vendor Exanet based out of Israel.

"The transaction has not yet been approved by the Israel court, so we won't speculate on its completion or timing," a Dell spokesman said in response to a Computerworld inquiry.

The bid included an offer to purchase Exanet's assets, which are mostly patents, and other intellectual property. The offer must be court approved through a Chapter 7 liquidation in Israel.

Exanet also has offices in New York, Europe, and Japan.

Synology on Wednesday announced the launch of its new five-bay DiskStation DS1010+ scalable NAS box with much improved write times. How much? According to Synology, the new unit cruises past its predecessor, the DS509+, with 250 percent faster writes.

"We recognize that many businesses have the difficult task of anticipating and managing their increasing storage needs while dealing with very limited budgets," says Douglas Self, Product Specialist at Synology America corp. "The new DiskStation DS1010+ addresses these needs while packing in a huge set of business critical features and the flexibility of purchasing five bays now, knowing that scaling to 10 bays is easy and affordable in the future with the DX510."

Synology says businesses can expect an average of 116MB/s or higher read speeds under a RAID 5 configuration in a Windows environment, along with 103MB/s or higher write speeds.

Other features include cross-platform data sharing, Windows ADS support, network and remote backup including Apple Time Machine support, file sharing and encrypted FTP, DLNA media server and photo sharing, and more.

Image Credit: Synology