AlmaLinux has dropped its aim to be 1:1 compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and will instead target application binary interface (ABI) compatibility.

The move follows Oracle’s announcement of a way forward for its own distribution which, while critical of IBM and Red Hat’s decision to restrict access to RHEL source code, will also result in a loss of binary compatibility.

The company insisted that the decision would mean “very little change in [customers’] use of AlmaLinux”. 

It also said that Red Hat-compatible applications would continue to run and the security updates would continue to flow.

However, by dropping the binary compatible aim it is difficult to see how a guarantee of all compatible applications continuing to run can be made, even with the ABI promise. 

AlmaLinux also noted that users might also encounter bugs not in Red Hat, but not being bound to Red Hat’s release cycle means the distro can release fixes as expeditiously as it needs to.

What is application binary interface compatibility?

While 1:1 binary compatibility of the operating system is achieved through use of the source code - something Red Hat is discouraging through its restrictions - ABI refers to how an application works with the underlying operating environment.

Red Hat defines ABI as “a set of runtime conventions that interact with a compiled binary representation of a program”.

Applications that are ABI-compatible should therefore continue to work on AlmaLinux. However, applications that are not - or make use of features outside of the ABI - might not function correctly. 

It is also worth noting that at this point, ABI compatibility is presently an aim. As AlmaLinux says itself: “ABI compatibility in our case means working to ensure that applications built to run on RHEL - or RHEL clones - can run without issue on AlmaLinux”.

What does this mean for customers?

The fate of RHEL clones such as AlmaLinux has been in the balance since Red Hat’s decision to restrict access to the RHEL source. 

Today’s announcement by AlmaLinux, and the earlier Oracle post, is an indicator that if a customer needs full RHEL binary compatibility, then a Red Hat subscription will likely be required.

Alternatives, such as Rocky Linux, still exist and intend to make use of UBI container images and leverage pay-per-use cloud instances in order to obtain the source and maintain 1:1 compatibility. 

However, observers such as Matt Yonkovit, head of open source strategy at Scarf, told ITPro that Red Hat would likely find a way to close the loophole being exploited by Rocky Linux.

What has the reaction been?

The user community has mostly reacted positively to the news, mainly due to the removal of uncertainty over what AlmaLinux would do to deal with Red Hat’s decision. However, while there is empathy for AlmaLinux’s position, some users regarded the dropping of 1:1 compatibility as a “blow”.

“As much as I like Alma, the whole point of installing it for me was to be 1:1 with the RHEL I support at work. Warts and all.”

Another described AlmaLinux’s decision as “a very well thought out response to the changes”.

The furor surrounding Red Hat’s decision to restrict access to RHEL sources is set to continue despite the clarification given by AlmaLinux thanks to the differing approaches taken by distributions seeking to fill the space left by CentOS.

Dell Technologies and Nvidia have jointly announced the Project Helix initiative to help businesses create and deploy their own on-premise generative AI models.

Both companies will work together to provide “a series of solutions” aimed at enterprises to help use their proprietary data to enhance the value of AI models, all while protecting their data privacy.

Assistance provided through the new offering will span the complete AI journey, from modeling to deployment and fine-tuning results, with Dell providing optimized hardware and software to support this at every stage.

Nvidia’s tested AI Enterprise software will come included with Project Helix, including its more than 100 development tools, frameworks, and pre-trained models.

“This is a full-stack solution that enables enterprises to create and run custom AI models built with their knowledge of their business,” said Chuck Whitten, co-COO at Dell Technologies.

“Our powerful infrastructure and software, Nvidia’s accelerators, AI software, and expertise; this is unmatched, second to none in the industry.”

Whitten pointed to existing Dell hardware that can tackle heavy generative AI workloads such as the PowerEdge XE9680 server. 

This contains eight of Nvidia’s H100 GPUs which comprise the core infrastructure on top of which customers can make use of Dell’s server and storage software.

The pair will work to promote on-prem AI, in contrast to the current dominance of public cloud and hyperscaler dominance in AI.

In recent months, Microsoft and Google have established market leadership with their respective chatbots and AI productivity tools.

“Enterprises are working to deploy these models and workloads on-prem to make full use of their data,” said Jensen Huang, CEO at Nvidia. 

“If you think about how they drive better insight and better outcomes from their business, they're looking at ‘I need the context of my business with this data, with these models and tools to really drive faster insights to my business’. They have to do it on-prem because that's where their data is.

“And they have to do it close to the edge because that’s the speed of light, and you want it to respond instantaneously. But you also want it to be at the edge because, in the future, you want to have information from multiple modalities. 

“The more contextual information we get, the better grounded and better inference we can make.”

The announcement was made during the day-two keynote at Dell Technologies World 2023 in Las Vegas, after having been heavily teased by Dell CEO Michael Dell throughout the events of the first day.

In a discussion with ITPro, John Roese, global chief technology officer at Dell Technologies, said that the company is in a prime position to advise customers on how to navigate AI uptake, and emphasized that Helix’s turnkey structure lets customers deploy tools with built-in safety.

“Many larger and midmarket companies will want to run generative AI in their own on-premises data centers, to ensure security for their proprietary data,” Laurie McCabe, cofounder and partner at SMB Group Inc., told ITPro.

“Project Helix gives them a system that’s optimized for this, so they don’t have to piece everything together – helping them to take advantage of generative AI more quickly and efficiently.”

Flexibility has been a core tenet throughout the conference, with cloud choice having been a key factor in Dell Technologies’ massive Apex expansion, and this approach applies to Project Helix too.

“There will be a lot of flexibility for customers that are looking to figure out what models to use,” said Varun Chhabra, SVP ISG and telecom marketing at Dell Technologies.

“Helix will come with foundational models that are provided and developed by Nvidia, if customers want to use that. Customers will also have the choice flexibility to be able to pick an open-source model of their own choice.

“Once these foundational models have been identified by the customer Helix will help them tune that model with their own proprietary, high-value data sets.”

Chhabra noted that the majority of customers will start with a foundational model, whether this is one included as part of Helix or an open-source model, but that the initiative will provide the flexibility for either to be easily trained on a business’ data.

Dell has stated that its Validated Designs based on Project Helix will become available in July 2023.

Data platform company Splunk has filed a lawsuit against rival Cribl, alleging that its CEO and other employees stole source code and technical secrets for its own advantage.

Splunk alleged that former employee Clint Sharp, who left the company in 2017, took code without permission that he then used when he co-founded Cribl the same year.

Additionally, it claims that since its formation Cribl has illegally sourced technical documents from outgoing Splunk employees in order to undermine the company.

“Mr Sharp founded Cribl using code he intentionally and unlawfully took from Splunk when he was a Splunk employee without a licence or permission to do so,” read the complaint.

“Since that time, Cribl and Mr Sharp have recruited numerous Splunk employees to Cribl, and have systematically encouraged employees to take Splunk’s confidential technical and business documents with them. In turn, Cribl has used the information it misappropriated to compete unfairly against Splunk.”

In a blog post, Splunk alleges that it attempted to settle the matter privately, but that this was unsuccessful. It characterises Cribl’s actions as a “coordinated campaign of misappropriation” and claims that the company used Splunk’s Technology Alliance Partner (TAP) programme to further its theft.

After launching in 2017, Cribl joined the TAP program, an agreement that allows partners to add to Splunk’s Enterprise platform, through the use and limited copying of Splunk software.

However, the TAP program agreement states that partners may only use the software to demonstrate the use of extensions with the software and to develop extensions further. Using copies of the software to determine source code would constitute a violation of the terms of agreement.

"The allegations in Splunk’s lawsuit are false, and we will defend against these baseless claims," Cribl stated in a blog post.

"We have built interoperability using our own hard work and open source implementations, such as Eventgen. While Splunk tries to stifle competition through litigation, we will keep our relentless focus on our customers to give them choice and control over their data."

Splunk has requested an injunction against Cribl, Clint Sharp and all associated Cribl entities, from further infringing Splunk copyrights. It has also requested an accounting of the profits that Cribl has made from the activity and subsequent damages. The company has requested a trial by jury.

"Proving infringement of copyright in source code, as Splunk is alleging here, tends to be difficult," said Michael Buckworth, founder at UK law firm Buckworths. "A former employee would be incredibly foolish to use a carbon copy of code he has misappropriated; rather he would likely recode the software to deliver substantially similar functionality.

"New code achieving the same outcome as existing code is unlikely to infringe copyright in existing code leaving the damaged party to look at patent infringement or breach of contractual obligations," he added.

"Splunk may believe that they can prove each allegation that they have made with the result that they could secure significant damages from Cribl, or even have it shut down.

"Alternatively, this may be a strategic move to dry up investment and other financial support in Cribl. There is nothing that will turn off investors more than a high-profile IP dispute! Either way both parties will now need to prove their position and live with significant costs if they fail.”

Splunk operates in more than 21 regions internationally, providing customers with a suite that provides oversight over their data and allows them to conduct big data analytics. It also aims to improve observability across multi-cloud environments. Last year it announced a new cloud security suite in addition to its other offerings.

Cribl supplies data management solutions to its customers, aiming to provide data flexibility and stack observability. Its service Cribl Stream is used by DevOps engineers and other industry professionals in order to process data in real time, supply context to data, and encrypt sensitive fields.

IT Pro has approached Splunk for comment.

This article has been updated to include a statement from Cribl.

Cloud computing firm Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has announced, with immediate effect, the appointment of Matt Harris to the role of UK managing director.

Harris will take on the management of HPE’s enterprise products and services, UK operations, and more than 2,000 staff across London, Reading, Manchester, Bristol and Glasgow.

He will assume the role from Marc Waters, who has been in place since 2016 and oversaw changes such as the company’s new partner program for XaaS practices. Waters will be staying with HPE as the senior vice president of UK, Middle East, Africa and High-Performance Computing EMEA.

Having worked at HPE for 18 years, Harris has a breadth of experience in areas ranging from the public sector to accounts of global firms. After graduating with a BA in Economics & Business from Newcastle University, Harris began work for HPE as an intern in 2004.

In 2013, he joined the UK leadership organisation, where he held roles such as UK sales manager for storage and UK general manager for servers. Since 2018, he has held the role of UK chief sales officer as well as vice president of hybrid IT infrastructure.

In 2020, he spoke at an IT Pro panel about on-premise hardware, while leading the hybrid IT infrastructure group to develop solutions in emerging markets including artificial intelligence (AI), IoT and big data.

“I’m delighted to take the leadership of a business that I have called home for 18 years and at a time when HPE’s edge-to-cloud portfolio is better positioned than it has ever been,” said Harris in a statement.

“In a dynamic environment here in the UK, HPE has never been more relevant as we support organisations across all sectors find solutions that help them move forward. I believe strongly that the tech sector has a huge role to play in solving challenges for humanity and business. I am 100% focused on making HPE a great place to work, and a great business partner, as well as advancing HPE’s core purpose – to advance the way people live and work.”

Speaking of his successor, Waters said that “Matt is both an exceptional leader and a good friend who truly understands HPE.”

“He is highly regarded by our people, our customers and our partners so I am absolutely delighted to confirm him as our new UK Managing Director.”

Oracle has acquired the digital medical records business Cerner for $28.3 billion (£21.4 billion), with plans to use the company as an anchor asset into the healthcare sector.

The enterprise software company made the purchase through an all-cash tender offer for $95 per share and the transaction is expected to close in 2022. Oracle expects Cerner to be a huge additional revenue growth engine for years to come as the company expands the acquired business into many more countries throughout the world.

Cerner is a leading provider of digital information systems used within hospitals and health systems to enable medical professionals to deliver better healthcare to individual patients and communities. Oracle said the company has over four decades of experience in modernising electronic health records, improving caregiver experience, and streamlining and automating clinical and administrative workflows.

The two companies are hoping to transform healthcare delivery by providing professionals with better information, hoping this will help them make better treatment decisions resulting in better patient outcomes. Cerner systems will run on the Oracle Gen2 Cloud, with the goal being to deliver zero unplanned downtime in the medical environment.

As Cerner systems will run on the Oracle database, only specifically authorised medical professionals will be able to access patient data. IT professionals running the systems will be unable to look at patient data too.

“With this acquisition, Oracle’s corporate mission expands to assume the responsibility to provide our overworked medical professionals with a new generation of easier-to-use digital tools that enable access to information via a hands-free voice interface to secure cloud applications,” said Larry Ellison, chairman and chief technology officer at Oracle.

“This new generation of medical information systems promises to lower the administrative workload burdening our medical professionals, improve patient privacy and outcomes, and lower overall healthcare costs.”

Cerner will be organised as a dedicated Industry Business Unit within Oracle and will be its anchor asset to expand into healthcare. Oracle also intends to maintain and grow Cerner’s community presence in the Kansas City area, while utilising Oracle’s global footprint to reach new geographies faster.

“Joining Oracle as a dedicated Industry Business Unit provides an unprecedented opportunity to accelerate our work modernizing electronic health records (EHR), improving the caregiver experience, and enabling more connected, high-quality and efficient patient care,” said David Feinberg, president and chief executive officer at Cerner.

Last week there were rumours that Oracle was in talks to acquire Cerner, for around $30 billion. The deal could give Oracle massive volumes of health data for its artificial intelligence services and be Oracle’s largest acquisition ever, as well as one of the biggest takeovers of 2021.

Celona and NTT have signed a new pact to bring private 5G solutions to enterprises.

NTT’s industrial-grade 5G wireless network connects onsite teams and devices with the cloud. According to NTT, its 5G service complements digital transformation goals set by chief information officers and chief digital officers.

Per the new deal, Celona will contribute to NTT’s Private 5G (P5G) service. Through network and policy automation, Celona will help simplify large-scale 5G deployments. The Celona-NTT partnership is also aimed at securing device and application network segmentation within organizations.

Businesses will also benefit from a standardized, centrally managed global implementation that offers shared and licensed private spectrum options. Additionally, users can leverage NTT’s software-defined operational model to measure and monitor key performance indicators.

“Enterprises are looking to leverage Celona’s 5G LAN solution-as-a-service globally at scale,” said Rajeev Shah, Celona co-founder and CEO.

“By partnering with NTT to deliver the P5G platform, we can offer clients secure mobile connectivity with wire-like predictability and world-class performance. Together, we’re setting an industry benchmark for unlocking new applications for the future of digital business initiatives.”

NTTVC, an independent venture capital firm formed in partnership with NTT, spearheaded the Celona and NTT collaboration to deliver P5G.

“At NTTVC, our strategy is to help startups harness the Power of Partnership to take their business to new heights,” said Vab Goel, founding partner of NTTVC.

Goel continued, “When we invested in Celona, we knew there was a huge opportunity for us to open doors within NTT for the co-creation of innovative new service offerings. P5G is a shining example of what is possible when we help our portfolio companies tap into NTT's impressive ecosystem.”

Future Technologies and Intel have developed an Innovation Center in Atlanta, Georgia to aid enterprises in their digital transformation efforts.

The lab connects all facets of technology, including connectivity (LoRa, Wi-Fi 6, 4G, 5G, CBRS, Fiber, Facebook Terragraph 60 GHz, BLE) and computing (cloud, edge, hybrid).

According to the founding members, the Innovation Center “will provide a working environment to ideate, create and test next-generation use case solutions” that address technologically complex problems and allows the comparison of multiple connectivity and industrial solutions under real-world conditions. The facility also includes network monitoring and simulation tools for testing bandwidth, latency, RF interference, and more.

Intel VP and GM of 5G network business incubation Caroline Chan stated, “The utilization of private networks and edge computing across a diverse set of use cases is gaining momentum across a variety of industries. Intel is proud to be a founding member of Future Technologies Innovation Center. We believe that this innovation center will be vital to bring together the many partners, ensure interoperability, and showcase real-world implementations as we continue to drive private networks momentum into production.”

Future Technologies’ six-step engagement protocol that includes business case review, technology demo, customer field demo, proof of concept, deployment, and SLA support ensures clients can visualize and customize their use cases.

The firm also created a partner ecosystem to help the Innovation Center adapt to clients’ individual needs. Notable use cases include remote expert, internet of things (IoT) in a box, computer vision, and asset health. The facility will grow to include mobile robotics, drones, and push-to-talk, among other automation solutions.

The Innovation Center is also backed by Cambium Networks, Tecore Networks, Nokia, Megh Computing, Librestream, and KCF Technologies.

“We have made a significant investment into the Innovation Center to help provide a working environment for our clients to ideate and solve their complex problems,” said Peter Cappiello, Future Technologies CEO.

“We believe that this combination of a physical industrial type of facility, the enabling technologies and our thought leadership will provide differentiated value to our clients as they innovate to build efficiency and scale into their digital transformation.”

Nokia has announced a slew of new features for its Nokia Digital Automation Cloud (DAC) private wireless networking platform, including simplified integration with Microsoft Azure IoT modules.

Nokia's new approach to software installation, described as ‘click and deploy’, means that Microsoft Azure IoT Edge Modules such as Modbus can now be deployed on the Nokia DAC edge server.

The announcement comes almost a year after Nokia and Microsoft made their first joint solutions public. In November 2019, the two companies announced a strategic collaboration aiming to accelerate transformation and innovation with the help of cloud, artificial intelligence (AI), and the Internet of Things (IoT).

BT was the first global telecommunications service provider to provide its enterprise customers with a managed service integrating Microsoft Azure cloud and Nokia SD-WAN solutions.

According to Stephan Litjens, general manager of Nokia Digital Automation: "Microsoft Azure IoT services enable customers to address interconnected scenarios across multiple industries that include manufacturing, logistics, utilities, smart cities and transportation".

The Finnish tech giant also announced that it would be extending platform capabilities complementing private wireless connectivity as well as providing new, integrated voice and video in order to facilitate campus-wide communications.

"With the new functionality and added value features introduced today, we further ease and accelerate customers’ transformation path towards Industry 4.0", said Litjens.

Nokia’s DAC team comms and DAC VoIP will now offer voice and video solutions to provide customers with secure communication, regardless of how many people they are speaking to. The new on-premise applications are delivered over the platform’s scalable edge cloud and are expected to be especially useful for larger, asset-intensive locations such as ports, mines, and factories.

Nokia DAC Applications head Tuuli Ahava said that the new features will "address the questions facing organizations as they begin to implement Industry 4.0 use cases”.

"Data security, backward and forward compatibility, legacy system integration, ecosystem access, and ease-of-use are just some of the concerns that the DAC platform resolves in one optimized solution," she added.

The announcement follows the launch of Nokia’s 5G SA private wireless network, which is used by Lufthansa Technik, Toyota Production Engineering, and Sandvik.

Aruba recently announced a new suite of workplace solutions to address three post-coronavirus work scenarios: returning to the office, working remotely and the office reimagined.

Aruba claims AI-powered, cloud-native networking solutions its empowering organizations as they accelerate business recovery and implement touchless solutions in response to the pandemic.

To assist businesses as they return to the office, Aruba will release contact- and location-tracing tools for its existing infrastructure customers based on Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, and the company has also partnered with Envoy to enable pre-registration, automated host notification and auto-generated Wi-Fi credentials for visitors.

Additionally, Aruba plans to team up with its technology partners to provide contactless solutions for measuring the forehead temperature of groups of employees and visitors simultaneously.

For remote workers, Aruba Remote Access Points will provide workers with secure remote access to critical resources. Meanwhile, Aruba Virtual Intranet Access VPN will ensure secure connectivity to laptops, phones and tablets for remote workers.

“For too long organizations have treated working locations as a binary choice – we’re either assigned to an office or are remote workers. The current requirement to work remotely has blown the doors open for a new hybrid workplace reality that experience designers and technologists alike need to account for in the future. A comfortable, secure and reliable work-from-home setting will be a key requirement for this new era,” said Ryan Anderson, VP of digital innovation for Herman Miller.

Post-coronavirus, Aruba anticipates businesses will also be reimagining their office setups altogether. “Moving forward, organizations are considering lasting changes in office layout and frequency of employee visits that are more on-demand and modular than ever before. This type of next-generation space poses challenges to traditional networking and security infrastructure intended for a static work environment,” the company claims.

To assist businesses as they move forward with this reimagining, Aruba has partnered with Herman Miller to release Embracing a New Reality: Workplace Strategy Insights for COVID-19 and Beyond.

To get the inside scoop on these new tools from Aruba, check out Aruba Atmosphere Digital on June 9.

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Intel and the Intel logo are trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries in the U.S. and/or other countries.

An enterprise cloud is IT infrastructure designed to meet your company's IT needs for both traditional enterprise applications and next-generation cloud applications. It combines the agility and simplicity of public cloud with the predictable costs and control of on-premises infrastructure.

This guide explains the idea of enterprise cloud, details many of the capabilities of Nutanix Enterprise Cloud, and explains the advantages that Nutanix delivers for solution areas including business-critical applications, messaging and collaboration, server virtualization and private cloud, Big Data and cloud-native apps, and virtual desktop infrastructure

For the modern enterprise, there are few apps as heavily relied upon as the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) suite. In most cases, this is likely provided by Salesforce, although other good options are increasingly appearing on the market.

Helping keep track of customers, ensuring a business is proactively attentive to their needs, and providing a way to interact with users all in one place is something all businesses can, and should, benefit from.

At its core, CRM suites combine tech, processes, and data to gain a deep understanding of customer behaviors, preferences, and needs. Salesforce and other CRM makers can help with everything from automating routine tasks to aligning sales and marketing efforts.

CRM definitely isn’t the sexiest of industries and apps, but it ranks as one of the most vital, especially for a business that wants to successfully scale without leaving customers feeling that things used to be better and more engaged. Given their power, some CRM systems can be confusing to navigate and difficult to understand.

What is Customer Relationship Management (CRM)?

In a nutshell, a CRM suite helps a business track all communications with their customers (whether cold, warm, or hot leads), to help understand how their relationship is developing.

