14 DAY TRIAL // VIA Technologies, a company that is known for its power-efficient x86 processors, has announced today that it's entering the design manufacturing business, as part of a plan to provide flexible system hardware solutions. According to the announcement, the company will provide its knowledge and expertise in small form factor and IPC markets, to OEM and ODM customers. The manufacturer will start with its new VIA NS7200 home storage and media server and continue to provide customized versions of home and SOHO storage platforms targeting specific markets.
“VIA is now working more closely with our customers to bring to market unique and original product designs with customizable feature sets,” said Daniel Wu, vice president, VIA Embedded, VIA Technologies, Inc. “Our goal is to aggressively leverage our position as a leader in system level integration to help our customers' products stand out in a crowded market.”
According to the company, the new strategy is meant to allow its customers to accurately address the needs of system integrators and retailers, improving the speed of the product cycles and reducing the production costs. VIA will take advantage of its energy-efficient processor platforms and high-quality chassis designs and provide them with a full design manufacturing service and engineering support.
The VIA NSD7200 has been designed as a 2-bay storage server that is powered by a 1.5GHz VIA C7-D processor and can boast a maximum DDR2 memory of 2GB. The product is part of VIA's growing server product portfolio for SOHO segments and features a Gigabit Ethernet port, optional 802.11 b/g module, three USB 2.0 ports (2 at the back and 1 in front) and a type 1 Compact Flash socket for discrete OS installation.
The storage server offers support for Microsoft's Windows Home Server, Windows XP and Windows Vista, as well as Linux-based Ubuntu 8.04, SUSE Linux Enterprise and FreeBSD operating systems.