The software includes details about the person in question, what kind of relationship the company has with the individual, notes about their lifestyle that could be used as conversation starters, who in the business owns the relationship, how the organization may be able to solve their challenges, and so on. If that seems like a lot, it’s because it is: CRM software is very complex and powerful, a single tool capable of work that would have required a full team just a decade ago.

Customers in 2024 are increasingly expecting a more tailored service, whether they're buying from a large corporation or small business, and a CRM will provide the information and insight to be able to sell more effectively, making communication more likely to result in a sale or the retention of a customer.

Typically, a CRM system requires a database and a large amount of storage to hold customers' information, and can also include communication channels and track and store business-client conversations. Many big companies will pay hundreds of thousands to build out their databases, pay for CRM, and harness the insights.

How does CRM change business processes?

At a basic level, CRM works by collecting and organizing customer information from various sources (think: emails, social media, phone calls), which is then stored in a centralized system, where it can be accessed by sales, marketing, customer service, and other teams.

The system helps businesses understand customer needs, personalize interactions, and manage relationships, while also automating routine tasks, like sending follow-up emails. To your customer, it will seem like your employees are working over-time.

Automation

Automation is a key component of a CRM suite. Tasks like sending automated emails, scheduling follow-ups, and updating customer records are managed without manual input, thus saving your employees time and removing repetitive work. For example, the sales teams can use CRM to automatically move prospects through the sales funnel, triggering actions based on certain criteria configured when setting up the CRM.

As you might imagine, AI – or perhaps more accurately Machine Learning (ML) – is a big focus of Salesforce, with its Einstein AI, and other CRM makers at the moment. AI can analyse customer data to predict behaviors, segment audiences, and recommend actions, such as which customers are most likely to make a purchase and then suggest offers specific to each customer. Human oversight is still needed to ensure AI doesn’t misunderstand or make mistakes, but the ability to analyse data en-masse is powerful for businesses of all sizes.

Analytics

Analytics is also a big part of any CRM suite, given the fact that it has already digested a huge amount of data to work. Most CRM software will be able to generate insights into customer behaviors, sales trends, and campaign effectiveness, as well as many other areas specific to your business. The resulting reports can then be matched with KPIs.

Efficiency

Paper-based customer records are incredibly inefficient and almost impossible to quickly search through or to derive quick insights from. CRM, on the other hand, makes looking after clients and selling to them much easier, helping businesses prioritize what they contact those customers about. To do so involves monitoring clients' historical transactions, the types of products they have enquired about, and even any adverts that they have clicked on. All of this information builds up a customer profile that businesses can use to personalize their communications.

Customers could end up feeling neglected if firms bombard them with irrelevant messages and products. Drawing on data taken from customer interactions, CRM platforms ensure that each customer's experience is tailored to them when they access company websites, contact customer services, or want to keep up to date via social media.

Centralization

That said, CRM isn't just a system that lets companies improve sales channels. CRM also offers a central hub where they can manage processes across the business. Many CRM services can handle human resources (HR), marketing, finance, and supply chain management. SAP, for example, offers software that brings together business departments.

Without CRM, employees typically end up spending more time trying to generate business leads, close deals, and maintain client relationships. By investing in this tech, companies can speed up these processes and focus their attention on less mundane tasks. They can identify and target new customers, too. Many CRM platforms work with third-party services such as MailChimp and Google Apps, further boosting productivity.

Pros and cons of CRM software

As with all technology, leaders need to assess what is right for their business and what investments will help them achieve their objectives.

Pros

In one fell swoop, getting a CRM suite is very likely to improve your customer relationships while reducing the amount of work your outward-facing staff have to complete. Timely emails, automatic promotions based on user activity, and the ability to track a client relationship over months and years from one dashboard is a potential game changer.

Automation features – which most top CRM suites have – streamline routine tasks, such as data entry, follow-ups, and reporting, to help your team focus on high-value activities like strategy and relationship building.

CRM systems can also help grow your business, and can be customized to fit individual needs, making it a scalable solution as your customer base expands.

Cons

CRM software can be expensive, especially for smaller businesses that are just getting started, or even mid-size businesses. There are costs associated with buying, implementing, and maintaining the system, and there may also be fees for subscriptions, customization, and training.

Implementing a CRM system will require a handful of employees and could easily take a long time, especially if the source data – i.e. the data on customers, clients, and so on – isn’t in an easily readable format. Your staff could also face a steep learning curve unless you hire someone with previous CRM experience, which is likely to be expensive.

Data centralization also carries its own risks: putting everything about your clients and customers in one place makes the job of a malicious actor much easier if they were to breach your system. An over-reliance on these systems may cause issues down the line, too, and especially if your CRM software goes down for any length of time.

Overall, CRM is fairly easy to adopt, and many of the top vendors offer incentives for companies looking to make the switch. We’ve written extensively about how CRM can help businesses, from reducing the workload of employees to keeping track of thousands (or tens of thousands) of customers - without your hair going grey.

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Network-attached storage (NAS) appliances are the ideal solution for growing businesses facing a storage crisis. They offer a cost-effective, high-capacity storage solution that provides your teams with fast local access to data and can easily grow with you as demand increases.

Cloud storage is a natural contender for these duties, but once you take into account their regular monthly fees, these services can become very expensive over the long term – especially if you’re using them to store increasingly large amounts of data. It’s true that NAS appliances represent a much higher initial spend, but on-going costs will be comparatively insignificant.

They are also more versatile than cloud storage as they provide a ready-made repository for on-site server and workstation backup and won’t be impacted by internet and service outages. You don’t have to worry about a cloud provider’s ‘shared responsibility model’ either, as moving storage in-house means you have total control over all aspects of security and data governance.

There is a huge range of NAS appliances on today’s market with capacities to match every demand and prices to suit all budgets. We’ve lab-tested and reviewed plenty of them over the past 12 months, and in this guide, we reveal our favorite models.

Best NAS drives 2026

Best known for its classy PC accessories and power chargers, Ugreen is also making a name for itself in the NAS market with a family of six desktop appliances. The 6-bay NASync DXP6800 Pro is incredibly well built, but what lies beneath its sleek aluminium shell is even more interesting as it’s powered by a 10-core Intel Core i5-1235U mobile CPU and comes with 8GB of DDR5 memory upgradeable to 64GB. 

Port choices are equally impressive as it sports pairs of 10GbE multi-Gigabit, 40GbE Thunderbolt 4 (TB4), USB-A 3.2, and USB-A 2, an integral SC4 card reader, and an HDMI 2 port to pipe video from the CPU’s integrated Iris Xe Graphics chip. There are no restrictions on storage, so you can use any hard disk or SSD you want, and it also has dual M.2 NVMe SSD slots underneath for use as a storage pool or cache.

NAS performance over 10GbE is quite respectable, with a share mapped to a Dell Windows server returning sequential read and write rates of 8.9Gbits/sec and 6.8Gbits/sec. Ugreen’s UGOS software has also benefitted from a steady development program as it now offers 31 apps, including a hypervisor, IP SANs, and a snapshot manager.

The NASync DXP6800 Pro is a powerful business NAS solution, and although the UGOS software can’t match the likes of Synology and Qnap for app choices, Ugreen is steadily catching up. Businesses that want a superbly built NAS with dual 10GbE and TB4 ports simply won’t find a more affordable solution elsewhere.

Price: Diskless, £742 excluding VAT

Read our full Ugreen NASync DXP6800 Pro review for more information.

NAS appliances are perfect candidates as backup vaults, and none do it better than Synology’s ActiveProtect DP7400. Targeting mid-sized businesses and enterprises, this PBBA (purpose-built backup appliance) delivers unified data protection and recovery services with support for Windows and Mac endpoints, Windows and Linux servers, databases, file servers, VMware and Hyper-V hosts, and all Microsoft 365 (MS365) services.

Deployment takes just 15 minutes, and you use its smart web console to create protection plans. Ransomware protection is excellent as all plan creation tasks offer the choice of standard or immutable local storage, where the latter stops any backup versions from being deleted until the retention period you’ve set has expired. 

Backups can be replicated to cloud storage such as Synology C2 and Amazon S3 accounts, and it will only accept immutable buckets with Object Lock enabled. Data restoration features are abundant as you choose a workload, load the recovery portal, view its files, folders, volumes, or MS365 items, pick a recovery point, and decide where to send them.

Synology’s desktop ActiveProtect DP320 and DP340 appliances provide backup services for remote locations and are managed from the DP7400, although they are comparatively expensive. Not so with the DP7400, as the one-off purchase price includes around 122TB of usable backup storage along with unlimited client support, and Synology’s smart APM (ActiveProtect Manager) OS makes it a breeze to create a fully-managed 3-2-1-1-0 backup strategy.

Price: Approx. £35,000 excluding VAT

Read our full Synology ActiveProtect DP7400 review for more information.

Qsan’s XCubeNXT XN8126D takes data availability to the next level. This hybrid storage array employs dual controllers running in active/active mode and teams up fault-tolerant FC and IP SANs with NAS share clustering services for all-around redundancy.

The chassis crams 26 SAS3 SFF hot-swap drive bays in 2U of rack height, and the controller’s SAS3 ports support all of Qsan’s XCubeDAS expansion shelves and a total of 546 drives, allowing capacity to be pushed to an incredible 16.7PB. There’s no vendor lock-in, so you can choose any storage device you want, and the XN8126D also supports Western Digital’s supermassive UltraStar Data60 and Data120 JBODs.

Storage is easily configured from the QSM 4 web console, as we used the wizard to choose drives, create storage pools, and decide on thick or thin provisioning, pool encryption, and auto tiering. When creating volumes, you choose the block option for FC and IP SAN presentation or file volumes for NAS shares, and snapshot protection can be applied to each volume and scheduled for as often as every five minutes.

NAS cluster creation is a simple process, and we found that failover worked well. The web console showed Controller 1 was providing the primary link, so we rebooted it while running a continuous Ping on the cluster IP address. We saw Ping timeouts while Controller 2 took over, and in only 18 seconds, our NAS share was back in action.

Starting at around £11K for a diskless unit, the XCubeNXT XN8126D is very competitively priced. It offers a truly enormous expansion potential, and its active/active architecture delivers five 9s reliability, making it a great choice for mixed workloads.

Price: £11,000 excluding VAT (MSRP, diskless)

Read our full Qsan XCubeNXT XN8126D review for more information.

Qnap’s TS-h1277AFX will appeal to teams running demanding workloads such as real-time 4K/8K video editing. This sleekly designed all-Flash desktop NAS appliance supports up to twelve SATA SSDs, is powered by an 8-core 3.8GHz AMD Ryzen 7 9700X CPU, and its base 32GB of fast DDR5 memory can be upgraded to a massive 192GB. 

Network features look good as it sports dual 2.5GbE and 10GbE ports, while the three PCIe Gen4 slots can be used to add Qnap’s dual-port 10GbE, 25GbE, or 100GbE cards. The appliance is also compatible with a wide range of GPGPU cards, with two power cables already provided for them.

For testing, we installed eight 1TB Western Digital Red SA500 SATA SSDs and created a single RAID5 array. Performance over 10GbE is outstanding as a NAS share mapped to a Dell PowerEdge R760xs Windows Server 2022 host returned Iometer sequential read and write rates of 9.2Gbits/sec and 9.3Gbits/sec, and the same results for random operations.

IP SAN speeds over 10GbE were equally impressive, with a 1TB iSCSI target returning Iometer sequential read and write speeds of 9.2Gbits/sec and 9.3Gbits/sec, and also the same rates for random operations. Moving up to a dual 10GbE MPIO link to the iSCSI target delivered sequential read and writes of 18Gbits/sec and 18.3Gbits/sec, while random operations recorded 18Gbits/sec and 17.8Gbits/sec

The TS-h1277AFX is a solid choice for content creators and video editors who need fast access to data. Support for low-cost SATA SSDs makes it more affordable than appliances that require expensive PCIe NVMe SSDs, and Qnap’s QuTS hero software delivers a wealth of business features, including great data protection services.

Price: Diskless, £3,083 excluding VAT

Read our full Qnap TS-h1277AFX review for more information.

Targeting enthusiast home and small business users alike, Asustor's Nimbustor 4 Gen2 AS5404T is a four-bay NAS enclosure equipped with a potent quad-core 2GHz Intel Celeron N5105 CPU and 4GB of DDR4 upgradeable to 16GB. An unusual, and possibly unique feature, is that the AS5404T teams up its four main SATA drive bays with four M.2 NVMe SSD slots – twice as many as most competitors – opening up more possibilities, such as using two SSDs as a read/write cache and two more to provide a high-performance mirrored storage pool.

The ADM (Asustor Data Master) operating system isn’t quite as slick as Synology’s DSM, but it's still a relatively straightforward OS, in which you'll easily find the bulk of features you might want for a small office. ADM excels when it comes to apps, with 339 currently available in App Central – more than twice as many as either Synology’s Package Center or Qnap's App Center offers on similarly priced devices. 

The appliance is equipped with dual 2.5GbE multi-Gigabit ports and returned excellent performance numbers in our lab tests. With four 1TB Western Digital hard disks configured in a RAID5 array, we watched the ATTO Disk Benchmark app report fast read and write operations of 281MB/sec and 256MB/sec.

For the money, this is simply an excellent NAS. It doesn't have the greatest operating system, but it offers the perfect balance of power and features, while its flexible drive support and upgradeability allow it to grow with your business. 

Price: Diskless, £413 excluding VAT

Read our full Asustor NimbusStor 4 Gen2 review for more information.

With new technologies like automation revolutionising the workforce, it’s difficult to say what the next five years, even one or two years, will look like. Armed with the knowledge of cost drivers and technology environments, companies can align their automation needs with their operational strategy to take advantage of new opportunities as they emerge.

This whitepaper explores robotics and process automation technologies, including questions executives should ask when considering firm-wide automation decisions, IBM’s five key elements for enterprise automation strategy and more.

Small businesses looking for an affordable and flexible cloud VoIP service will love Sipgate Team. Monthly prices start as low as £9.95 per user and you have the option of upgrading or downgrading plans at any time, so you don’t end up paying for services you don’t need.

The starter Business S plan offers a simple pay-as-you-go service where you pay nothing for internal and VoIP-to-VoIP calls, 1p per minute for landlines calls and 9.9p for those to mobiles. For unlimited use, you can add a UK call package for £30 per month, while £50 covers all calls to the EU.

The Business L plan costs £14.95 per month per user and includes the UK call package, while Business XL takes this to £19.95 and enables the EU package. All plans start with one free UK phone number assigned to your account, with further numbers costing £1.95 each per month or £9.95 for a block of ten, while a one-time fee of £20 is incurred if you port existing numbers across.

After the sign-up process, Sipgate posts you a start code as a security measure, but you don’t need to wait for this as Sipgate now implements an online check. In less than 24 hours, we received an email confirming our business address was valid and the account was active.

The administrative web portal is a tidy affair and opens with a page offering quick access to all the service’s features. Be prepared for some manual labour though, as Sipgate doesn’t have an import function: user accounts must be created individually by entering their name and email address and assigning a phone number plus extension.

There was more work to be done for hardware provisioning. Our Yealink handsets had to be configured for each user by entering their account and SIP proxy details in the phone web interfaces. This will be a pain for large numbers of users, but a big advantage is that Sipgate Team will work with just about any IP phone.

Users receive welcome emails with their personal web portal details and a secure password that must be changed after they first log in. Users will like the portal as it provides options to view personal call logs, create contact lists, block nuisance calls and route calls to another phone or mobile.

Home workers that don’t need a desk phone can use the portal’s Click2Dial instant call feature, load a web phone directly from their portal and install Sipgate’s new softphone app for Windows, macOS or Linux. Sipgate doesn’t provide its own mobile apps but supports plenty of third-party ones; we had no problems using Zoiper for iOS on an iPad.

Call-handling features are extensive with the Business L and XL packages adding an interactive voice response service. It provides a virtual switchboard where you can present a greeting message with instructions and assign up to ten users or groups with options to direct callers to the right place.

These plans also include call queue support, where you create groups of users with a new phone number and extension assigned and upload a custom greeting message. If all group members are busy, callers will be put on hold and directed to the first person that becomes available.

Low monthly charges and no minimum contract make Sipgate Team an attractive choice for small businesses that don’t want to be tied to lengthy agreements for cloud voice services. The manual phone provisioning will require some technical skill, but plenty of help is provided, and the new desktop apps and softphones add extra appeal.

SMBs looking for an on-premises remote support solution will find NetSupport Manager (NSM) 12.5 gives them everything they need and more. Its unparalleled range of support tools are neatly integrated into a single management console, it offers great platform support and its perpetual license means there are no future subscription fees to worry about.

At its foundation, NSM offers remote control, file transfer, text or two-way audio chat and recording facilities plus detailed hardware and software inventory. NSM provides a wealth of clients with ones available for all versions of Windows plus macOS, Linux, Google Chrome OS and Android.

Instead of a web portal for accessing systems at remote sites, NSM includes a Gateway component which offers four encryption options including 256-bit AES. The PIN Connect server can speed up support connections to clients over larger networks as the technician and user enter the same unique PIN and an instant link is made for them.

Installation is a swift process and we loaded the NSM Control component on a Windows Server 2016 host in five minutes. The NSM Deploy tool is used to push the client out to selected systems and runs discoveries on Active Directory (AD) domains and workgroups plus local and custom IP address ranges.

We tested with multiple Windows 10 domain member desktops and pushed the client out to each one in around 30 seconds. Access security is tight as we could password protect clients, apply Active Directory access policies and use NSM profiles to decide what tools each technician can access.

We also use Macbooks running macOS High Sierra but were disappointed to find that NSM doesn't provide remote deployment options for these. The client DMG package must be downloaded from the NetSupport web site, copied across to each one and installed manually which is a pain.

Even so, with all our Windows and macOS clients deployed, we could browse them from the main NSM Control console, create custom groups of selected clients and search for specific ones using all or part of their machine name. NSM's auto-dynamic grouping function is very useful as it sorted all our clients into lists based on their OS version and geographical location.

Starting a remote control session is a cinch as you just double-click a client's icon. The thumbnail view can be set to show their screen activity in real-time while icons below each one provide quick access to remote control, file transfer, command prompt, chat and inventory tools.

Right-click on a client icon and the drop-down menu provided the same easy access with options to reboot them, log them out and remotely execute apps on their machine. Integration with Windows Explorer means you can view the network on a Control system and directly run remote control, chat and inventory.

Selecting file transfer loads a separate window showing the contents of the Control and client machine for simple drag and drop file copies. Even better, the file distribution tool allows a Control host to select files on their system and send them to multiple clients in one go.

NSM provides a free mobile control app for iOS and Android devices which can connect to any network device running the NSM client. We used the app on our iPad to browse for NSM clients and could fire up remote control sessions, have a text chat, reboot them and use the app's virtual keyboard.

Look no further if you want the best on-premises remote support product on the market. NetSupport Manager is easy to deploy, delivers a wealth of highly accessible features plus great access security and is very competitively priced.

Verdict

Look no further if you want the best on-premises remote support product on the market. NetSupport Manager is easy to deploy, delivers a wealth of highly accessible features plus great access security and is very competitively priced.

Supports Windows 7/Server 2008 upwards, OS X 10.5 upwards, Linux, Android 4 upwards

Mobile Control app for iOS and Android

Today, backups are far more than just passive file safes. In an environment where cyberattacks are persistent and regulatory burdens are rising, a failing backup means more than just lost data – it can mean operational shutdown, legal fallout, or brand damage.

A recent survey by data centre provider Asanti reveals that 72% of UK organisations experienced IT disruptions in the past year. Yet, only 31% feel extremely confident in their disaster recovery and business continuity plans. Even fewer – just 56% and 36% respectively – have clearly defined and regularly tested their Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs). Even more striking: 89% of respondents cite human error as a critical vulnerability in their resilience strategy. This highlights a dangerous disconnect between infrastructure investment and operational confidence.

Classic models like the 3-2-1 rule – hold three copies, across two media, with at least one off-site – remain foundational. But modern threats demand more. Immutable backups and verified recovery tests now form the extra defenses that transform a backup from mundane to mission-critical.

Meanwhile, hybrid architectures – balancing local speed for day-to-day restores with cloud resilience for disaster recovery – are fast becoming the default for businesses that need to recover quickly without compromising security.

This isn't just another rundown of every backup tool on the market. Instead, it presents a clear, strategy-first blueprint – one that turns backup into a dependable pillar of business resilience. You'll discover:

• What modern backup infrastructure needs to include
• How to deploy, automate, and validate real-world backup workflows
• Which top-tier solutions align best with these principles

Put simply: backup should work like business continuity plumbing--visible only when it fails, and absolutely critical until then.

Backup Best Practices That Actually Work

Strengthen the Foundation with 3-2-1-1-0 (Not Just 3-2-1)

Most organisations still abide by the classic 3-2-1 rule – three copies of data, two different media, one off-site--but in today's environment, that's barely baseline. The modern gold standard is 3-2-1-1-0, which adds:

• An immutable or air-gapped copy to protect against deletion or tampering.
• Zero recovery errors, achieved by routine testing to ensure your backups are ready when needed. This extension is rapidly becoming mandatory, not optional. It addresses threats like ransomware and insider tampering that can render conventional backups useless.

Why Immutability Isn't Optional Anymore

Immutable backups – often implemented via WORM (Write Once, Read Many) storage or object-lock in the cloud – cannot be altered or deleted once created. This makes them a formidable defence against ransomware and insider threats. In fact, a spring 2025 Veeam report found that organisations adopting 3-2-1-1-0 recovered up to seven times faster from ransomware and suffered markedly less data loss.

Automate, Test, Repeat--Because Manual Runs Won't Cut It

Automated backup schedules, integrity checks, and regular restore drills aren't just nice to have – they're essential. Without them, you're flying blind. The "0" in the 3-2-1-1-0 rule hinges on this discipline.

Tailor Your Strategy Using RPO and RTO Metrics

Not all data needs the same protection. Classify assets by how fast they must be restored (RTO) and how much data loss is acceptable (RPO), then match backup frequency and storage strategy accordingly. For example, transactional systems might require live replication or hourly snapshots, while archive data could stay on slower, cost-effective media.

Summary: Your 2025 Backup Blueprint

• Embrace 3-2-1-1-0, not just 3-2-1.
• Make one copy immutable or air-gapped, and test all backups regularly.
• Use hybrid backup to balance speed and off-site resilience.
• Automate everything: backups, validation, and restores.
• Define and align on RPO and RTO, and tailor backup frequency accordingly.

With this modern blueprint established, the first practical step is to apply it to your organization's unique data landscape. A strategy is only effective when tailored to the specific assets it's designed to protect.

Prioritising data and choosing the right backup mix

Not all data carries the same weight, and treating it as if it does is one of the most common – and costly – mistakes organisations make. The first step in building an effective backup plan is to understand what data you have, where it lives, and how critical it is to operations.

Classify by criticality and compliance

Business-critical systems such as financial records, customer databases, and operational applications should sit at the top of the backup hierarchy. Losing access to these can halt operations within hours. By contrast, archived or non-essential data may tolerate longer recovery times.

Compliance obligations add another layer. Regulated industries such as healthcare and finance must maintain specific retention periods and prove recoverability. Failing to categorise and align backup policies with those requirements risks not only downtime but fines and reputational damage.

Set RPOs and RTOs early

Clear Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs) – the maximum acceptable amount of data loss – and Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) – the maximum time systems can remain offline – help shape a realistic strategy. For example, a payment processing platform may require near-zero RPO with almost immediate RTO, whereas an internal file share may be able to tolerate a 24-hour recovery window.

Local, cloud, or hybrid?

• Local backup: Delivers the fastest recovery times but leaves data vulnerable to site-specific risks such as fire, flood, or theft.
• Cloud backup: Provides geographic redundancy and scalability, but recovery speed depends on bandwidth and service performance.
• Hybrid backup: Increasingly the default choice and the model that offers the best of both worlds. It combines the rapid recovery speeds of local media for day-to-day incidents with the geographic redundancy of the cloud for major disasters. This balance is critical when downtime costs can reach £220,000 per hour.

A recent State of Backup and Recovery Report 2025 revealed a common disconnect: while more than 60% of organizations believe they can restore from downtime within hours, only 35% actually meet that goal. In other words, real-world recovery often falls short of expectations – making architecture, not optimism, your true fallback. That's where hybrid backup provides a strategic edge. It enables faster restores while safeguarding data off-site. This balance of immediacy and resilience underpins a genuinely modern backup strategy: one built to work when it's needed most.

Recommended Solutions

Here are four standout solutions that truly embody the backup best practices we've covered – each clearly mapped to a realistic scenario:

Why it stands out:

Seamlessly combines backup, antivirus, endpoint detection, and patch management into a single console – simple for resource-strapped teams.

Supports image-based backups, immutable storage, and hybrid deployment with local and third-party cloud support.

Earned a perfect 18/18 in AV-TEST evaluations for protection, performance, and usability – meaning strong cyber resilience with minimal impact.

Why it stands out:

Delivers high-performance backup, global deduplication, reliable restores, and cloud integration under a unified console. Real-world users consistently cite its intuitive use and reliability.

Analysts rate it highly for backup management, scalability, performance, and recovery, giving it an 86 analyst score and 83% user recommendation – extremely solid credentials.

Why it stands out:

Provides on-site hardware appliances with efficient deduplication, cloud replication, and immutable snapshot capability. A ready-made hybrid setup with minimal technical overhead.

Why it stands out:

Offers transparent pricing based on cloud capacity, inclusive of unlimited workstations, servers, VMs, and hypervisors, along with hybrid options, versioning, and NAS/file sync support.

Quick Comparison Table

How to Choose & Implement the Right Solution

Use this checklist to align your requirements with the right product:

• Confirm feature fit: Does the solution support immutable backups, automated testing, hybrid deployment, and meet your RPO/RTO?
• Run trials and validate: Use the vendor's free trials--or pilot environments--to perform actual restore tests and verify ease of use and performance.
• Deploy flexibly: Hybrid architectures should adjust with workload shifts--plan for long-term agility, not just immediate needs.
• Educate stakeholders: Ensure IT, security, and business teams understand backup procedures, responsibilities, and recovery steps. It's not "install and forget."

Data restoration is another winner as we could view files, folders, and volumes on selected sources, pick a recovery point, and decide where to send them. There are plenty more choices as Instant VM Recovery uses an existing backup to spin up a new VM on the same host and creating a simplified recovery disk brings bare metal recovery into play.

Backup Exec is a well-rounded data backup solution offering complete protection for physical and virtual environments. It's easy to use and very affordable with a starter five instance license costing an agreeable £498 per year.

Read our full review Veritas Backup Exec review for more information

Apple's MacBook Pro is now somewhat venerable by laptop standards. The latest design was launched in 2016 to great fanfare, and got even better last year with the upgrade to Intel's 7th-generation Kaby Lake CPUs. However, Apple's challengers have been nipping at the MacBook Pro's heels ever since, and companies like Acer, Dell and HP are gaining ever more ground on it.

With so much competition, has the MacBook Pro still got what it takes to keep Apple as king of the notebook hill?

MacBook Pro 13in (2017) review: Screen, keyboard and trackpad

There's no denying the 2017 MacBook Pro's screen is still stunning. Not only are the colours vibrant, with accurate contract and brightness throughout, but images are pin sharp on the 2,560 x 1,600 pixel retina display. Always one of the MacBook Pro's most redeeming features, the resolution does definitely not disappoint. Bravo again, Apple.

Just as the brightness and contrast deserve praise, so does colour reproduction. Apple's decided to give the 2017 MacBook Pro something of a feature boost, with a wider DCI P3 colour gamut. This means the colours are richer and offer a pretty spot-on reproduction of colours - better than the majority of the notebooks available today.

Whether you use a MacBook Pro to edit images and video, or just want to watch YouTube, play around with files or need it for more intricate design work, the screen makes this all a breeze.

The MacBook Pro's keyboard is unquestionably one of the best on the market. Rather than attempting to maximise the travel distance and feedback of each key, Apple has essentially done the opposite, shaving travel time down to a bare minimum.

This would be a negative point, were it not for the fact that it has also scaled down the amount of force needed to actuate each keystroke, meaning that after a brief adjustment period, your fingers will be gliding over the keys with effortless speed and grace. It's a far cry from the solid 'thunk' of a good mechanical keyboard, but feedback is still firm and satisfying as well.

The MacBook Pro's trackpad is another highlight, providing plenty of room to manoeuvre while offering appropriate sensitivity levels that let you move to the edges of the screen without having to reposition your finger. Unfortunately, the left and right clicks aren't quite punchy enough to provide the sort of feedback we enjoy on other trackpads, but this is a fairly minor gripe.

We can do nothing but praise the accuracy of the MacBook Pro's trackpad. The fact it responds to every tiny stroke makes it ideal for intricate tasks such as photo and video editing that are usually more suited to an external mouse or even a graphics tablet.

Multi-touch gestures have also seen much improvement in this latest version of Apple's portable hardware, making it much easier to stroke using two fingers or more to complete actions. Even if you're yet to uncover this seemingly secret world, now's the time to give it a go.

MacBook Pro 13in (2017) review: Design and features

Unfortunately, Apple hasn't had a change of heart and has still omitted the majority of 'standard' ports, such as a full-size USB connector. Along with the USB, the Thunderbolt 2, SD card reader and HDMI ports are also gone. All except the standard 3.5mm jack have been replaced by Thunderbolt 3 slots that can be used for everything, including data transfer tasks and hooking up printers, an external mouse if you're not keen on using Bluetooth, a monitor and just about everything else you may want to add.

The lower-cost iterations of the MacBook Pro only have two ports too (and one will need to be used for charging the laptop if you like to work with it plugged in), so only having one port will cause some annoyance. If you opt for the more expensive Touch Bar-enabled laptop, you'll have four to play with, but that comes at a hefty price.

This may prove a pain for a large chunk of MacBook users. If you're using it as a desktop replacement, it means you may need to rethink your workstation setup, as monitors, keyboards, and other peripherals likely won't connect directly to Thunderbolt 3 ports. Your best option is to invest in a dock, which adds extra hassle and expense onto an already pricey device.

There's a silver lining, though, and that's that having to use a dock can actually streamline your workspace and make you more mobile. You can get your whole setup connected in one stroke (connect your monitor, keyboard, mouse and any other peripherals to the dock, which then connects to your MacBook with one cable), making it easier to flit between mobile and desk-based working.

That's something you're going to want to be doing a lot, too - this is Apple's thinnest, lightest MacBook Pro yet, and it's never been easier to sling it in a bag when you're heading out the office. In fact, it's the same weight as the equivalent MacBook Air and as thin as the Air's thickest point, although it doesn't taper to a fine edge. In terms of mobility, it's definitely Apple's best laptop thus far for working on the go.

While it may seem like an odd point to mention, the MacBook Pro's hinge is really nice. The movement is smooth, with noticeably less force needed to adjust it than older models. It shouldn't make that much difference, but it's a small touch that gives it a satisfyingly premium feel.

MacBook Pro 13in (2017) review: Hardware and specs

Apple hasn't refreshed the MacBook Pro's hardware since mid-2017, so it's still sporting last generation's Kaby Lake chips. The 13in model comes with a Core i5 processor, with a base clock speed of 2.3GHz for the entry-level non-Touch Bar version and 3.1GHz for the higher-specced version with Apple's Touch Bar tech.

You can also swap both processors out for slightly faster options at the point of purchase, and both come with 8GB of LPDDR3 memory as standard, with an option to beef that up to 16GB. Both versions of the 13in MacBook Pro use Intel's built-in graphics processing - in order to get a proper discrete GPU, you'll need to upgrade to the 15in model.

These aren't bad specifications, necessarily, but they're no longer quite as cutting-edge as they used to be. It's starting to show, too - the most recent Dell XPS 13 outclassed Apple's top-end MacBook Pro by more than 60% in multi-core performance, according to our Geekbench tests.

Having said that, the 2017 MacBook Pro has had a significant bump over its Skylake-powered predecessor. According to our benchmarks, it's around 10% faster. However, when we ran it through the Geekbench tests, it was more than twice as fast as the 2016 MacBooks at single-core operations, and around a third faster for multi-core tasks. It's roughly on par with the Core i5 version of Microsoft's latest Surface Pro, pulling slightly ahead in terms of multi-tasking.

Even if it's no longer top of the pile in terms of performance, we still wouldn't expect the newest crop of MacBook Pros to struggle with anything but the most demanding of tasks, and our review unit did not disappoint. Even when running the latest version of Adobe Photoshop, LibreOffice, Spotify and three Chrome windows with more than 10 tabs each, the MacBook Pro didn't break a sweat, and you're unlikely to see slowdown unless you start seriously pushing it to the max with intensive rendering tasks.

The 2016 MacBook Pro's already-excellent storage speeds have also been improved on, with an upgrade to both read and write performance. The 2017 MacBook Pro's read speed has had a negligible speed boost of around 5%, bringing it up to about 2.1GB/sec, but write speeds have had a massive 69% uptick, pushing them to a blazing 3GB/sec. We managed to transfer 8.5GB of files in mere seconds.

These speeds are blazing, to say the least, and outstrip the competition by a country mile. If you've ever been bothered by long load times, the new MacBook Pro should make those frustrations a thing of the past.

Unfortunately, one area where the latest MacBook Pro has slipped slightly is in terms of its battery life. The 7hrs 30mins score it racked up in our benchmark tests isn't exactly shameful, but it's more than two hours less than last year's model and less than a full workday.

This is the price that you pay for Kaby Lake's improved performance over its predecessor, but it's an irritating compromise that we could have done without. On the other hand, Thunderbolt 3 charging means that it's compatible with a huge range of third-party power supplies, so juicing back up shouldn't be a problem.

MacBook Pro 13in (2017) review: Verdict

When Apple first debuted its redesigned MacBook Pro in 2016, it was a seriously impressive machine; sleek, sophisticated and without an ounce of uncessary fat on it, it was the pinnacle of notebook design in a number of ways. Last year's addition of 7th-generation Kaby Lake chips made it even more attractive, offering some of the best performance around, and it richly deserved the five-star score and Editor's Choice award that we gave it when we first reviewed it.

Two years on from the initial launch, however, and the blush has come off the rose to a certain extent. Apple's top-spec MacBook Pro is now being outperformed by cheaper Windows alternatives thanks to Intel's 8th-gen processors, and while Apple's design still hasn't truly been equalled from an aesthetic standpoint, its rivals are now both thinner and lighter.

It's still a heavyweight performer, and you're very unlikely to be disappointed by it in any particular way - but the fact is that it's now even worse in terms of value for money than it was originally. If you've got the cash to splash and nothing but Apple will do, then it's still the MacBook to buy, but if you want a cheaper, more portable and more powerful option, then Dell's XPS 13 is the notebook to go for.

This might not last long though; rumours suggest that Apple may be about to unveil a new line of Coffee Lake MacBook Pros, and if it does, we fully expect them to re-establish the Cupertino company's place at the top of the heap.

There is certainly a solid claim for the office printer to be seen as one of the most underappreciated fixtures found in almost every modern office. No matter how far along your business is on its digital transformation journey, there’s no denying the humble office printer is still as integral to modern work life as it was in the days before cloud-hosted documents. Although, with a much greater selection to choose from in a rich market, understanding how to buy the right printer for your business is a tougher task than it might sound.

The promise of the paperless office has been dangled before us for more than 40 years – yet we’re hardly any closer to it now than we were in the 1970s. True, a gradual move towards digitisation means we don’t need to handle so many physical printouts in our everyday working lives, but businesses still need to produce hard copies of certain documents. Invoices and reports, documents for signing or proofing, sales pitches, and many others all require physical copies which means the in-house printer still has a big and central role to play.

The good news is that there’s a huge range of printers on the market that can handle your needs. No matter what your requirements when it comes to price, speed, and printing technology, there’s a model to suit every task. However, with great choice comes great confusion, for some, and a comprehensive understanding of what the different types of printers are available - from inkjets to all-in-ones - can inform how to confidently buy a colour printer.

Choose the right tech

Lasers remain a popular choice for business printing: they’re fast, they’re reliable and they can deliver great results on cheap recycled paper. Even low-cost lasers can produce pin-sharp text, with colour quality that’s good enough for professional reports.

LED printers work on a similar principle, but instead of beaming a laser across the page, they use a stationary array of LED emitters to generate the static charge that sticks the toner to the paper. Since they have fewer moving parts, LED printers are cheaper to manufacture, yet most can match lasers for speed and produce equally good results. They may, however, produce a slight cross-hatch pattern on large areas of colour.

Finally, there are inkjet printers. The old advice was to avoid inkjets, as they have historically suffered from poor reliability and high running costs. Today’s business models are serious contenders, however, with high-capacity ink tanks and big duty cycles. Running costs are generally lower than for laser or LED printers too, although for the best prints you will need higher quality paper, which may increase overall costs.

Cut the costs

When making a big purchase, in an ideal world, the ‘buy well, buy once’ approach would be preferential but when it comes to printers, it is simply not that easy. The running costs and, perhaps more impactfully, the cost of ink will also need to be factored in. Cheaper models still use the same expensive consumables as higher-priced machines and are sometimes less efficient, meaning that over time, making a larger initial investment in something more premium may save running costs down the line.

To illustrate this, in our tests of printers reviewed in recent years, one cheaper model - Brother HL-L3270CDW - ultimately cost thousands more to run per year, when printing 100 pages per day, compared to the ever-so-slightly pricier Kyocera Ecosys P6235cdn.

Of course, you could decide to go down the mono-only printer route, saving money in the colour ink department, but the ever-falling costs of buying a colour printer make the small saving in the initial investment seem futile. You never know when you’ll need that added functionality. If you have serious concerns about the cost of ink, there is plenty of debate around buying genuine cartridges versus aftermarket products so you can decide for yourself what’s right for your business.

Sustainability matters on multiple front

Many businesses have also publicly adopted green values - ways of minimising their harm to the planet and even giving back to it in some cases. Understanding which colour printer to buy can also bring often unseen benefits to the environment. Having a full understanding of the business’ printing needs and how they can be delivered using the most eco-friendly printer can please the planet, your staff, your stakeholders, and your annual budget, all while upholding the company’s commitment to sustainability.

And now we live in a time where the cost of living crisis is impacting everyone, from individuals to the enterprise, going green has never made more sense. The type of printer in which your business invests can lead to huge savings now energy prices have soared. In our tests, for example, we dubbed the Epson WorkForce Pro WF-C5290DW - an inkjet printer - a ‘green giant’ thanks to its ultra-low energy use compared to LED rivals. At no point during our time with it did the Epson exceed 27W while printing. Some of the LED models we’ve had in our labs, by comparison, peaked as high as 1.17kW during their warm-up phases. According to these figures, while running a printer for 60 minutes a day, a greener machine can lead to savings to the tune of £8,000 a year just in energy costs.

Additional savings can be made by switching the printer to duplex mode - using double-sided printing - which can lead to a reduction in the amount of paper used and reduce running costs too. Limiting your workforce’s colour printing can also help reduce wastage, and opting for cheaper, recycled paper can further decrease the company’s footprint and the printer’s impact on your bottom line.

Safety PIN

All businesses should understand the value of cyber security and proper identity management, but perhaps one of the lesser known yet still absolutely necessary considerations when choosing a printer, is the need for a GDPR-compliant machine.

A printer can be a security risk: it’s all too easy for users to print out confidential documents and leave them sitting in the output bin for all to see. If that’s a concern, look for a “walk up and print” feature that holds documents at the printer, releasing them only when you arrive at the local control panel and enter a PIN.

Certain printers also have the ability to reserve a portion of their internal memory as a RAM disk, or use an SD card or internal hard disk to store frequently used forms and documents. Be warned that any personally identifiable information stored on the printer comes under the remit of the GDPR – so make sure the storage device can be encrypted, and when the time comes to recycle the printer, remove the drive and have it professionally destroyed.

Remember too that if your printer is accessible over the internet, it’s a potential target for hackers and needs to be locked down. Simple security measures include changing the default password for the management interface, keeping the firmware up to date and disabling any unneeded features such as SNMP management, FTP access, or internal email services.

Hybrid cloud storage is a method of managing cloud storage by mixing both local, internal storage and that of the public cloud. This is an extremely beneficial way for organisations to maximise their data storage, and to maintain control for compliance and security purposes.

Some of the many capabilities that hybrid cloud storage can offer include scalability, agility, and the cost benefit of not having to maintain expensive on-premise data centres. Additionally, businesses can take advantage of the security that private cloud storage offers, deciding where they can store their data depending on compliance or regulatory requirements.

According to Faction’s Multi-Cloud Trends Report, The Latest Trends of 2022, 82% of large companies have adopted a hybrid cloud infrastructure, with organisations using on average 2.6 public and 2.7 private clouds.

Moving into 2023, focus will be less on the adoption of hybrid cloud technologies, but more on the expansion and innovation of existing environments to ensure cost efficiencies and security, highlighting the preference of businesses to maintain this technology.

The benefits of hybrid cloud storage

Improved data sharing, mobility and elasticity are the fundamental benefits for hybrid cloud storage environments. By leveraging accelerated networking and cloud gateway caching technologies, organisations are now able to expand the flexibility of their cloud deployments.

To plan an optimal hybrid storage program, I&O groups must have full information about their current storage, so taking steps towards a hybrid cloud model can kickstart having improved visibility into the storage environment as an internal process.

Moreover, the ability to decide between public cloud and on-site storage guarantees a level of confidence for businesses that may need to be careful about where, and how, certain parts of their data corpus is stored. Organisations in heavily-regulated industries, such as banking or healthcare, for example, will need to make sure that sensitive information remains stored in-house, and a hybrid cloud environment enables them to do this while still using the public cloud for the rest of their data.

A shared storage cloud deployment will also let customers apply familiar enterprise storage feature sets such as volume sharing, optimisation, and application integration to their cloud workloads. The cost of such developments is high as they entail storage systems, physical rack space and networking costs, but for burst and seasonal workloads, organisations should see a significant cost saving since they'll be taking advantage of the elasticity of cloud services.

Risk-averse enterprises can justify the cost of the deployment by emphasising the ability to leverage familiar data protection and storage management capabilities while learning how to optimise workloads in cloud environments. Also, switching cloud providers is likely in the future, so consider colocation networks to make the switch easier.

A good hybrid cloud storage environment should offer the versatility to use resources both on-premises and off, based on a framework capable of policy-based management and intelligent oversight, regardless of physical location. This framework can then automate data lifecycle management, minimise unnecessary duplication and provide long-term visibility into data.

The problems with hybrid cloud storage

Even with the many benefits hybrid cloud storage provides, there comes a new set of challenges that organisations haven’t had to face previously, with their data securely stored on-prem.

Security remains one of the greater concerns, particularly when the security controls of the private cloud can’t extend to the public cloud, leaving room for unmitigated threats. Having a way to automate data security policies could overcome this, as long as they could still enable the on-demand capabilities of hybrid cloud storage.

The 2022 Thales Cloud Security Study revealed that 53% of those surveyed found it more difficult to manage data privacy and protection in the cloud vs. on-premises, so it’s understandable that businesses feel the need for a greater, more robust cyber security policy, and would be adverse to storing all of their data in the cloud.

Hybrid cloud systems could also be more costly. As well as the additional training it requires for staff, and the security measures to enable employee access, the transfer of data across platforms can incur additional costs - not to mention that it is challenging to track storage usage across multiple cloud platforms.

There are several other challenges too, including whether hybrid cloud is suitable for all workflows and legacy systems, but in spite of these issues, use of cloud storage and hybrid cloud storage is growing rapidly.

How to get the most out of hybrid cloud

Hybrid cloud symbolises what can be the most effective method for incorporating the highly flexible capabilities and cost reduction afforded by cloud technology, while at the same time maintaining the security and internal control capabilities offered by on-premises infrastructure. That doesn't make concerns around adoption invalid, but few obstacles are insurmountable to businesses who want to use the benefits of a hybrid solution.

It's important to remember that cloud adoption doesn't have to be a binary choice. Cloud storage resources should be considered simply as another tool in the toolbox, and one that should be used based on the appropriate combination of business application suitability, security, and management issues - as well as cost savings.

Storage technologists should approach hybrid cloud storage as an opportunity to explore capabilities and services that most IT environments could never afford to implement on-premises.

There are also opportunities for storage vendors and cloud storage providers to help customers address security, cost and implementation concerns around hybrid cloud storage, as the benefits of the technology become more widely accepted.

This article was first published on 14/10/2019, and has since been updated.

Stepping up as the successor to the three-year old RS815+, Synology's RS818+ is its first 1U rack NAS to support 10GbE upgrades. There's little else to distinguish this new member of the family as it uses the same quad-core 2.4GHz Atom C2538 as its predecessor, but its dual SO-DIMM slots allow the base 2GB of DDR3 memory to be boosted to 16GB (the RS815+ only supports 6GB).

Memory upgrades for the RS815+ were achieved by sliding the entire the motherboard tray out from the rear. This feature been removed on the RS818+ so you just undo the four screws holding the lid down, which gives equally easy access to the memory slots.

The standard port count remains the same and comprises quad embedded Gigabit and dual USB 3. The RS818+ also has the eSATA port at the rear for connecting Synology's 4-bay RX418 disk shelf, allowing capacity with certified 12TB drives to be boosted to an impressive 96TB (the older RX415 version isn't supported).

Synology offers the RS818RP+ model, which comes with power redundancy in the shape of dual 150W hot-plug power supplies. You pay a premium for this though, as a diskless RS818+ costs 789 whereas the RP+ version pushes this to 1,058.

Synology RackStation RS818+: RAID and 10GbE expansion

We loaded up a quartet of 8TB Seagate NAS SATA hard disks in the appliance's solid metal drive carriers. Deployment is swift; Synology's discovery web portal found the appliance on the lab network, initialized it and loaded the latest production DSM 6.1 software which presents a very user-friendly interface.

From the Storage Manager app, we created a big 22TB RAID5 Disk Group but there are plenty of other options to choose from. Along with standard RAID6 protection, the RS818+ offers Synology Hybrid RAID (SHR) arrays which are designed to simplify your RAID choices and also support an SHR-2 dual-drive redundancy option.

For 10GbE testing, we installed an Emulex dual-port 10GBase-T card in the low-profile slot which was accepted without any complaints. You have a good range of high-speed options as the appliance is certified for industry-standard Intel and Emulex copper and fibre 10GbE cards, plus Synology's own single and dual-port cards.

Cooling is handled by three dual rotor fans at the rear and we found noise levels to be reasonably low. Using the excellent SPLnFTT iOS app on our iPad, we measured sound levels of 45dB from one metre in front, making the RS818+ a good choice for small offices.

Synology RackStation RS818+: 10GbE performance

Our performance tests showed the limitations of the Atom CPU, as although read speeds were very impressive, write speeds were significantly lower. With a NAS share mapped to a Dell PowerEdge R540 rack server with dual 16-core Xeon Gold 6130 CPUs and running Windows Server 2016, we saw Iometer return high sequential reads of 7.9Gbits/sec but only 3.2Gbits/sec for write operations.

It was the same story for our real world tests, with drag and drop copies of a 25GB test file returning average read and write rates of 4.6Gbits/sec and 3.1Gbits/sec. Backup performance was reasonable though, as securing a 22.4GB folder with 10,500 small files averaged a respectable 1.9Gbits/sec.

The Atom CPU also struggled with our encryption test. Copying our 25GB file to an encrypted folder over 10GbE saw a sustained average of only 1.1Gbits/sec, putting the RS818+ amongst the lowest performers for this test.

Synology RackStation RS818+: Backup apps

The RS818+ targets services such as backup and its 64-bit CPU means it can run all of Synology's data protection apps. During volume creation, make sure you select the BTRFS option as this enables NAS share and IP SAN snapshots, which can be run manually and scheduled at regular intervals using the Snapshot Replication app.

The Hyper Backup app manages all your local, remote, Rysnc and cloud backups from one console and also integrates with Synology's C2 Backup cloud service. Perfect for essential off-site backups, we had no problems running Hyper Backup jobs that secured selected folders on the appliance to cloud storage.

Cloud features are exemplary as the Cloud Sync app can now synchronize appliance data with 22 providers including Microsoft Azure, Amazon Drive, Dropbox, Google and OneDrive. The Cloud Station Server app teams up with the Backup Windows workstation client to provide one-way synchronization while the Cloud Station Drive agent extends this to two-way synchronizations.

Agentless backup is possible too as the Active Backup for Servers app secures selected data on Windows and Linux systems just using network shares. We also used the Snapshot Replication app to replicate NAS folders and IP SAN LUNs to another Synology appliance for disaster recovery.

Synology RackStation RS818+: Verdict

With a price tag for a diskless unit that's shade under 800, the RS818+ looks good value and is only slightly more costly that the RS815+ it's replacing. The additional 10GbE upgrade options increase its versatility but a CPU upgrade would have been welcome as the Atom C2538 is nearly five years old.

NAS write performance sees no improvements but if it's backup features you're looking for then Synology's DSM software won't disappoint. Its myriad data protection apps are exceptional and it offers unbeatable cloud features as well.

Verdict

An affordable and compact rack NAS with a wealth of data protection features and 10GbE upgrade potential but let down by its elderly Atom CPU and underwhelming write speeds

Chassis: 1U rack

CPU: 2.4GHz Intel Atom C2538

Memory: 2GB DDR3 (max 16GB)

Storage: 4 x hot-swap SATA drive bays

Array support: RAID0, 1, 10, 5, 6, hot-spare, JBOD, SHR

Network: 4 x Gigabit

Other ports: 2 x USB 3

Expansion: 1 x eSATA

Power: Internal PSU

Management: Web browser

Warranty: 3-year limited

Options: RX418 4-bay expansion unit, £496 ex VAT

Wireless networks are now an essential requirement for businesses that want to be more productive. The proliferation of tablets, laptops, mobiles and smartphones in the workplace means employees don't need to be tethered to their desk and can reap the benefits of increased mobility.

Wired networks with structured cabling are expensive to install and difficult to upgrade so it makes sense to deploy a wireless network. With the right business-grade access points (APs) in place, they can be expanded easily to keep up with your growing business and the latest products offer vastly increased wireless performance and tight security.

Intense competition in this market sector means prices for business-class access points (APs) are dropping all the time. This is great news for SMBs as they can get a basic, secure wireless network up and running for under 100.

Radio waves

Wireless technology has come on in leaps and bounds over the past year, with the latest 802.11ac Wave 2 APs offering a number of valuable benefits. Along with increased throughput, Wave 2 APs offer a feature called MU-MIMO (multi user multiple input multiple output).

MU-MIMO builds on the older MIMO standard by using a larger aerial array that ups the number of spatial streams from three to four. It essentially increases the number of lanes on your wireless road and enables concurrent downstream communications with multiple devices, allowing it support a large user base without causing congestion.

The downside is Wave 2 APs are more expensive with prices starting at around 250. Worry not though, as you can still get cheaper Wave 1 AC1750 APs along with Wave 2 AC2500 and AC2600 APs.

The numbers refer to the total available data rates, with AC1750 offering 450Mbits/sec on the 2.4GHz band and 1,300Mbits/sec on the 5GHz band. AC2500 and AC2600 are the same (with a little added marketing flair) and push the numbers to 800Mbits/sec and 1,733Mbits/sec.

Business class ticket

Small offices may be tempted by cheap consumer-grade wireless routers, but they'll be missing out on many features essential for business operations. Many business-grade APs have the ability to present multiple SSIDs (service set identifiers) allowing wireless networks to be created for different user groups.

Each SSID can have its own security scheme and authentication method where it could apply a user and group list maintained on the AP or tie in with an external RADIUS server. Security can be tightened further with MAC address black and white lists so only specific systems will be allowed to connect to an SSID.

The first thing a partner or client will whip out when they visit your offices is their smartphone or laptop and providing instant wireless connectivity adds professionalism to your business. You'll want to apply even tighter security, so look for APs that provide guest wireless features such as L2 isolation which stops users on the same SSID from seeing each other.

For general guest wireless access, consider APs that offer a captive portal. This can be used to redirect them to a custom web page where they provide details about themselves, enter login credentials and agree to an AUP (acceptable use policy) before being allowed Internet access.

Intruder alert

When deploying wireless services it's all too easy to forget about the supporting backend network, which could leave a gaping hole in your security. Remember, if you can plug a wireless AP into your LAN - so can someone else.

A recent case in point is an educational establishment that couldn't understand why their ISP was reporting a much higher Internet usage than their internal web filtering appliance. After investigation, it transpired that some enterprising pupils had plugged six old BT home wireless routers into the school network, hidden them in cupboards, set them to hide their SSIDs and passed the details to all their classmates.

The web filtering appliance was configured as a simple proxy but the main gateway server happily handed out DHCP and DNS services to any device plugged into a classroom wall socket. It also placed them on the default VLAN thus circumventing the filtering appliance completely and giving the pupils unmonitored Internet access.

The lesson here is to tighten up your backend systems so this can't happen. Furthermore, all business-class wireless APs can scan for and list neighbour devices, and for greater control consider those offering features such SSID-to-VLAN mapping or intrusion prevention that can block 'rogue' devices.

Standalone or managed

A standalone 11ac AP will be fine for a small office but if you have many areas to cover or big expansion plans, look for those offering central or remote management. It will reduce support overheads as you can create one set of wireless networks and have all managed APs broadcasting the same SSIDs.

This brings roaming into play so as staff or guests wander around your offices, their mobile devices will move seamlessly from one AP to the next - ensuring they always get the best service. Clustering is a very flexible option as products that support this allow a 'master' AP to look after multiple 'slaves' which can be reverted to standalone operations on a whim.

Cloud management is ideal if you're looking after wireless networks in different geographical locations. Cloud enabled APs connect with your portal account to get all their settings, making it simple to manage, monitor and support each location from a single web console no matter where you are.

SMBs that want uncomplicated cloud-based remote support will like LogMeIn's GoToAssist as it doesn't get much easier. Its simple cloud portal lets technicians fire up on-demand support sessions in a jiffy and access unattended systems just as easily.

It's very affordable too, as GoToAssist's subscriptions allow you to purchase it on a monthly basis or save hard cash and sign up for a minimum of a year. Even better, the subscriptions are based on the number of technicians with no limits on supported clients.

Along with remote control services for Windows, Mac and Android devices, GoToAssist offers chat facilities, file transfer, clipboard sharing, basic diagnostics, session recording and collaborative sessions. Also included in the price are technician apps for iOS and Android mobiles, allowing them to provide remote support on the go.

Central to GoToAssist operations is the www.fastsupport.com web site where clients go to join a support session. When a technician starts a session in the portal, it creates a unique 9-digit code which can be emailed to a client who clicks on the link in the message to start the session.

Clients can also go directly to the web site and enter their name and the code. When clients join the session, it runs the GoToAssist Opener and Customer apps which prompt them to accept the connection request.

The Customer app pops up a small window on the client with four buttons to stop screen sharing, have a chat, run file transfer or end the session and for the latter, the app unloads itself when the session has closed. The technician's window is nicely designed and presents a row of buttons across the top for accessing the various support tools.

One feature we really like is the ability to have sessions open with multiple clients in one interface. Just start another session in the same window and when the client joins, an extra icon appears at the top left so you can swiftly swap between them simply by clicking on each one.

So far, we've looked at instant support sessions but GoToAssist supports unattended access as well. Install the custom app on each system and they'll appear in the main portal view for quick connection.

We had no problems with on-demand and unattended connections to our Windows 10 desktops. Our MacBooks running macOS Sierra were just as accommodating and the GoToAssist DMG package for unattended access worked fine.

We also tested the iOS technician app on our iPad and found it just as easy to use. After logging it into our account, we could start on-demand sessions using a PIN and access all unattended system assigned to our account.

The iOS technician app provides the same toolset as the Windows version and also supports collaborative sessions. You can join existing sessions with other technicians and invite others to join your sessions.

The Windows Customer app defaults to running as a service, allowing commands such as reboot and Ctrl-Alt-Del to be issued. Another bonus is you don't lose contact with the client if you reboot it as the app reloads on startup and the session resumes.

Access security is handled by the Admin Center portal which also provides direct access to any other LogMeIn apps you've purchased. For GoToAssist, you can create new technicians, set access permissions for file transfer and remote control, enable session recording and view activity reports.

GoToAssist is ideal for SMBs that want an easily deployed cloud-hosted support solution. Linux platforms aren't currently supported but it's very affordable and the facility to run multiple support sessions in the same technician window is a stand-out feature.

Verdict

GoToAssist is ideal for SMBs that want an easily deployed cloud-hosted support solution. Linux platforms aren't currently supported but it's very affordable and the facility to run multiple support sessions in the same technician window is a stand-out feature.

Technician/client: Windows 7/Server 2008 upwards, OS X 10.4, Android OS 4.0 upwards

SMBs that want a remote support solution that's ready to go out of the box will find Solarwinds DameWare an excellent choice. Whereas most competing products require an agent permanently installed on every supported system, DameWare can do most of its work without one.

Solarwinds also offers two choices. The standalone version primarily aimed at smaller businesses with most of their client systems contained on the LAN, while the Central Server version targets larger organisations that want to extend support services beyond their firewall.

Your choice will be determined by the level of remote control services you want, as the standalone version includes the Mini Remote Control (MRC) tool which is accessed directly from the DameWare console. Central Server goes further; it includes Proxy Server and Mobile Gateway Server components to provision secure remote access to clients from iOS and Android mobile devices.

The standalone version is easy to deploy and we had it installed on a Windows Server 2012 R2 host in less than a minute. The console presents a simple Windows Explorer-style interface which presents a list in the left pane showing all systems discovered on the local network.

We found a vast number of remote support functions can be conducted without loading an agent. After setting our default login credentials, we chose a system from the console's left pane and a large drop-down list provided instant views of running processes, hard disks and storage properties, the event log and much more.

We could load a remote command prompt window and if the Windows remote support service isn't running on the target system, DameWare will offer to start it. Likewise with registry editing, as it'll also start the Windows remote registry service for you.

This latest version only sees some minor fixes, so hardware inventory is still unremarkable as DameWare only lists basic information such as its CPU, memory, graphics and so on. Each time you request a software list, it'll query the remote system but the details shown are more extensive and can be exported as a CSV file.

A minor complaint is that a quick access tab is loaded at the top of the central window every time you select a tool. These aren't closed down when you select another one so it's very easy to end up with 10 or 20 tabs loaded if not kept carefully controlled.

Basic remote control sessions can be run within the DameWare console using RDP, while the MRC tool provides a separate user interface with plenty of buttons for functions such as chat, view only and system reboots. It also simplifies file transfer operations by loading Explorer and offering menu options for quickly copying files between guest and host.

Mac support is limited to remote control and we had no problems using MRC to connect to our macOS Sierra clients. It uses the standard VNC service so all we needed do was enable screen sharing and protect access with a password.

DameWare is a top choice for supporting Active Directory (AD) environments, as the console provides direct access to all domain objects including containers, groups and users. After pointing it at our Windows AD controller, it listed all objects and allowed us to add or modify AD users or groups, unlock accounts and reset passwords.

Despite its busy console interface, DameWare is a great choice for growing businesses as its technician-based licensing makes it very affordable and highly scalable. It's a cinch to deploy and its agentless architecture means many support tasks can be swiftly completed without the need to load a remote control session.

Verdict

Despite its busy console interface, DameWare is a great choice for growing businesses as its technician-based licensing makes it very affordable and highly scalable. It's a cinch to deploy and its agentless architecture means many support tasks can be swiftly completed without the need to load a remote control session.

Console: Windows 7/Server 2008 upwards

Clients: Windows 7/Server 2008 upwards, Linux and OS X (VNC enabled)

There's no denying 4K video conferencing (VC) is on its way and Logitech aims to be one of the first in the queue for your business. It launched its 4K Brio personal webcam earlier this year and now its MeetUp brings Ultra HD quality to small conference venues and huddle rooms.

At 400mm wide, this big sound bar can be placed on a wall with the supplied bracket, underneath a TV/monitor on its integral stand or on top of it using the optional mounting bracket. Flanked on each side by speaker grilles, the Logitech camera takes centre stage with its 4K Ultra HD sensor and a massive 120-degree field of view (FoV).

The lens sits in a motorized carrier for remote pan and tilt operations and it has a 5X digital zoom. The kit includes a solid metal RF remote control handset with buttons for pan, tilt and zoom, volume levels, mute, making or ending voice calls and activating Bluetooth.

At the back is a port for the external power supply and a Type C USB 3 port for connection to a PC or Mac running your VC app. Unfortunately, Logitech's choice of USB cable shows it doesn't see 4K VC happening any time soon.

The kit includes a 5 metre USB 2 cable which only supports HD 1080p video streaming. Logitech's manual states clearly that you'll need to source your own USB 3 cable if you plan on using 4K streaming.

We installed the MeetUp on a Windows 10 host which loaded the required drivers when we connected it. Logitech's handy Camera Settings utility allowed us to view the camera feed to aid positioning, choose standard or widescreen modes and tweak contrast, brightness and colour balance.

The MeetUp can also be remotely controlled with Logitech's ConferenceCam Soft Remote app for Android and iOS. We tested the latter on our iPad which scanned the network, spotted the Windows host PC with the camera attached, connected to it and opened up a soft replica of the RC handset.

We also tested the MeetUp on a MacBook Pro which had no problems working with it. Logitech also provides a Mac OS X version of the Camera Settings utility which provides the same features as the Windows one.

We found Skype meetings easy to set up and WebEx had no problems either but, as with all current VC services, they only support 1080p video streaming. Even so, the general consensus of all our participants was that video quality was sharp and clear with great contrast and colour balance.

We controlled pan and tilt operations from the handset and iOS app with a full horizontal sweep taking 7 seconds. The zoom function can also be remotely controlled but being the digital variety means image quality deteriorates at the maximum 5X setting.

The MeetUp speaker performed well and easily covered our 6.5 metre long conference room. Direct comparisons with Logitech's portable ConferenceCam Connect showed that the MeetUp was capable of far higher volume levels, although it lacks any decent bass and sounded quite shrill at times.

The three omni-directional mics also worked very well as callers said they could hear us clearly at the maximum 2.4 metre range. For larger rooms, Logitech offers an optional speaker/mic extension unit which has a 6 metre cable that plugs into a dedicated port on the MeetUp.

With few VC services currently supporting 4K streaming, SMBs will find it difficult to justify the 750 asking price for the MeetUp. And even when 4K is supported, they'll need to consider its high network bandwidth requirements which current estimates put at a minimum of 15-25Mbits/sec.

That said, it's a lot cheaper than proprietary systems such as Cisco's Spark Room Kit which starts at nearly three grand. The MeetUp's image quality at 1080p is also excellent so if you want a versatile, future-proofed VC solution then this is a great choice.

This review originally appeared in PC Pro issue 279.

Verdict

With few VC services currently supporting 4K streaming, SMBs will find it difficult to justify the £750 asking price for the MeetUp. That said, it’s a lot cheaper than proprietary systems. The MeetUp’s image quality at 1080p is also excellent so if you want a versatile, future-proofed VC solution then this is a great choice.

Logitech lens

120-degree FoV

Supports 4K Ultra HD (3840 x 2160/30fps)

1080p HD (1920 x 1080/30fps)

Motorised pan/tilt

5X digital zoom

Triple omni-directional mics

Speaker

Bluetooth

USB 3 (Type C)

RF remote control handset

External PSU

5 metre USB 2 cable

400 x 85 x 104mm (WDH)

1.04kgs

2yr limited hardware warranty.

Options: Expansion microphone, £234

TV mount, £92 (all ex VAT)

HPE's MSA arrays are very popular with SMBs as they offer a great range of storage virtualisation features at unbeatable prices. The latest Gen5 MSA 2050/2052 appliances look like even better value, offering a doubling in performance for the same price.

Along with an updated Broadwell CPU, the new controllers are endowed with twice as much cache memory. Each one has 8GB of cache and employs a super-capacitor and CompactFlash card to protect its contents in the event of a power failure.

Connection options abound as the converged controllers on the SAN models each have four SFP+ ports grouped into two pairs. Each group supports 8/16Gbps Fibre Channel or 10GbE iSCSI. Simply install the desired transceivers to set their personality - remembering that the two controllers must match.

HPE also offers a 4-port 12Gbps SAS3 controller model for direct attached storage. You can have 12 LFF or 24 SFF hot-swap drive bays and all models support SAS3, Midline SAS and SSDs while the 2050 can also handle self-encrypting drives.

Storage virtualization features

Standard software features across both the 2050 and 2052 models include thin provisioning, snapshots, volume copies and SSD read caching. The stand-out feature is HPE's automated data tiering, which employs a performance tier comprising SSDs that stores hot data and delivers a big performance boost.

This is optional on the 2050 while the 2052 includes HPE's MSA Advanced Data Services Suite, which increases the number of snapshots and activates the performance tier. Standard and archive tiers are included with all models, where data is initially held on SAS drives and moved to lower-cost Midline SAS drives as it gets cold.

The appliances analyse data usage in real-time with 4MB page moves occurring every 5-10 seconds. This allows them to respond quickly to changes in I/O patterns making them a far better choice for changing or unpredictable workloads than many competing SMB arrays that only use daily I/O batch processing.

Deployment

You don't need to be a storage guru to deploy the MSA 2052, as its slick SMU v3 web console kicks off a nine-step quick-start wizard to help configure management access, system settings and data port assignments. Our review system was supplied with a full house of 10GbE SFP+ iSCSI transceivers so we just had to assign static IP addresses to each one.

Storage is just as easy to provision as the appliance supports two pools assigned to each controller. Pools contain multiple disk groups, which are created by selecting disk types or SSDs, RAID levels and the controller they should be assigned to.

There's nothing else to do; the appliance automatically places SSDs in the performance tier, SAS drives in the standard tier and Midline SAS drives in the archive tier. If a pool isn't using a performance tier, you can create SSDs read caches if you wish.

To create virtual volumes, we simply chose a name and a size, the number of volumes we wanted and assigned it to a controller to determine which pool it would go in. You can leave the appliance to manage all data movement or select a tier affinity to force it to use the performance or archive tiers.

Snapshots and recovery

Previously, the SMU console only supported manual snapshots of virtual volumes but this has been updated to include a scheduler. You can still create on-demand snapshots but the console now allows you to schedule them to repeat as often as every minute, add a daily time window and decide to retain up to sixteen snapshots.

Snapshots are very versatile as they don't require a dedicated pool and you can take child snapshots (snapshots of snapshots). You can reset snapshots so they contain the latest data and map them as new volumes whenever you want.

Recovering data from a snapshot is a swift three-click manoeuver. We tested this by deleting some data from a virtual volume, selected the Rollback option, chose a snapshot, unmounted the volume from connected hosts and had the data restored in less than 10 seconds.

Performance

For testing, we used two Windows Server 2016 hosts both equipped with dual-port 10GbE SFP+ adapters. One was connected to two ports on Controller A and the other to Controller B to allow us to create load-balanced MPIO links.

HPE supplied our test system with four SSDs, eight SAS drives and twelve Midline SAS drives. We created two pools each with three tiers and mapped dedicated virtual volumes to each host.

IP SAN performance is excellent, with Iometer running on both servers returning cumulative sequential read and write speeds of 28Gbits/sec and 20.5Gbits/sec. Random performance is also good, with Iometer recording cumulative read and write rates of 26.1Gbits/sec and 13.5Gbits/sec.

I/O throughput is on the money too, as we recorded total sequential read and write rates of 151,000 IOPS and 67,000 IOPS. For random operations, we saw total read and write rates of 116,000 IOPS and 64,000 IOPS.

Verdict

SMBs that want a top performing storage array at a sensible price won't find a better solution that the new MSA 2050/2052 appliances. The price we've shown is for the 2052 SFF SAN model Q1J03A which includes a pair of 800GB mixed-use SSDs to get you started and with all data tiering features enabled as well, it looks excellent value.

Verdict

The MSA 2052 is a cinch to deploy and delivers excellent performance - a great choice for SMBs that want automated data tiering at a price they can afford

Chassis: 2U rack

Storage: 12 x LFF or 24 x SFF hot-swap drive bays

Drives included: 2 x 800GB mixed-use SAS SSDs

Power: 2 x 570W hot-plug PSUs

Two controllers each with the following:

Memory: 8GB cache with super-capacitor and CompactFlash card

RAID support: RAID1, 10, 5, 6

Data ports: 4 x SFP+ supporting 8/16Gbps FC or 1/10GbE iSCSI

Management: 10/100 Ethernet

Expansion: 6Gbps SAS port (max 96 LFF/192 SFF disks)

Other ports: Mini-USB CLI port

Volume Copies/Snapshots: 128/512

Software: HPE MSA Advanced Data Services Suite

Management: Web browser

Warranty: 3 years parts only NBD

VMware has announced the launch of VMware Cloud Foundation 2.3, integrating cloud management for businesses wanting to implement a hybrid cloud alongside compute, network, storage and application services.

The deployment and configuration of VMware vRealize Automation, vRealize Operations and vRealize Log Insight can all be automated through the VMware SDDC Manager to speed up the time it takes for businesses to kick-start workloads.

Heterogeneous server support means businesses can operate multiple server models from a single rack or select servers for each workload domain if they'd rather be more specific. These means the development environment can be completely tailored to the application, offering greater flexibility.

VMware Cloud Foundation 2.3 can be deployed on premise or as-a-service in the public cloud, via VMware Cloud on AWS, IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions, CenturyLink, Fujitsu K5, OVH and Rackspace Private Cloud powered by VMware.

"VMware Cloud Foundation 2.3 will be a leap forward in delivering on our promise of providing customers with the simplest path to the hybrid cloud," said John Gilmartin, vice president and general manager of VMware's Integrated Systems Business Unit.

"Since introducing VMware Cloud Foundation in 2016, our customers have consistently purchased and deployed vRealize Automation alongside the platform for automated delivery of application and infrastructure services. It was a no-brainer for us to integrate VMware Cloud Foundation and the vRealize Suite to automate the deployment and configuration of cloud management services to accelerate customer time to market."

VMware has now teamed up with Intel to offer VMware Cloud Foundation 2.3 with Intel Xeon Scalable processors. Intel Select Solutions for VMware Cloud Foundation will speed up the deployment of on-premise environments, all the while optimising the experience to enable businesses to achieve the best performance, security and reliability for containerised workloads.

Enterprise network security usually costs a king's ransom but WatchGuard's Firebox M5600 bucks the trend by delivering a wealth of features at a more palatable price. It may only be a 1U rack appliance but it's plenty powerful, with WatchGuard claiming a 60Gbits/sec firewall throughput and 11Gbits/sec with all UTM services enabled.

Targeting distributed environments of up to 7,500 users, the M5600 offers a versatile range of port options. The appliance has four expansion slots at the front and comes with the eight copper Gigabit and quad 10GbE SFP+ port modules as standard.

The two spare slots accept any module so you can add eight more 10GbE ports if you wish. However, the clincher is WatchGuard's dual-port 40GbE fibre module, as few competing vendors offer this as an option.

The M5600 is powered by elderly 10-core 2.8GHz E5-2680 v2 Xeon CPU teamed up with 16GB of DDR3 memory, while internal storage is handled by a 2GB CFast card and 250GB LFF SATA hard disk. Dual 400W PSUs come as standard, as do four hot-plug fan modules - but this combination produces annoyingly loud noise levels.

Price

The price may initially seem steep but it looks a lot more appealing when stacked up against the competition. The price we've shown includes the M5600 appliance and a full three-year subscription to the Total Security Suite, which activates everything WatchGuard has to offer.

Along with the firewall, VPNs and 24x7 Gold LiveSecurity support, it enables IPS, web content filtering, anti-spam, gateway anti-virus, application controls and HTTPS inspection, plus WatchGuard's reputation enabled defence, advanced persistent threat (APT) blocker service and data leak prevention (DLP) module.

There's more; WatchGuard's RED (reputation enabled defence) service is included for increased web protection. Web access requests send the URL in question to WatchGuard's RED cloud servers where they score it and instruct the appliance to either allow or block it.

To put the outlay into perspective, SonicWALL's top-of-the-line SuperMassive 9800 2U appliance (its E10xxx range recently went on EOL notice) starts at over 46K just for the hardware. Add in a three-year subscription to its Comprehensive Gateway Security Suite and the price jumps to nearly 100K.

Deployment

The M5600 is very easy to deploy, as the web interface fires up a wizard to secure administrative access and get Internet access running on an external port along with DHCP services on your first trusted interface. Three operational modes are available and we opted for the mixed routing mode as it's the most versatile.

This mode allows all ports to be defined as separate interfaces where we could set them as external, trusted, optional or custom and add DHCP services on selected trusted ports. Port aliases streamline further configuration and we used these to assign multiple firewall policies to source and destination ports.

WatchGuard uses proxies to handle all traffic and includes ones for HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, SIP, IMAP, POP3 and SMTP. The relationship between proxies and actions takes a little while to get the hang of, but on first access, the web console provides a wizard for each one.

Enforcing web content filtering using the WebBlocker service was a three-step process. We chose from over 120 URL categories, applied HTTP and HTTPS filtering and on completion, the wizard created a new firewall rule.

Proxies

Mail security is handled by the spamBlocker service, and to use it we set up the POP3 proxy to tag messages classed as spam, suspect and bulk. It's very effective: in live tests of other WatchGuard appliances, we've seen spam detection rates of 97-98 percent with no false positives.

Within selected policies, we could enable IPS and apply allow, drop or block actions based on five threat levels. Gateway AV is a cinch to set up - you enable it on selected policies and choose actions for virus detections, scan errors, oversized files and encrypted files.

You'll need to enable gateway AV if you want to apply APT protection. As files come in to the network, it scans them, creates an MD5 hash and checks the LastLine cloud service to see if they're known malware.

WatchGuard's application awareness controls access to hundreds of apps and has eleven entries for Facebook alone. DLP is another easy one to configure and uses predefined and custom rules on the HTTP, FTP and SMTP proxies to check for keywords such as credit card or social security numbers.

Security and management

The mobile security service queries Android and iOS devices and blocks access if they don't meet the minimum OS level. To use it on iOS devices, we loaded the free WatchGuard FireClient app and could then set blocking policies for any devices not running the latest OS version.

You can use the M5600 to centrally manage wireless networks that employ WatchGuard's own APs. Once paired with the appliance, they take all their settings from it and you can apply selected security policies to wireless traffic.

The appliance's web console provides plenty of detail about all activity and we also used WatchGuard's Dimension software on our Hyper-V host for centralized monitoring. It provides an impressive amount of information such as global threat maps and security service graphs and with Dimension Command activated, you can only log in to an appliance's web console from Dimension's interface.

Verdict

Considering the price of the hardware, we would have liked a newer Xeon CPU and more memory (plus quieter fans) but performance is impressive and there's no denying the M5600's security credentials. WatchGuard offers a wealth of easily managed enterprise-grade security services at a price the competition will have trouble matching.

Verdict

WatchGuard’s flagship M5600 UTM appliance is a great choice for enterprises that want tough and easily deployed network security at a more sensible price

As reviewed

Chassis: 1U rack

CPU: 2.8GHz Intel Xeon E5-2680 v2

Memory: 16GB DDR3

Storage: 2GB CFast 3SE SATA card, 250GB LFF SATA HDD

Network: 8 x Gigabit, 4 x 10GbE SFP+

Expansion: 4 x module slots (2 free)

Other ports: Gigabit management, 2 x USB 2, RJ-45 serial

Power: 2 x 400W hot-plus PSUs

Management: Web browser, WatchGuard Dimension/Command

Warranty: 3-year advanced hardware replacement

Dell's PowerEdge R640 aims to deliver a balanced combination of storage, processing power and rack density, and in this exclusive review, we bring you a first look at its new 14th-gen 1U rack server. Naturally, Intel's Xeon Scalable family is at the top of Dell's agenda and a new internal cooling design allows the R640 to support every CPU model right up to the 205W 28-core Platinum 8180.

Storage options are equally impressive, as the chassis is available with four LFF, eight SFF or ten SFF drives. There's room for two more SFF drives at the rear in an optional hot-swap cage and the server can support up to eight PCIe NVMe SSDs out of the box.

Hard disks are all handled by Dell's 10th-gen PERC controllers which have 8GB of flash-backed NV cache memory - a quadrupling over the previous generation. The new H740P and H840P adapters are SAS3 ready and their Harpoon-based RoC (RAID on chip) provides a performance boost for handling high-IOPS SSDs.

All 14th -gen PowerEdge servers showcase Dell's new iDRAC9 remote management controller, which delivers a completely revamped web interface and a wealth of new features. Platform security is tight as well and includes cryptographically-signed firmware packages plus a lockdown mode to stop unauthorized system configuration changes.

Storage options

Dell offers a lot of storage options so ensure you make the right choices to avoid future upgrades. All three Smart Flexi Value models are offered with eight or ten SFF drive bays with only the standard model supporting four LFF bays.

The SFF models offer two backplanes with the 8-bay version supporting SAS3, NL-SAS and SATA hard disks. We review the 10-bay version - which you'll need if you want to use PCIe NVMe SSDs as well as SAS3 hard disks.

The Xeon Scalable CPUs increase the number of PCIe lanes from 40 to 48 and Dell's NVMe implementation takes advantage of this. The 10-bay backplane is plugged into a SAS expander board behind it, but also has onboard NVMe connectors cabled directly to the motherboard.

These use the eight extra PCIe lanes allowing you to direct-attach up to eight NVMe drives in the front bays without requiring extra adapter cards. Mind you, they aren't cheap; Dell's 3.2TB mixed-use NVMe drives cost over six grand apiece.

Dell's BOSS (boot optimized storage solution) card does away with the need to put the OS on a hard disk. Included in our review system, the BOSS is a PCIe adapter card with dual M.2 SATA SSD slots which supports mirroring.

Internal design

There's a lot going on inside the R640's busy interior but all cabling is neatly tucked out of the way for easy access to key components. Eight hot-plug fan modules reside in front of the motherboard and for NMVe drives and higher-end CPUs, you'll need to specify high-performance models.

The price includes the PERC H740P Mini snap-in RAID module. This supports all the usual RAID suspects including RAID6 and 60 and has 8GB of NVRAM cache with a battery backup pack tucked away neatly on top.

Our system came with 192GB of 2,667MHz DDR4 memory which can be boosted to 768GB using RDIMMs or 1.5TB with LRDIMMs. The R640 also supports up to twelve Persistent Memory NVDIMM-N modules which combine 16GB of high-performance DRAM with integral Flash backup and use a dedicated battery backup module which fits on top of the SAS expander board.

Up to three PCIe expansion slots are available and underneath their cage is a dedicated slot for Dell's network daughtercards. We were supplied with the dual Gigabit/10GBase-T model and other options include quad Gigabit, quad 10GbE SFP+ or dual 25GbE.

Server management and security

Dell's new iDRAC9 is a winner for remote management as its smart HTML5-based web interface delivers a veritable wealth of information on server operations. The Dashboard screen provides a quick view on overall system health plus quick access to logs and a virtual remote control console.

The System tab reveals everything you need to know about power consumption or cooling and provides performance graphs for CPUs, memory and I/O usage. Activating the System Lockdown mode blocks any further configuration changes and you can use the System Erase feature to safely destroy data on decommissioned drives.

Dell scores over HPE's iLO5 with its Quick Sync 2 feature which we used to link our iPad to the server over Bluetooth. The OpenManage Mobile (OMM) iOS app allowed us to view all server information, receive alerts, reboot it and control it using the free VNC Viewer app.

Dell's OpenManage Enterprise isn't due for release until mid-2018 but while you're waiting, you can use its free OpenManage Essentials software. We employed it to manage all our Dell network devices, perform inventories and activate its advanced alerting system.

Verdict

The PowerEdge R640 packs a lot into its compact 1U chassis and delivers some innovative storage features as well. Support for the entire family of Xeon Scalable CPUs means it can easily be customised to suit a wide range of workloads and budgets while the new iDRAC9 controller sets new standards for server management.

Verdict

The powerful PowerEdge R640 squeezes a remarkable range of features into its 1U chassis making it the ideal choice for enterprises that want the best rack density in their data centre

Chassis: 1U rack

CPU: 2 x 2.1GHz Intel Xeon Gold 6130

Memory: 192GB ECC DDR4 2,667MHz (max 1.5TB with LRDIMMs)

Storage bays: 10 SFF front hot-swap (supports 8 x NVMe SSDs)

RAID: Dell PERC H730P Mini SAS3/8GB NVRAM cache/BBU

Storage included: 5 x 300GB 15K SAS3 SFF hard disks

Array support: RAID0, 1, 10, 5, 6, 50, 60

Network: 2 x Gigabit/2 x 10GBase-T daughtercard

Expansion: 3 x PCI-e 3.0 slots

Other: BOSS card with 2 x 240GB M.2 SATA SSDs

Cooling: 8 x hot-plug performance fans

Power: 2 x 1600W Platinum hot-swap PSUs

Management: Dell iDRAC9 Enterprise

Warranty 3yrs standard on-site NBD

In its broadest product launch since acquiring IBM's System x portfolio, Lenovo has gone back to the drawing board and completely redesigned its ThinkSystem servers from the ground up. They deliver a wealth of new features and in this exclusive review we bring you a first look at its ThinkSystem SR650 general purpose 2U rack server.

Support for Intel's Xeon Scalable CPU family is at the top of Lenovo's agenda and the SR650 shows off a new storage design offering more choices. Along with support for up to 14 LFF or 24 SFF drives, the SR650 features embedded NMVe PCI-Express ports as standard, while the AnyBay carriers from previous generations increase storage versatility.

A welcome update for us is Lenovo's embedded XCC (xClarity Controller) chip. Remote server management has been a major weakness of current System x and ThinkServer platforms and the XCC puts it firmly alongside Dell's iDRAC9 and HPE's iLO5 for features.

Management

The first benefit of the ThinkSystem firmware became apparent when we powered the SR650 up; boot times have been drastically reduced. Our lab's System x3550 M5 rack server takes a yawn-inducing 6 minutes to go from power on to OS login, whereas the SR650 cut our waiting time to 110 seconds.

OS deployment is easier too, as the xClarity Provisioning Manager provides an assisted installation routine. Selected during boot up, it helped us get a RAID array created and Windows Server 2016 loaded with all the correct drivers inside 30 minutes.

There's much more, as the XCC web interface is like nothing we've seen from Lenovo before. It's slick home page opens with a wealth of information about all critical components, quick access to remote control, a rundown on all firmware versions and a set of coloured blocks showing utilization and system wide power usage.

It provides a full inventory of every hardware component and a detailed breakdown of power usage, component utilization, fan and voltage status plus system temperatures. You also have direct configuration access to the RAID controllers, firmware update tools and options to set server, firmware and access security.

After updating the lab's xClarity Administrator Hyper-V host to v1.3.2, we were able to add the SR650 to its console, remotely monitor it and use its image library for centralized OS deployment. We also used Lenovo's xClarity Mobile iOS app on our iPad to remotely access the Administrator host and a new feature for cellular-equipped mobiles is the ability to tether them directly to the ThinkSystem's front USB port for local monitoring.

Storage

The server's front panel uses the popular 8+8+8 drive bay configuration, allowing it to support from 8 to 24 SFF drives (HPE's DL380 Gen10 supports 30 SSF drives). The SR650 LFF model has room for up to 12 drives at the front and this chassis also supports an optional two-bay cage fitted at the rear in place of the 3-slot PCI-Express riser.

Lenovo's AnyBay is unique as it supports SAS, SATA, standard SSD or NVMe PCIe SSD interfaces in the same bay. With the appropriate AnyBay backplane factory fitted (and dual CPUs), the SR650 16-bay model can handle up to eight of these bays.

The clincher is the pair of embedded dual-port NVMe PCIe connectors on the motherboard. Other server vendors require you to purchase an optional adapter card for NVMe drives but the SR650 supports four out of the box at no extra cost -- the extra four require Lenovo's optional NVMe switch adapter.

RAID choices are plentiful with the review system including a ThinkSystem 930-8i SAS3 adapter fitted in the dedicated PCI-Express slot in the centre of the motherboard and including 2GB of battery protected Flash cache. Lenovo also offers a dual M.2 SATA SSD enablement kit and two mirrored 128GB modules for only 328.

Expansion and power

Internally, the server is well designed with easy access afforded to all major components. The SR650 supports the entire Xeon Scalable family with the price of our review system including dual 8-core 2.1GHz Xeon Silver 4110 CPUs partnered by 32GB of TRuDDR4 memory.

The Xeon Silver CPUs are aimed at entry-level data centre applications with all five models supporting 2,400MHz memory, 768GB per socket plus Intel's HT and Turbo Boost technologies. Their low 85W TDP was reflected in our power tests, and the server drew 80W in idle and a mere 118W under extreme load.

The server was supplied with the full complement of six internal hot-swap cooling fans and dual 750W Platinum hot-plug PSUs. Other PSU options include 550W, 750W Titanium, 1100W and 1600W and all share a common form factor across the entire ThinkSystem range.

Instead of embedded network ports, the motherboard provides a LOM slot which links up with the C624 PCH and supports dual or quad Gigabit and 10GbE cards. Lenovo's Infiniband and 25/40/100GbE cards require a separate riser with an ML2 slot.

Conclusion

The ThinkSystem SR650 represent a huge step forward for Lenovo as it's well designed, good value and highly expandable. Support for the Xeon Scalable family allows it to be customized to suit any workload, storage features see big improvement and the new xClarity Controller finally brings Lenovo into 21st-century server management.

Verdict

The ThinkSystem SR650 is a versatile data centre workhorse at a great price made all the more appealing by Lenovo’s smart new remote management controller

(As reviewed)

Chassis: 2U rack

CPU: 2 x 8-core 2.1GHz Intel Xeon Silver 4110

Memory: 32GB TruDDR4 (max 3TB)

Storage: 2 x 400GB Lenovo SAS3 SFF SSD (max 24)

RAID: Lenovo ThinkSystem RAID 930-8i SAS3/2GB Flash/BBU

Array support: RAID0, 1, 10, 5, 50, 6, 60

Expansion: 7 x PCI-Express 3 (6 free)

Network: 4 x Gigabit LOM

Power: 2 x 750W hot-plug PSUs

Management: XCC Enterprise, xClarity Administrator

Warranty: 3yrs on-site NBD

Options: Dual mirrored 128GB M.2 SATA SSD kit, £328 ex VAT

Despite the ever-growing threat of cyber attacks, new research has shown that businesses in the UK are failing to effectively prepare themselves for an attack.

A study conducted by PwC showed that almost half of UK organisations lack a dedicated inter-departmental team working on business-wide security issues, and more than 15% do not conduct any cyber security drills or preparations.

On top of this, businesses are still failing to place adequate importance on cyber threat intelligence. Almost a third of respondents admitted that they have no idea how many cyber attacks they suffered in the past year, and one-third said that they had no idea how the attacks they they fell victim to were carried out.

"Cyber attacks could happen to any organisation at any time,"said PwC cyber security partner Richard Horne, "so it's important that all businesses and public sector organisations are getting the basics right and continually testing their approach to prepare themselves in the right way. In that critical moment when an attack hits, the ability to act quickly and effectively is key to minimising business disruption and reputational harm."

For UK companies, the biggest risk comes from their own employees, with more than a quarter of attacks using staff members as an initial attack vector. This is compared to the rest of the world, where compromised mobile devices present the most common threat.

While the average monetary cost of a breach actually fell this year, the study showed that exfiltration of records and information is increasingly the aim of breaches. Compromisation of customer and employee records were reported by more than 20% of businesses, and more than 20% reported the loss or damage of internal records.

Encouragingly, more than 60% of organisations surveyed said that they have an overall security strategy. However, less than 40% said that their boards do not actively participate in their strategy, lagging 10% behind their global counterparts.

"Cyber security needs to be viewed as a 'team sport' rather than just an issue for the IT team,"Horne said. "To be most effective, everyone in an organisation should be considering the security implications of their actions. Pulling a business together like that requires strong leadership from the top."

"Working with others across the public and private sector is key too. Forging close working collaborations and sharing intelligence is often the best way to tackle the latest threats. New forms of attack require new ways of working to defend our society."

Since parting company with Dell last year, SonicWall has been busy developing its Email Security product family with a view to moving up the food chain to the enterprise markets. Targeting companies ranging from 10 to 10,000 users, it has introduced a range of enhanced features and now includes its Capture ATP (advanced threat protection) cloud sandbox technology, which focuses on threats such as ransomware.

Capture ATP intercepts email attachments, subjects them to a barrage of cloud resident tests and blocks any it deems as malicious. This augments an extensive range of standard security measures including anti-spam, anti-phishing, anti-spoofing and anti-virus services, plus optional email compliancy/DLP (data leak prevention) and encryption.

We've reviewed the Email Security 9.0 software version which is designed to be hosted on a Windows Server platform of your choice. There are plenty of other options, as SonicWall also offers versions that can be supplied on one of three turnkey appliances, virtualized on a hardened VMware VM or run as a SonicWall hosted cloud service.

SonicWall offers a lot of licensing options and we've shown the price for a one-year TotalSecure subscription for 1,000 users, which activates email protection, compliance, McAfee anti-virus and 24/7 support. Three other anti-virus engines are available, while the Capture ATP license for the same number of users only costs 974 for one year.

Deployment

Host hardware demands are quite modest and we chose a budget-priced HPE ProLiant DL20 Gen9 1U rack server equipped with a 3.7GHz E3-1240 v6 Xeon and 16GB of DDR4 memory. Storage requirements start at 160GB, but you'll need to factor in the expected email volume and quarantine area when sizing your hard disks. Our host was running Windows Server 2012 R2 and there's no indication yet that SonicWall supports Server 2016.

For testing, we introduced our Email Security host to a live network comprising Windows Active Directory (AD) and Exchange servers. Software installation including the Apache Tomcat web server only took around 20 minutes and we then logged in and followed the web console's quick start wizard.

We chose the recommended All-In-One mode, pointed the host at our Exchange server and chose MTA (mail transfer agent) with Smart Host routing, which sends all messages straight to our downstream server and provides message queuing should it become unavailable. A quick connection check confirmed all was well, and we then used the LDAP integration to import all our AD users and groups into the appliance.

Security

The software is ready go out of the box as it activates a full set of default email security policies. Anti-spam uses predefined aggressiveness settings to class dubious messages as spam or likely spam and send them to the recipient's junk box.

You can easily tweak the settings to suit and choose to have different ones for each message classification. They can be globally rejected, deleted, forwarded to another email address or tagged, and custom settings can be applied to specific AD users and groups.

The Compliance module allows custom message filters to be applied to mail in both directions and comes with a set of dictionaries and ID definitions containing details such as common financial terms and credit card number formats. Any messages that trigger compliance filters can be sent to an internal approval box for authorisation and you can apply automatic encryption or decryption.

We weren't overly impressed with SonicWall's support responses during testing as our licenses expired leaving the appliance in reporting mode. We went through the proper channels to get them renewed but had to wait four days until the support team returned from an extended public holiday.

Performance and Capture ATP

We test email security products in a live environment, as it forces them to deal with emerging and zero-day threats rather than just a stale pile of harvested mail. We left our Email Security host running for three weeks on its default settings and found it be remarkably effective, delivering a 99.2% spam detection rate.

The default anti-spam aggressiveness settings produced surprisingly few false positives but should these be over-enthusiastic, you can change them to suit. Our users were each sent a daily junk summary email so they could remotely view their junk box and, if permitted, release messages and personalise their anti-spam aggressiveness settings.

The Capture ATP feature also performed well, picking up a range of attachment file types, sending them to the cloud sandbox and then releasing them when deemed safe. We tested this by emailing ZIP attachments with malware inside to selected users and ATP deleted them and blocked the emails.

As the administrator, we were sent an email alert each time ATP detected a malicious file which provided a direct link to a status report. It's only when you view the report's summary that you realise just how many cloud scanners the files are checked by.

Verdict

Even after factoring in the cost of the host hardware and Windows OS, SonicWall's Email Security software still looks comparatively good value. It's highly scalable and very easy to manage, spam detection rates are extremely good and the new Capture ATP feature adds valuable cloud-based protection against the latest mail-borne threats.

Verdict

You’ll need to factor in a host system but good value, easy deployment and a great spam detection score makes SonicWall’s Email Security software a sound choice for SMBs and enterprises alike

Requirements

Fujitsu is one of the stalwarts of the enterprise IT industry, and has been producing fit-for-purpose laptops and PCs for decades.

But, is enterprise-grade performance and functionality still enough in a world where more and more workers are demanding IT equipment that's as satisfying as the kit they use at home? As manufacturers like Dell start offering devices that can match the likes of the MacBook range for aesthetic value, for example, Fujitsu's new Lifebook U937 may have some work to do to keep up.

Design

Weighing in at around 960g, the U937 feels very light indeed. It's comfortably under the 1kg upper limit of what we'd consider an ultraportable, and feels a lot less hefty than many of its competitors. Put it in your bag, and you're liable to forget that you're carrying anything at all.

It's also appealingly slim. At 15.5mm thick, it's not the thinnest laptop on the market, but it's very far from bulky, and the fact that the increased thickness allows Fujitsu to include a very robust selection of ports (which we'll talk more about later) means it's a trade-off well worth making.

One trade-off that isn't quite so easy to stomach is that the U937 feels incredibly flimsy. The company claims it's constructed from magnesium, but it feels distinctly thin and plasticky, with the lid in particular feeling very insubstantial indeed. It bends alarmingly under the slightest pressure, and we've little doubt that we could snap it clean in two without applying much force.

Although this is likely part of what makes it so light, it's got worrying implications for the U937's longevity and build quality. We'd be incredibly worried about it breaking if we ever dropped it, and we have serious concerns about its long-term longevity over a period of, say, several years.

The textured, matte-black finish doesn't feel articularly pleasant, either. It's got a distinctly cheap, tacky feel to it, and presents a much less satisfying user experience than aluminium-bodies rivals like the MacBook Air. Visually-speaking, it's not too hideous - its matte-black and charcoal colour scheme is professional and understated - but it's definitely not winning any beauty contests, either.

Keyboard and trackpad

Alas, the keyboard is a letdown too. Although feedback and response is excellent, the chiclet keys are slightly lacking in travel depth, and there's no backlighting to speak of - which is a serious oversight in a laptop as expensive as this. We also found ourselves frequently hitting the Page Up and Page Down keys by mistake, as they're located directly over the left and right arrow keys.

The trackpad is another disappointment. It uses separate left and right mouse buttons, rather than the all-in-one trackpad design that has become the norm. Having to reposition our finger every time we wanted to click on something proved to be a persistent annoyance, and we had to tweak the sensitivity to stop it feeling sluggish.

It's disappointing to see compromises like this being made - particularly in a machine that's supposed to be an enterprise-grade device and which carries an enterprise-grade pricetag.

Display

Thankfully, the U937's 13.3in touchscreen IPS panel puts on a strong display. The 1080p screen has a measured contrast ratio of just under 1000:1, which is very good, and a maximum brightness of 318cd/m2 is bright enough to use in all but the harshest of lighting conditions. It's lacking the matte, non-reflective coating seen on other laptops, however, which means that screen glare could be a problem when using it in direct sunlight.

We measured its colour accuracy at more than 92% of the sRGB colour spectrum, so it should be more than good enough to use for graphic design and editing work. Movies and video are also rich and detailed so a joy to watch on this machine.

Specs and performance

Another area where Fujitsu hasn't scrimped is the specifications, and it's here that the U937 really shows off its credentials as a business laptop. It features Intel's latest business-grade chips and a healthy complement of memory. The model we tested had a Core i5-7300U vPro processor and 8GB of RAM under the hood, but various configurations are available, topping out with an i7-7600U and a whopping 20GB of RAM.

As we expected, it proved to be more than a match for our benchmarks, racing through them to earn a highly commendable final result of 55, which is better than most Core i7-powered business laptops and even creeping up on the performance of lower-end workstations.

Despite the high-powered components, battery life hasn't suffered a huge amount either. In our tests, it lasted 8hrs 7mins before the battery ran out and although that's trailing behind the 10-hour scores clocked up by recent releases, it's not too shabby considering the power-hungry internals.

The only complaint we had with it was an occasional tendency to run slightly hot, but this is a minor problem compared to how sterling the performance is otherwise. It's incredibly fast, and more than capable of handling anything the average enterprise user will likely throw at it.

Ports and features

One of the headline features is Fujitsu's enterprise-grade security, which offers numerous login methods, including facial recognition, smart card identification and even the company's PalmSecure technology, which reads the unique pattern of veins in your hand to provide biometric authentication.

Unfortunately, they're not available right out of the box. Instead, we had to download the Workplace Protect management software, as well as the drivers for the PalmSecure reader itself. Once we'd downloaded and installed the necessary software, however, setting up the advanced security measures was quick and relatively painless.

Facial recognition is fast and accurate - provided you're in brightly-lit conditions. Rather than the special depth-sensing IR cameras used by Windows Hello's facial recognition, Fujitsu's version uses the standard webcam built into the U937 - which means that if the lighting isn't good, then it won't be able to match your face.

Logging in via PalmSecure takes longer and needs a bit of maneuvering. Indeed, it requires you to hold your hand in a very specific position before it will read it. It's not especially convenient and we're not convinced it's that much more secure than standard biometric authentication methods like fingerprint readers. These login methods also don't integrate with Windows Hello, which means they can't be centrally managed through the OS, and don't integrate with it quite as smoothly.

If you're looking for a laptop that's all but guaranteed to support your existing IT equipment, the U937 is the one for you. It's sporting just about every port imaginable, including a HDMI output, an SD card reader, two USB 3.0 ports, one USB-C port, a SIM card tray, and a SmartCard reader. Fujitsu has even managed to cram an Ethernet port into the 15.5mm-thin chassis, thanks to a nifty pull-out design.

Rounding out its business credentials, the U937 also ships with Windows 10 Pro, so it's ready to integrate into an enterprise environment out of the box.

Verdict

The Fujitsu Lifebook U937 is a seriously mixed bag. The internal hardware is excellent, and offers business-grade performance that will easily see you through all but the most high-intensity tasks. The display, too, is excellent and Fujitsu has included a number of business-friendly features like heaps of connectivity and authentication options.

Where it falls down, on the other hand, it falls hard. The build quality is extremely disappointing and the chassis feels cheap, plasticky and decidedly not robust. The keyboard and trackpad, too, feel like they belong on a much less expensive machine. Using the U937 doesn't feel anywhere near as premium or satisfying as it should, given the eye-watering price.

Inside this laptop beats the heart of a formidable business beast - it's just a shame that it's housed in the body of a five-year old mid-range notebook.

Verdict

This powerful business ultraportable is betrayed by a flimsy chassis and decidedly disappointing build quality. It's got heaps of potential, but there's just too many compromises to recommend.

Epson's WorkForce Pro WF-8010DW is ready for hard hitting workgroups as this A3+ inkjet has an enormous 65,000 page maximum monthly duty cycle. It teams this up with impressively low running costs and also claims a speedy 34ppm top speed for both A4 mono and colour prints.

It's aimed at businesses that want plenty of paper choices to hand, as the single 250-sheet A3+ base cassette can be augmented with three more 500-sheet trays. The large rear MPT has room for 80-sheets up to A3+ sizes and it can handle 256gms heavyweight paper as well.

The WF-8010DW uses the same PrecisionCore print head technology as Epson's commercial printers while its high-capacity DuraBrite Pro ink tanks deliver laser-matching print costs. Go for the high-yield XL cartridges and you'll pay a penny for a mono A4 page and 4.3p for a colour one.

Deployment got off to a poor start as the setup disk wasn't included, so we had to download all the drivers and software from Epson's support site. The Windows drivers and software update tool loaded without any problems but Epson's Easy Photo Print utility failed to work until we had located and installed the separate Easy Print module.

Our first test print also showed the black ink nozzles were partially blocked so we had to run a wasteful cleaning cycle and nozzle pattern test to remedy this. With its nose wiped clean, the printer then proceeded to produce an impressive print quality.

The driver's Standard mode delivered the sharpest text, as we found the High setting left a slight dusting around smaller fonts. The latter produced superior mono photos though, with good levels of detail and lacking the banding evident in Standard mode prints.

Stay on the High road for colour, as you'll be greeted with bold, punchy reports and sharp, glossy photos with no banding or edge bleeding. The rich colour quality from the DuraBrite Pro ink really made our test A3 posters look good and we found them vibrant and eye-catching.

You won't have to wait long either; A3 posters on 100gms paper at the High setting took 16 seconds to produce. Even on premium glossy photo paper, the printer delivered an A3 colour poster in 129 seconds and an A4 photo in 75 seconds.

Alas, for general office printing, we couldn't get close to Epson's claimed speeds as even on the driver's Economy setting, our 34-page Word document returned a noisy 22ppm. Best mode dropped this to 12.5ppm whilst duplexing the document in Standard mode returned a cacophonous 16ppm.

The printer is well connected, although you can't have wired and wireless connection active together. We printed directly from our iPad over AirPrint and WiFi Direct and used Epson's iPrint iOS app to print files straight from our Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, Evernote and OneDrive accounts.

The Epson Connect cloud service allows remote users to email print jobs as attachments to the printer. After registering, we received a unique email address for the printer and used our account portal to create approved sender lists and decide which features they could access.

Businesses with a fleet of Epson printers will find the Device Admin tool useful as it allows them all to be managed from one interface. Along with scheduled usage reports, it can also apply device templates to maintain settings consistency.

With its huge duty cycle, the WF-8010DW has the staying power to keep up with print hungry workgroups. Real world print speeds are well down on those quoted, but for a sub-300 A3 printer, colour quality is very good - and it's cheap to run as well.

This review originally appeared in PC Pro issue 274

Verdict

With its huge duty cycle, the WF-8010DW has the staying power to keep up with print hungry workgroups. Real world print speeds are well down on those quoted, but for a sub-£300 A3 printer, colour quality is very good - and it’s cheap to run as well.

4800 x 1200dpi A3+ colour inkjet printer

512MB RAM

34ppm A4 mono/colour

Gigabit

11n wireless

WiFi Direct

AirPrint

USB 2

Duplex

250-sheet A3+ paper tray

80-sheet A3+ rear MPT, max monthly duty cycle, 65,000 pages

567‎ x 570 x 378 mm WDH

26kgs

1yr on-site warranty

If you're a medium-sized business with big backup requirements, Arcserve's UDP appliances could be perfect. They provide a one-stop shop for backup and recovery of physical and virtual environments. As standard, they include replication, high availability and space-saving deduplication technologies.

The latest UDP 8000-series appliances also offer a wide range of capacities; the entry-level 8100 model starts with 4TB of backup storage, courtesy of three 2TB SAS3 hard disks in a RAID5 array. This is managed by an Avago SAS RAID card, while a 120GB Intel SATA SSD handles UDP's deduplication hash tables. There's also a fourth drive bay for expansion.

As the price implies, this is no lightweight backup unit. It's powered by a six-core Xeon E5-2609 v4, with 64GB of DDR4 memory and dual gigabit data ports. Here, too, there's room to grow via optional 10GbE upgrades. The 8100 is supplied with Windows Server 2012 R2 Standard and the Arcserve UDP software preinstalled. After attaching a local monitor, mouse and keyboard, we were able to follow the quick start wizard to join the appliance to our domain, add member nodes and create a protection plan in 20 minutes. All declared nodes have the agent automatically pushed to them, taking around ten minutes for each one.

A key feature of the Arcserve package is its recovery point server (RPS), which defines data stores on the appliance where data is backed up to. Plans define the number of recovery points required, with schedules for full and incremental backups that can be run every 15 minutes. You can add tasks to a plan, with options that include remote RPS replication, file copying and, if you've loaded the Arcserve Backup software, migrating data to a tape drive attached to an optional SAS host bus adapter.

Another feature is Virtual Standby, which uses recovery points to create local VMware or Hyper-V VMs of selected nodes. The VM is kept up to date with the latest data so, if the primary node goes down, the standby VM is fired up to provide continuity.

There's also a new Instant VM feature, which creates on-demand VMs from node recovery points. This is impressively quick: we set it to create a new Hyper-V VM from our latest Exchange 2013 backup and had it ready to boot in 30 seconds.

Alongside D2D and D2D2T migration strategies, UDP supports the Arcserve Cloud service. Coming in 3TB, 6TB or 9TB annual subscriptions, this allows data to be replicated off-site and provides cloud-based Virtual Standby for disaster recovery.

When it comes to restoring data, the Arcserve is flexible. You can load the agent interface from the UDP console or locally at the client, browse recovery points, select drives and folders and choose where to restore them. SQL databases are as easy to restore as individual files, and the 8100 can even make entire data stores available as network shares.

The only part that required more legwork was granular recovery for Exchange. We accessed our Exchange agent and mounted the latest restore point as a new drive on the UDP server. After loading the GRT restore utility and pointing it at the Exchange backup, we could then browse our users, view mailbox contents, connect the utility to our live Exchange server and restore individual items.

For agent-based backups, UDP performs deduplication both locally at the source and globally on the RPS data store. We were impressed by its data reduction efficacy: we backed up 615GB of data, which deduplication and compression scrunched down to only 216GB.

At more than 10,000, the Arcserve 8100 isn't a budget option, but its credentials are beyond reproach. It's easy to deploy and provides top-notch data protection features.

Verdict

At more than £10,000, the Arcserve 8100 isn't a budget option, but its credentials are beyond reproach. It's easy to deploy and provides top-notch data protection features.

1U rack server

1.7GHz Intel Xeon E5-2609 v4

64GB DDR4 (max 160GB)

Avago SAS 9361-4i PCI-E RAID

3 x 2TB Seagate Enterprise SAS3 hot-swap drives in RAID5 array (max 4)

120GB Intel SATA SSD

2 x Gigabit Ethernet

2 x 500W hot-plug PSUs

3yr hardware warranty

Toshiba is back with a bang. After falling behind the likes of Apple, the company is aiming to retake its place as one of the premier business notebook manufacturers, and the new Portg range is how it plans to do it.

Following on the heels of the convertible Portg X20, the X30 is a traditional 13in notebook that's squarely aimed at taking on devices like the Dell XPS 13 and MacBook Pro. But does Toshiba still have enough of the old magic to win back a place at the top table?

Design

The X30 is a truly gorgeous machine. The black semi-gloss chassis is elegant and understated, with subtle gold detailing that adds a touch of class without being too garish or overpowering.

It's got a lot in common with its convertible cousin, the Portg X20W. It's made from the same (admittedly slightly plasticky) magnesium material, and shares a similar design aesthetic. The main differences are that it's a traditional clamshell notebook rather than a 2-in-1, and a change to the keyboard and trackpad setup, which we'll talk more about later.

It's thin and light enough to rival pretty much any other ultrabook on the market, too. The 1.05kg weight is lighter than the MacBook Pro, and at just under 16mm, it's still more than slim enough to slip neatly into your bag.

It's a seriously good-looking device, and can easily go toe-to-toe with the MacBook Pro and Dell XPS 13 as one of the most attractive clamshells available.

Display

The X30's screen is less impressive, but still perfectly efficient nevertheless. The 13.3in Full HD display has a non-reflective matte coating commonly used on business devices to reduce screen glare under harsh lighting.

A maximum brightness of 357cd/m2 is perfectly capable, while not reaching the eye-searing levels of Apple's latest notebooks, and colour accuracy covers an impressive 91.95% of the sRGB gamut - more than enough for standard tasks, and even capable enough to handle some light photo editing.

Keyboard and trackpad

The X30 has a slightly unusual keyboard setup that's reminiscent of older laptop designs. In addition to the standard keyboard and trackpad combo found on most notebooks, it also has physical mouse buttons positioned between the trackpad and the keyboard, as well as an AccuPoint nipple embedded in the center of the keyboard.

It's an unusual combination, but one that we're big fans of. It gives an extra layer of versatility in how you use the device, particularly for older users who remember when this kind of setup was the norm.

The keyboard itself is excellent, with good spacing and travel depth, and firm, solid feedback on the keys. The touchpad is smooth and responsive too, with a coating that lets your finger glide over the surface. It's a superb setup all-round, and offers a level of flexibility in terms of how one uses it that will be sure to please many CIOs.

Performance and specs

Looks aren't everything though, and the X30 needs to be able to back those good looks up with some muscle if it wants to succeed as a business device. In order to do that, it's packing Intel's latest Kaby Lake chips. Our review model was powered by a Core i5-7200U processor with an 8GB RAM allocation, but as with most of Toshiba's business notebooks, several different configurations are available.

The X30's performance in day-to-day use was good, with no dips in speed or reliability even under intensive multi-tasking use. An overall benchmark score of 49 is very respectable - especially considering it's only fitted with a Core i5 chip - and puts it on par with the Surface Laptop.

Battery life was similarly capable, offering a creditable result of 10hrs 28mins in our tests. We found that it was more than capable of lasting through an entire workday with charge to spare, even while multi-tasking.

Ports and features

Many ultrabooks struggle to walk the line between offering a high number of ports for business users whilst keeping the chassis thin enough to retain the 'wow' factor. Thankfully, the Portg X30 isn't one of them.

It includes a very healthy complement of ports and connectors, including one USB 3.0 port, a HDMI output, a micro SD slot and two Thunderbolt 3-enabled USB C ports, providing power, display and data transfer. It's even got a security card reader. All in all, it's more than enough to cover the vast majority of enterprise connection needs - and for any extra connectivity you need, Toshiba offers a fulsomely-equipped USB-C docking station.

In terms of extra features, the X30 supports Windows Hello biometric authentication via an IR camera sensor and a fingerprint reader, as well as PXE, vPro, SCCM and WMI support.

Verdict

The Portg X30 is an excellent business ultrabook, and a true return to form for Toshiba. Not content to sit back and let Apple and others encroach on its turf unchallenged, the Japanese company is coming back to retake its position with all guns blazing.

The X30 may not be the very fastest or longest-lasting laptop, but it's more than capable of keeping up with others in its category and price bracket. What's more, it twins this with a sleek and attractive chassis, packed with a generous allocation of ports whilst still being slim and light enough to qualify as an ultraportable.

Toshiba has succeeded in producing an exceptional business device, and one that we're sad to see leave our review pile. It may be a little expensive, but it's worthy of gracing the desks of even the most discerning techies, from developers all the way to the CIO.

Verdict

The Toshiba Portégé X30 is a phenomenal business ultrabook, dripping with features that make it much better-suited to an enterprise environment than other high-end laptops. It's not the top of the tree in terms of power, but it's close, and it can't be beaten for versatility.

With its new storage server, Broadberry Data Systems has beaten the blue chips: the CyberStore 224S-WSS is the first commercially-available appliance running Microsoft's latest Windows Storage Server 2016 (WSS2016). And it delivers a powerful hardware package at a very reasonable price.

It comes in the form of a 2U all-Supermicro rack system, equipped with dual 2.1GHz Intel Xeon E5-2620 v4 processors and 64GB of DDR4 RAM. Network connections are plentiful: as well as the four embedded Gigabit Ethernet ports, Broadberry has fitted a dual-port Intel 10GBase-T card.

Storage options are flexible too. The CyberStore offers 24 hot-swap SFF drive bays, which will accept either mechanical drives or SSDs, and supports both SATA and SAS interfaces. The Supermicro X10DRH-CLN4 motherboard's C612 chipset handles up to ten SATA connections, while an embedded Broadcom 3008 controller delivers SAS3 support.

The price includes a pair of 800GB Intel SATA SSDs for data storage, leaving 22 bays available for use; WSS2016 is installed on a mirrored pair of 240GB Intel S3520 SSDs, tucked near to the dual 920W hot-plug PSUs at the rear.

Note that that's the Standard Edition of WSS2016, which has no capacity restrictions and no requirement for client access licences. It supports unlimited disks, along with up to two Hyper-V VMs, and there are no memory limitations.

The new OS brings few design changes; the Server Manager interface is almost identical to Windows Server 2012 R2. But there are worthwhile under-the-bonnet improvements for deduplication in particular.

The volume size limit has been raised from 10TB to a maximum of 64TB, and individual files up to 1TB in size are now fully supported. When you create a dedupe volume, the wizard also now offers an extra usage type option for virtualised backup apps.

We tested it with a 4GB data set, using Arcserve Backup 17 to make daily incrementals and weekly full backups over a month. After each backup, we changed 2% of the data in 40% of our test files and ran deduplication jobs manually using WSS2016's slick new PowerShell 5.1 interface. At the end of the simulation, we saw an 84% reduction in data size -- putting WSS2016 on par with more expensive hardware dedupe solutions.

Other new features in WSS2016 include hardened SMB share security and QoS options for Hyper-V virtual disks. Windows 10 clients using Work Folders also now have file changes synchronised immediately, avoiding the up to ten-minute wait for updates.

All other expected features remain, including thin provisioning, Storage Spaces and support for NAS shares and IP SANs. Simple shares are easy to create, as the wizard's Quick option does all the work.

The Advanced share option needs the File Server Resource Manager role to be installed: this lets you set access permissions, apply share-level quotas and select properties for file classification and data management rules.

To test read and write speeds, we fitted a 400GB HGST SAS3 MLC SSD and fired up Iometer. Local performance was strong, with read and write speeds hitting 1,001MB/sec and 830MB/sec respectively. With Iometer set to small 4KB transfer requests, we saw random read and write throughputs of 118,000 and 46,000 IOPS.

We then moved to a remote machine and tested over a 10GbE network connection: we saw only a modest drop-off, with Iometer reporting sequential read and write rates of 935MB/sec and 680MB/sec.

While the CyberStore 224S-WSS comes with great performance and features, it also has huge expansion potential, with seven PCI-E slots via which you can add SAS expansion cards and external disk shelves. Overall, it's the perfect platform for Microsoft's new storage server, at a price that is, for what you get, very sensible.

Thir review originally appeared in PC Pro issue 274.

Verdict

Great performance, features and expansion options make this storage server the perfect platform for Windows Storage Server 2016 - all at a very attractive price

2U rack chassis

Supermicro X10DRH-CLN4 motherboard

2 x 2.1GHz Intel Xeon E5-2620 v4

64GB DDR4 (max 2TB with LRDIMMs)

Broadcom 3008 SAS3

26 hot-swap SFF drive bays

2 x 240GB (OS) and 2 x 800GB (data) Intel S3520 SATA SSDs

4 x Gigabit Ethernet

Intel X540-T2 dual-port 10GBase-T

7 x PCI-E slots

2 x 920W hot-plug Platinum PSUs

Windows Storage Server 2016 Standard

3yr on-site warranty

Centralised wireless network management has historically been a significant business expense - but nowadays many vendors are simply giving it away. For small businesses, TP-Link's Auranet EAP330 access point offers the best of both worlds: buy it as a standalone AP, and when the time comes to expand, add additional units and manage them all with TP-Link's free EAP Controller software.

The EAP330 is packed with business-class features. It's an AC1900 AP with support for concurrent 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands, sporting three internal omni-directional aerials for each band. Lurking under the solid metal casing you'll also find two Gigabit Ethernet ports, one of which supports 802.11af PoE and 802.11at PoE+.

We were pleased to see that, on first contact, the AP's web console immediately asked us to change the default administrative password. The impression was then rather spoilt by defaulting to open SSIDs for both radios, but it took mere seconds to apply encryption. The EAP330 supports eight SSIDs per radio each with their own security profile.

During SSID creation, you can choose an authentication scheme, opt to conceal or broadcast the SSID and enable isolation to stop wireless clients on the same SSID from seeing each other. VLAN membership can also be used to stop guest wireless users from accessing systems on the LAN.

You can also tighten up security by requiring users on specific SSIDs to provide a global password and serving up a custom AUP. You can't directly upload a company logo but it's possible to redirect guests to an external web authentication page or RADIUS server.

We found performance was good. Our Netgear AC1200-equipped Windows 10 desktop averaged a speedy 60MB/sec at close range when copying a file to a server on the LAN. The AP also has a good reach: we were able to wander with an iPad nearly 45m down the main building corridor before the SweetSpots app declared the signal lost.

QoS (Quality of Service) is enabled on both radios and automatically prioritises voice and video traffic. You can view tables of connected clients and rogue APs: if you want more advanced features such as wireless heatmaps and traffic graphs, you'll need to switch to the EAP Controller software. Setting it up isn't a big upheaval though: the software took two minutes to install on a Windows 10 client, and immediately spotted our two test APs.

At this point, in standalone mode, they were classed as "pending": once "adopted", they obediently adopted all their wireless settings from those configured in the software. One default SSID was assigned to both radios, but you can add more and apply upload and download rate limits to each one. All other standalone features, including guest portals, QoS, scheduled power cycles and MAC address filters can be configured from here.

The site statistics page is very informative as it provides graphs, tables and pie charts of APs, SSIDs and total wireless traffic. It's easy to spot bandwidth-hungry users: the "Quick Look" section shows the most active APs and the busiest client across the entire managed network.

What's more, along with AP discovery and database services, the software runs a local web server, so it can be accessed from anywhere. The browser-based portal is nicely designed and opens with a customisable map page, where you can view AP locations on each managed site, and use heatmaps to plan coverage.

To manage multiple distributed sites, you can set up a private cloud service using an Amazon Web Services EC2 instance. TP-Link has a superb video explaining how to create an EC2 Free Tier instance, install the EAP Controller and manage all your APs over the internet.

TP-Link's Auranet EAP330 is well suited to upwardly mobile SMBs. It provides an affordable, secure and high-performance wireless network, and the EAP Controller software is a class management act that offers scope to grow your network - without having to budget for an expensive subscription.

This review originally appeared in PC Pro issue 270.

Verdict

TP-Link’s Auranet EAP330 is well suited to upwardly mobile SMBs. It provides an affordable, secure and high-performance wireless network, and the EAP Controller software is a class management act that offers scope to grow your network – without having to budget for an expensive subscription.

AC1900 802.11ac/n/g/b/a wireless AP

Concurrent 2.4/5GHz radios

2 x Gigabit Ethernet

PoE/PoE+ on port 1

6 x internal omni-directional aerials

Wall/ceiling mount

Drop ceiling T-mount bracket

External PSU

221 x 194 x 37mm (WDH)

Web browser managementv

TP-Link EAP Controller Software included

Lifetime warranty

At first glance, the Scan 3XS Classic 3D isn't particularly unusual. Yet another black full tower chassis, yet another Core i7, yet another Nvidia card. But it manages to edge ahead of its competitors thanks to generous pricing, especially when compared to this month's similarly specified alternatives.

Scan hasn't been as aggressive as some when it comes to frequency-enhancing its processor. The Intel Core i7-6950X is set to 4GHz rather than its nominal 3GHz, while others opted for 4.2GHz. But that's still a good boost, and with ten cores on hand there's plenty of processing power available. The processor isn't cooled by a water system, but by a Noctua NH-U14S sink and fan, which is nearly inaudible and very good at keeping the CPU temperature under control. The increased processor speed is backed by the full three years of the manufacturer's warranty, of which the first year is on-site.

The hefty Core i7 is partnered by 64GB of 2,666MHz DDR4 SDRAM. Scan has supplied this as eight 8GB DIMMs, so unfortunately you can't upgrade without swapping out RAM. However, 64GB should be adequate for most needs for the lifetime of this system; note the Asus X99-A II motherboard has a 128GB maximum, should you need it.

The 3XS Classic 3D joins the crowd by offering Nvidia's brand new Quadro P5000. This is now the ultra-high-end card of choice, since the P6000 above it is so ludicrously expensive. With 2,560 CUDA cores and 16GB of enhanced GDDR5X memory, this is a truly capable professional 3D accelerator for modelling or, should you wish to venture into such a field, GPU-powered rendering.

Primary storage is the one small chink in Scan's armour. Intel's 600p Series is the first TLC 3D NAND-based SSD to hit the market, and it brings the prices of PCI Express NVMe M.2 SSDs down close to that of the formerly cheaper SATA variety. But while it's faster than SATA, it's not as quick as rivals with Samsung SSDs, with reading at 1.13GB/sec and writing at 468MB/sec, with the latter only a couple of times faster than a SATA hard disk.

Scan also supplies only 256GB of SSD storage, but it's joined by 2TB of Seagate Barracuda 7200.14 conventional 7,200rpm hard disk storage. With reading at 206MB/sec and writing at 198MB/sec, this is a quick hard disk. There's a 24x Asus DVD writer to round off the specification, but no handy memory card reader.

Performance is as expected for the hardware. The Maxon Cinebench R15 rendering score of 2,080 is around 5% behind the Core i7 6950X systems with more aggressive clocks, with the OpenGL score of 180 also a little down on the competition. However, the SPECviewperf 12.1 scores are just as capable, with a very good result of 146 in 3ds Max 05.

The OctaneBench result of 139 is the best of the Quadro P5000 bunch, showing good GPU rendering abilities, although the LuxMark test wouldn't run on this system for some reason. In the IT Pro benchmarks, the second best image-editing result and third best video-encoding score show that this system is a capable all-rounder. Whether you're modelling or rendering 3D, image editing, or video editing, the Scan has what it takes.

The Scan 3XS Classic 3D isn't quite perfect. Its primary SSD isn't the quickest. But apart from that it can go toe-to-toe with most contenders, with the exception of the monstrous Lenovo ThinkStation P910 and its two CPUs. Considering that the Classic 3D is anywhere between 450 and 950 cheaper than its competitors, this workstation gives you a lot of state-of-the art content creation kit for the money.

This review originally appeared in PC Pro issue 270.

Verdict

Considering that the Classic 3D is anywhere between £450 and £950 cheaper than its competitors, this workstation gives you a lot of state-of-the art content creation kit for the money.

The Lenovo ThinkStation P910 may be twice the price of most other workstations on the market, but it's also in a different league when it comes to performance. That's due to a dual-socket motherboard, twin Xeon processors and the most expensive graphics card currently available - the latter alone is responsible for nearly half the cost.

While most workstations are integrated into high quality but generic chassis, Lenovo is big enough to design its own entirely bespoke cases. And what a job it's done: you can remove almost every component by just pulling the correct combination of clips or levers. The M.2 storage caddies unclip and slide out, and even the PCI Express adapter cards and fans can be released in this way, albeit with some care and dexterity.

Lenovo equipped our review samples with a pair of high-end Intel Xeon E5-2687W v4 processors. It's an understatement to say that these are highly capable CPUs: they have a whopping 12 cores apiece, each running at a nominal 3GHz with a top 3.5GHz Turbo mode. For good measure, there's Hyper-Threading too. This will be a phenomenal platform for CPU-intensive tasks such as rendering, but it's still great for modelling. Lenovo has partnered its twin processors with a hefty 128GB of 2.4GHz DDR4 SDRAM. Should you ever need more, there are eight DIMM slots free for upgrades to a maximum of 1TB.

The core specification is decidedly no nonsense, but this is matched by the graphics provision: enter the Nvidia Quadro P6000. This hugely powerful card costs around 4,400 exc VAT. A direct replacement for the Quadro M6000, the P6000 includes 24GB of GDDR5X memory, which translates into a bandwidth leap from 317GB/sec to 432GB/sec. Even more impressive is the huge jump in CUDA cores from 3,072 to 3,840. That's well over twice as many as a Quadro M4000.

The storage provision on our review sample is more a showcase of what's possible than what you might specify for everyday usage. Our P910 came with a princely total of eight drives - four PCI Express NVMe M.2 SSDs and four 7,200rpm SATA hard disks. The former are all 512GB Samsung SM951 units, which have been superseded by the SM961. The latter are 4TB Hitachi Ultrastar 7K4000 drives. Both choices are a little slower than the very best, but when the SM951 manages reading at 2.4GB/sec and writing at 1.47GB/sec we're certainly not going to complain. Especially when there's a wealth of possibilities for performance RAID configurations to improve things, with 18TB of capacity to call upon.

With two processors and the fastest graphics around, unsurprisingly, the P910 came top of most of our tests. Its Maxon Cinebench R15 rendering result of 3,776 is more than twice what many of this month's systems managed. Only the OpenGL score of 148 was a curious aberration. And thanks to the immense video encoding and multi-tasking potential of the 24 cores, the P910 cruised to the second fastest score we've ever seen in the IT Pro benchmarks. Its OctaneBench 3.04 and LuxMark 3.1 scores were also way ahead, showing the potency of the P6000 for GPU rendering whether with CUDA or OpenCL. Furthermore, the SPECviewperf 12.1 scores were mostly way ahead of the P5000-based systems, although not in every viewset.

It's difficult to judge the P910 against most of its competition, because it's so different in price and uncompromising specification. It may be expensive, but not really any more than you would expect for the amount of hardware included. Moreover, you have to admire the tool-free chassis design, which would streamline upgrade and technical support. This is a blue chip product for a blue chip price, but nobody got fired for buying IBM, even a decade after its PC hardware division was bought by Lenovo.

This review was originally published in PC Pro issue 270.

Verdict

This is a blue chip product for a blue chip price, but nobody got fired for buying IBM, even a decade after its PC hardware division was bought by Lenovo.

Dell Technologies has re-emphasised the importance of its client devices business as part of workforce transformation efforts within the enterprise.

At Dell EMC World 2017, the company highlighted the role that devices like PCs, laptops and peripherals can play in modernising the way that businesses work, particularly focusing on how new technologies and device categories can enhance productivity, creativity and collaboration.

Global PC shipments have been steadily falling for the past few years despite a recent 1.6% hike in the UK, but Dell was quick to reassure customers that its core PC business is still a fundamental part of the company's strategy.

"The PC is very important to our customers, and to us," founder and CEO Michael Dell confirmed, pointing out that in the PC market, Dell's revenues, market share and average selling price are all going up, rather than down.

The company told customers that its aim is not just to equip and enable today's workforce, but also to prepare businesses for the demands that future staff will place on them.

A key trend Dell highlighted was the growing number of employees who work from home, as well as the expectations of millenial workers - almost half of whom would quit their jobs if they had to use sub-par tech.

"One of the things that customers have figured out is that it really does not make sense to give the people that work in your organisation the cheapest, lowest-cost computer," said Dell. "If you want to attract and retain and make productive people inside your company, you actually want to give them great tools so you can inspire their creativity and their productivity."

One of his company's big pushes for this year's event has been around the idea that work isn't a place, but an activity. As such, the company is making special effort to shine a light on flexible working, enhanced mobility and collaboration technologies that enable employees to work from anywhere.

The vendor is also embracing emerging tech trends, with VR and AR featuring heavily. Use cases from Nike and Daqri were shown off, and the company even announced a new tech partner programme for connecting companies who want to start AR and VR projects with suppliers and experts to help them succeed.

Security is a big concern with remote access, but Netop Remote Control impressed us with its extensive range of anti-intrusion measures. We could password-protect clients, require Windows login credentials to authenticate, integrate with Active Directory (AD), restrict support staff capabilities - and, as if that weren't enough, use the optional Security Server module to log and manage all authentication.

Netop also offers a wide range of connection options, making it a great choice for businesses that want to extend support beyond the LAN. Each client system simply requires the host component to be installed, which must be password-protected. The host took two minutes to set up on each of our Windows 10 and OS X El Capitan clients (Sierra support is coming soon).

A wizard then helped us with our connection choices. For large deployments, Netop's Pack'n Deploy tool helps by pushing the host to multiple Windows systems, complete with custom configurations.

Each host can be set to connect only to the guest console, or you can select the Netop Portal option to use the cloud-based service, allowing you to support users over the internet. Choosing this adds communications profiles for both modes to the host, so it can be accessed using either method.

Guest access controls are remarkably flexible. Even the default host privileges allowed us to decide precisely what our support staff can and can't do. We could block access to specific input devices, control file-transfer permissions, decide whether they could run programs and protect the link using AES-256 encryption.

Different settings can be applied for AD authentication or Netop's security server, and you can defeat brute-force password guessing by limiting the number of failed login attempts. You can also require the host system to be restarted or locked when a remote session finishes.

When it comes to connecting, the guest console is easy to use. It browses the local network and lists discovered hosts ready for selection. Our only quibble is that its OS identification skills could use some honing: all our Windows 10 hosts were reported as running Windows NT.

You can simply double-click on a host from the list to begin a remote access session - or you can use its dropdown menu to access specific functions such as file transfer, text or audio/video chat, command execution and messaging. The remote control window provides a toolbar ribbon across the top for in-session access to these functions, as well as facilities to use the clipboard and reboot the host system.

Host inventory is detailed. It showed us all the key hardware components of our clients, along with a complete list of installed software. The remote management option loads a separate console showing the host's storage status, along with access to its Registry editor, Task Manager, Event Viewer and running services.

The Netop Portal cloud service is a bit simpler: aside from remote control, it only offers options to lock, restart or shut down the host. Still, it's free as long as you have a support and maintenance contract - and the guest console can also connect to hosts via your portal account, providing a full set of control features.

Netop Remote Control will appeal to businesses that want a feature-rich remote support solution with a sharp focus on security. It's very affordable, and the Portal service makes it simple to extend support into the cloud.

Verdict

Netop Remote Control will appeal to businesses that want a feature-rich remote support solution with a sharp focus on security. It's very affordable, and the Portal service makes it simple to extend support into the cloud.

IT staff are frustrated by their non-techy colleagues and feel underappreciated, according to possibly the least surprising research ever.

More than two-thirds of UK IT workers say their colleagues don't appreciate the complexity of their jobs, a UK survey of 1,000 IT and 1,000 non-IT staff commissioned by Jobsite found, and over 75% feel that fellow employees don't make an effort to educate themselves on even basic tech issues.

This has contributed to a general feeling that they perform a thankless task, with half of IT professionals reporting that their work is only noticed when something goes wrong.

Interestingly, this isn't simply an example of IT having a persecution complex. The study showed that 85% of general office workers actually don't understand how to fix basic tech issues, with crashing computers, email errors and system lockouts the most common concerns.

Moreover, the tension between IT and general users definitely seems to be mutual, with more than half of workers saying their IT departments worked at a slower speed to the rest of the business, and almost 90% said they have become frustrated with the IT department at some point in their job.

Jobsite's Fiona Rigby said the research "has highlighted friction between IT professionals and their office worker colleagues". The recruitment firm has launched an initiative to help foster cooperation between IT departments and the rest of the business by highlighting some of the misconceptions surrounding the IT department.

"We are launching this campaign today to try and raise awareness of the critical role these workers play in driving UK businesses forward. By educating the average office worker to the range of skills IT departments bring to the table, we hope to help IT be viewed with greater prestige."

Picture: Bigstock

Aimed at professionals on the move, HP's OfficeJet 250 Mobile AIO cleverly combines colour print, copy and scan functions in an portable package. It offers both USB 2 and wireless support, with a lithium-ion battery that HP reckons will print 225 ISO pages on a single charge, and sells for less than 200.

At 3kg, it isn't something you'll want to carry with you everywhere you go, but it folds up into a neat package measuring 380 x 198 x 91mm (WDH) that can be transported in a large bag or briefcase. When it's time to print, the top cover opens up into a 50-page input feeder, with a 2.65in colour LCD touchscreen popping up at the front. The scanner and its ten-page ADF are concealed beneath a flip-out cover further forward.

The OfficeJet 250 uses standard HP 62 or 62XL black and tri-colour ink cartridges, which snap in to holders under the front cover. Running costs are reasonable for this class, with the high-yield versions delivering mono and colour pages for 3p and 4.8p.

Installation is easy. Along with USB and wireless, the OfficeJet supports Wi-Fi Direct. After we'd set up a wireless connection on the printer's control panel, HP's Easy Start utility automatically downloaded the latest drivers, and following a few simple questions about the printer, it handled the basic setup. On our Windows 10 laptops, that included loading HP's AIO Printer Remote app for printing photos and documents. We also loaded HP's Scan and Capture app for scanning in photos and documents, and the HP TWAIN driver as well.

For mobile devices, there's support for Bluetooth Smart and Apple AirPrint, which worked perfectly on our iPad. Availing ourselves of HP's ePrint iOS app gave access to a super set of features, including options to browse and print files directly from the cloud and web services such as Box, Dropbox, Facebook, Evernote, OneDrive, iCloud and Instagram.

Management is simple, too, thanks to the 250 Mobile's embedded web server, which provides information about status and consumables. You can keep an eye on battery capacity here, and scan documents directly to a web browser or email address.

Then there's the HP Connected portal service that assigns it an email address so you can send documents to it from anywhere. If you're in a meeting with a client and they want to print something, they can simply send it as an email attachment without having to load any drivers.

Top printing speeds aren't quite as fast as HP suggests. It promises "up to" 20ppm in draft mode when plugged into the mains, and 18ppm running on battery power. In fact, our 20-page test Word document was delivered at 15ppm on AC power, while our colour DTP document fell to 11ppm.

We saw no such problems in the standard printing mode, though: both tests were completed at the claimed 10ppm and 7ppm. In battery mode, we found speeds dropped marginally by around 10%.

Output quality is impressive. Text is nice and sharp in Normal and Best quality modes, with only a slight dusting on smaller fonts. Both mono and colour photos revealed plenty of detail in darker areas, while graphical reports showed excellent detail, with no hint of banding or edge bleeding.

The touchscreen provides plenty of scan options, too. You can make copies of documents, scan them directly to registered systems as images or emails, or send them to a removable storage device plugged into the secondary USB port at the side of the printer. Double-sided scanning isn't supported, but speeds are as quoted, and we found output quality at both 200dpi and 300dpi to be very good.

The OfficeJet 250 is an innovative and highly portable all-in-one. With its integrated battery and wireless support it's great for those who work on the road, and is a worthy IT Pro award-winner.

This review originally appeared in PC Pro issue 267

Verdict

The OfficeJet 250 is an innovative and highly portable all-in-one. With its integrated battery and wireless support it’s great for those who work on the road, and is a worthy IT Pro award-winner.

Fujitsu's fi-7480 is a versatile scanner. It can handle double-sided documents in sizes from A8 to A3 - plus folded A2 sheets - and take heavyweight paper up to 413gsm. It won't keep you waiting long either, with a top A4 speed of 80ppm at 300dpi colour.

Scan operations are sped up with Fujitsu's slick PaperStream software. Designed to streamline the scanning workflow, this builds clean-up and image-processing features into the TWAIN and ISIS drivers.

Tipping the scales at a meaty 7.6kg, the fi-7480 feels reassuringly solid, and has a capacious 100-sheet ADF, which clips securely at the rear. It has an equally large A3 output tray, and an LCD panel and control pad that can be used to quickly select scan profiles.

Installation on a Windows 10 PC took around 20 minutes. The routine automatically loaded the PaperStream components and asked us to connect the scanner via its USB 3 port to set up the driver - it isn't a network scanner.

The latest version of the Fujitsu PaperStream Capture software sees some big improvements over previous releases. Profiles let you combine scan settings such as colour, greyscale or mono output, resolutions, paper sizes and duplex or simplex. The software also allows you to scan directly to a local folder, a network location, or to an FTP or SharePoint server. The free Capture Connect app adds the ability to upload scans directly to various cloud services, including Dropbox, Google Drive and OneDrive.

Capture profiles also link up with the PaperStream IP driver, where you can enable a heap of extra features. These include hole filling, blank-page removal, page rotation and front/back merging, where images from duplex scans are combined onto a single page. You can use blank pages, barcodes or patch codes to apply document separation for big batch scans.

The metadata option adds even more versatility, allowing you to use OCR to extract information from specific areas in each page. This is straightforward to use: after previewing a sample scan, you draw a box around the area from which you want to capture the information, then choose whether you want it stored as a text, CSV or XML file.

Once you're set up, you can use the integral Administrator Tool Usability tab to store it as a scan profile. In this area, the fi-7480 goes way beyond your average desktop scanner. You can specify up to 50 profiles, and the scanner's three-line LCD panel supports 48-character names, so you can find the right one and launch a scan directly from the scanner itself. Alternatively, you can double-click it in the PaperStream Capture interface.

Your scan won't take long: this scanner delivers on its speed claims. We timed mono and colour duplex scans of our 50 pages of well-thumbed bank statements at an impressive 83ppm at both 200dpi and 300dpi. A4 pages scan slightly more slowly in portrait than landscape, but our four scan tests still came out at 68ppm across the board.

Fujitsu's intelligent sonic paper protection (iSOP) feature delivers impeccable paper handling. On the rare occasion we had a paper jam or double-feed, the scanner stopped instantly before any paper damage occurred. The ADF's independently movable, lockable paper guides also help when it comes to ensuring that big batch scans go off smoothly.

Quality, meanwhile, is crisp and clean in both greyscale and colour. 200dpi PDFs came out more than clear enough for archival - so you won't need to waste storage on higher resolutions. OCR capabilities are also exceptional, with fonts as small as 6pt recognised correctly.

With a price close to 2,000, this scanner is overkill for businesses that need to scan only the occasional document. But it delivers on its performance promises, and Fujitsu's superb PaperStream package adds even more value, making this the perfect choice for those seeking uncompromising speed and scan quality.

This review originally appeared in PC Pro issue 267

Verdict

With a price close to £2,000, this scanner is overkill for businesses that need to scan only the occasional document. But it delivers on its performance promises, and Fujitsu’s superb PaperStream package adds even more value, making this the perfect choice for those seeking uncompromising speed and scan quality.

A3 desktop scanner

600dpi colour optical resolution

80ppm @ 300dpi colour/A4/landscape

Simplex/duplex scanning

100/50 A4/A3-page ADF

USB 3

External PSU

ScanSnap Manager, PaperStream IP TWAIN/ISIS driver

PaperStream Capture, Scan to SharePoint, ABBYY Fine Reader for ScanSnap software

380 x 209 x 168mm WDH (closed)

1yr advanced exchange warranty

The new Dell Precision 5520 banishes memories of blank and bulky workstations by cramming the latest Intel processors and Nvidia Quadro GPUs inside a sleek metal and carbon fibre frame.

This level of extravagance means the Dell isn't cheap, but the 1,675 model we've reviewed is still a little cheaper than its key rival - the Apple MacBook Pro 15.

Screen, Keyboard and Trackpad

The Precision has a 15.6in screen inside a 14in chassis, with three bezels slimmed down to cram the hardware inside. The panel impresses elsewhere, too: it uses IPS technology, and the screen is sturdy despite its slim 4mm-thick frame.

The screen's benchmark results are also solid. The 1,718:1 contrast ratio is excellent, and it remained at 1.666:1 when we dialled the brightness back from its retina-searing level of 378cd/m2 to a reasonable 150cd/m2. Those superb ratios combine with stonking black levels, which mean colours are rendered with subtlety and depth. The average Delta E of 2.21 is decent, and it improved to 0.78 when we dropped the brightness.

In other areas, however, the panel is more ordinary. The colour temperature of 7,627K is cool, and it means the screen feels pallid. It's not too uniform, either: backlight strength swung by 13% across the bottom row and 12% across the middle.

Those more middling measurements mean this screen is less capable with colour-sensitive work. And, as if to confirm that, the Precision rendered 91.8% of the sRGB gamut but only 66.8% of the Adobe RGB spectrum. Those figures are a little underwhelming for a workstation, especially when Dell boasts of the Precision's 100% Adobe RGB coverage.

That disconnect occurs because two different panels are available for this machine. The entry-level model reviewed here has a 1080p screen, but that Adobe RGB designation is only available on the machine's 4K panel - an option that costs an extra 211 but also offers an IGZO touchscreen and Dell Premier Color's professional presets.

The 1080p screen has great contrast, black levels and colour accuracy, which means it's solid for most work tasks - but the colour temperature and gamut coverage means it slips behind the superb colours of Apple's Retina display. It also has less real estate than the MacBook, which has a sharper 2,880 x 1,800 resolution.

We have few qualms about the Precision's ergonomics. The keyboard is backlit with large buttons, and they depress with a shallow and consistent action that encourages fast, precise typing - and with more travel than the MacBook's butterfly mechanism. The only problem is minor, with larger buttons like the space bar and enter key feeling a little wobbly.

The trackpad is one of Dell's gesture-heavy Precision units, and its smooth surface offers pin-sharp operation and two satisfyingly clicky buttons. The MacBook's trackpad is larger though, and offers similar quality.

Design & Features

The gunmetal lid extends to the Precision's bevelled edges, and the interior is coated with dark carbon fibre. It looks different from the MacBook, with its glossy black and smooth metal, but no worse - and that's no surprise, considering this machine shares its design with the excellent XPS 15.

The good-looking exterior offers more versatility than Apple's notebook, with USB 3 and Thunderbolt, a battery indicator and a card reader. The downside, though, is that Dell's machine is chunkier: the Dell's 22mm body is thicker than the 15.5mm MacBook, and both weigh around 1.8kg. This may not be much of a problem, however, as many workstation laptops tend to spend most of their time at a desk.

Dell has also loaded this machine up with useful software: the Power Manager serves up battery and power options, while the Precision Optimizer has monitoring information alongside profiles for work applications like CAD tools and graphic design utilities. It's ISV-certified, too.

Hardware and Specs

The Dell arrives with Intel's Kaby Lake architecture, and its choice of chip outpaces the older Skylake part inside the MacBook. The entry-level Precision includes an i5-7300HQ processor, which has four 2.5GHz cores that Turbo to 3.5GHz, but no Hyper-Threading.

Apple's entry-level machine comes with a Core i7-6700HQ that starts at 2.6GHz and Turbo Boosts to 3.6GHz, and it does have Hyper-Threading - but it also uses an older architecture.

Graphical grunt comes from the Nvidia Quadro M1200. It's a mid-range mobile chip tuned to the needs of work software, and it has 640 stream processors alongside a 1,093MHz core - a solid specification that also has 4GB of memory. Those specifications are marginally better than the AMD Radeon Pro 450 inside the MacBook, which has 640 stream processors but a slower 800MHz core and just 2GB of dedicated RAM.

The Dell has 2,400MHz memory, which is faster than Apple, but its 8GB allocation is half as much as the MacBook offers. Apple fights back in storage, too: the Precision has a 256GB Toshiba XG3 SSD that delivers speeds of 1.4GB/s and 1.1GB/s, but the MacBook's PCI drive delivered speeds of 3.1GB/s and 1.4GB/s - a blazing pace that we've yet to see anyone come close to matching.

There's very little to choose between the two machines in benchmarks: the Dell has a newer processor and slightly better GPU, but the MacBook has Hyper-Threading and better storage. They're both exceptionally quick machines with solid benchmark scores - the Dell's overall score of 90 in our application tests isn't far short of the powerful desktop chip we used as our reference result. The Precision has the grunt to run intensive tasks, and its SPECviewperf 12 scores further demonstrated its ability: it returned a solid score of 44.8 in the 3DSMax test, and 61.38 in the SW-03 benchmark.

Impressively, Dell's machine produced this level of performance while remaining chilled - the fan noise was modest, and the Precision's exterior only became a little warmer during benchmarks and stress-tests. The processor's peak temperature of 91C is a tad high, but the clock speed never throttled and the silicon never became unstable.

The Precision's three-cell battery lasted for eight hours and 56 minutes in our standard test - a good result that's almost identical to the MacBook.

Alternative Specifications

Dell's machine is littered with potential upgrades, but this versatility makes it even pricier than the MacBook Pro.

Upgrading to a Core i7 costs 151, and deploying a beefy Xeon E3-1505M v6 costs 226. The 4K screen is 211, and doubling the memory costs 93. Upgrading to a 512GB SSD is 327, and doubling the battery capacity costs 31. Fitting a Core i7 CPU, 4K screen and 16GB of memory increases the price to 2,034, which is more than the entry-level MacBook Pro 15.

The standard three-year warranty is a generous next-business-day deal, but upgrading to ProSupport costs 193 - and extending that deal is more expensive still.

Conclusion

The Precision 5520 is a superb laptop that crams huge functionality into a small, attractive exterior. The Kaby Lake processor is fast, and the Nvidia Quadro GPU means this machine will handle graphical tasks with aplomb.

Even the entry-level machine is expensive, though, and it's still hindered by its 1080p screen and middling SSD. To fix those problems, you'll need to spend a lot more - which makes the MacBook's Retina display all the more tempting.

Regardless of the specification, though, the Precision remains a top-quality choice for workstation power in an impressively small package - the entry-level specification is cheaper than the MacBook, and its customisable components help it become more versatile than the Apple. If you need true workstation performance in a lightweight package, the Precision easily justifies its cost.

Verdict

Huge power and versatility inside a small and smart design – but you’ll pay for it

Is there a place for NAS anymore? Until recently, I wasn't sure. Five years ago, the idea of centralised backup and file storage for my home and small business was incredibly appealing. Now I use OneDrive and Dropbox as my go-to save locations, while Google Drive and iCloud Drive play a role in supporting my iOS and Android hardware.

Similarly, I once had big plans to centralise all the music, movies and recorded TV in the home and make it accessible through our Android tablets and Roku media streamers. Now, with the likes of Netflix, Now TV, Amazon Prime and Spotify, that idea seems redundant.

Unexpectedly, however, I'm beginning to change my mind. For one thing, NAS drives are becoming easier to set up and work with, so that I can get the kind of convenient, heavily automated sync and sharing I expect from Dropbox through my own personal cloud. With some of the more advanced units in particular, many of the hoops you used to have to jump through have disappeared. I can access my content through my phone or my browser, and even have my phone's photos upload automatically over Wi-Fi.

Read our article on the Best NAS Drives for more information about what NAS could suit you.

Performance is another big strength. Sure, my personal video library can't rival that of Netflix, but there's no buffering or dropped connections to spoil my entertainment. I can work on a document right from the NAS folder, and I wouldn't even know that it's not on my local drive. If I need to back up edited photos, it happens in seconds.

What's more, there's no need to worry about capacity, with 2TB or more of space. Sure, I don't think it's an option to run a library of Steam games directly from a NAS, but there's nothing to stop me syncing libraries across my two PCs. Try doing that with a cloud storage service.

Most of all, though, I'm impressed with the power and versatility of these devices. In a way, NAS has become too limiting a term; you can use them for simple backup, sync and storage, but some are now all-in-one media centres, IP camera security centres or even simple, low-cost email, web and VPN servers.

I can use one to stream Ultra HD video to my TV, but I could also use it for a small business virtualisation strategy or to service a school's intranet. It's hard to think of any other hardware that's so affordable and flexible. NAS devices mimic the advantages of cloud storage without many of the disadvantages, giving you the same "anytime, anywhere" access, but at a lower ongoing cost with more capacity and control.

In short, the NAS comeback is on.

PRTG 16 Network Monitor beats the competition hands down for versatility. It can monitor virtually any system or service you care to name, with this latest release offering over 200 different sensors.Those include not just local resources, but cloud services too. PRTG can monitor eight Amazon CloudWatch services, plus Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive and Dropbox - and it's all included in the price.

There's also a Common SaaS sensor that can monitor uptime for web-based services such as Office 365, Salesforce, Google Apps, Twitter and YouTube. The sensor checks on service availability and response times, and all its findings can be viewed together in one window.

Installation is a cinch: we had PRTG loaded on a Windows 7 host system in less than ten minutes. The handy configuration wizard guides you through initial network discovery, and runs through a basic tutorial of the web console, highlighting points of interest.

The discovery process can be scheduled to run regularly, and will automatically assign sets of sensors to each device according to its type. Thus, our Windows servers received sensors for CPU and memory usage, active services, disk space, apps and so on, while our switches were assigned sensors for each network interface.

PRTG is licensed according to the number of sensors you're using. Be aware that you can burn through these very quickly - our 48-port HP switch alone grabbed more than 60. However, it's easy enough to delete those you don't need, and return them to the pool for use with other devices.

The PRTG web console presents a wealth of valuable information, with systems neatly organised into hierarchical groupings. Systems can be sorted into groups, and can inherit settings such as login credentials and discovery schedules from the parent group -- or have their own settings.

Colour-coded sensors make it easy to see when resources are up, down, paused or in a warning state. Move the mouse pointer over a sensor and after a couple seconds it will pop up a window with graphs of live data and any relevant warning messages.

Sensor states and threshold triggers can also be used to issue email, SNMP trap, SMS or Syslog notifications. The sensors are given preset values when they're first assigned to a system or device, but you can change these at any level of the group hierarchy.

You can also keep an eye on things via Paessler's iOS app: we used it on an iPad to remotely link up with our main PRTG server and view all monitored systems. It's a great app, providing almost as much information as the main console, and it receives sensor alerts via push notifications.

The new Dropbox and Google Drive sensors work well. After authenticating, we had both sensors up and running in seconds. Both showed downtime, plus the percentage of storage available for our accounts. The Google sensor also showed the account's trash size.

A final distinction is the Windows Update sensor. This counts installed and missing critical, important and moderate updates, and will warn you if any go outside of preset thresholds.

In all, you'll be hard-pushed to find a more comprehensive network monitoring package than this. There are no hidden costs or extra packages to buy either, making Paessler PRTG our network monitor of choice.

This review originally appeared in PC Pro issue 268.

Verdict

You'll be hard-pushed to find a more comprehensive network monitoring package than this. There are no hidden costs or extra packages to buy either, making Paessler PRTG our network monitor of choice.

Requirements

Apple's brand new campus - colloquially dubbed 'the spaceship', due to its neo-futurist design - will officially open in April, the company has announced.

The facility will officially be named Apple Park, and will house more than 12,000 employees along with several research and development labs. It will also contain a 1,000-seat auditorium, which will replace the 'Town Hall' space that the company currently uses to host major events.

The new event space will be named the Steve Jobs Theater in honour of the company's late co-founder. The new headquarters was one of the last projects that Jobs worked on before his death from pancreatic cancer in 2011.

"Steve's vision for Apple stretched far beyond his time with us. He intended Apple Park to be the home of innovation for generations to come," said Apple CEO Tim Cook. "The workspaces and parklands are designed to inspire our team as well as benefit the environment. We've achieved one of the most energy-efficient buildings in the world and the campus will run entirely on renewable energy."

The process of moving the company's employees into the new complex is expected to take around six months, with construction continuing in certain areas for the duration of the summer.

Apple Park will occupy 175 acres in California's Santa Clara Valley, around 2 miles from the company's current headquarters at Infinite Loop in Cupertino. The central building has an area of 2.8 million square feet and the company claims it is made of the world's largest curved glass panels.

As well as Apple's corporate facilities, the park will also contain a visitor's center for members of the public, including a cafe and an Apple Store. There will also be a 100,000-square foot employee gym and two miles of running paths.

"Steve invested so much of his energy creating and supporting vital, creative environments. We have approached the design, engineering and making of our new campus with the same enthusiasm and design principles that characterise our products," said Jony Ive, Apple's chief design officer.

"Connecting extraordinarily advanced buildings with rolling parkland creates a wonderfully open environment for people to create, collaborate and work together. We have been extremely fortunate to be able to work closely, over many years, with the remarkable architectural practice Foster + Partners."

28/09/2016: Apple switches London HQ to Battersea Power Station

Apple is establishing a new London headquarters in Battersea Power Station, the company has announced.

The company's new offices will house around 1,400 employees consolidated from eight separate locations around the capital, moving into the space in 2021.

The new offices will occupy roughly 500,000 square feet over five floors of the newly-redeveloped building's central Boiler House. The iconic landmark lay derelict for decades, but has recently undergone an extensive and costly renovation project to redevelop the structure.

"We are delighted Apple chose to make this their home in 2021," said Rob Tincknell, head of the Battersea Power Station Development Company.

"It has always been our clear objective to create one of London's most thriving new communities and this commitment from Apple will undoubtedly help us achieve this goal."

London Mayor Sadiq Khan also expressed his support for the project, calling it a "sign that London is open to the biggest brands in the world and the leading city for trade and investment".

Apple expressed its excitement about the move in a statement to the London Evening Standard, calling Battersea Power Station "a magnificent new development at one of the city's best-known landmarks".

"This is a great opportunity to have our entire team working and collaborating in one location," a spokesperson said, "while supporting the renovation of a neighbourhood rich with history."

However, while the new facility will act as the company's London base of operations, Apple's main European headquarters will still be located in County Cork, Ireland, but Apple's tax payments to Ireland have courted controversy in recent months, with Apple ordered to pay the government 13 billion.