ATON
DH44 Digital Audio Router: $799
www.atonhome.com

INTERESTED IN MAKING DIGIAL AUDIO AN INTEGRAL PART OF YOUR customer’s home or offi ce? Aton’s DH44 Digital Audio Router attaches to your existing audio sources-—either analog or digital-—and pipes them into four different zones. The router turns analog sources into S/PDIF digital audio and transfers the signal over CAT5 to any number of the company’s amplified touchpads.

The touchpad sports a built-in 30W RMS amplifier that can switch between any of the four system sources and one local source. Attached to a local source, such as an iPod, you connect the touchpad to Aton’s DHSIP Input Wallplate and run the signal to in-room speakers.

Aton’s DH44 is great for playing music across an entire home. It can also play a different tune in each zone, with independent tone control, balance, and loudness. The DH44 takes up 1U of space in your customer’s rack, is available with an optional mounting kit, and is protected by a two-year warranty. Aton even includes a slim IR remote control.

G-TECHNOLOGY
G-Speed eS 4TB: $2,699
www.g-technology.com

WE’RE BIG PROPONENTS OF networked storage, but there’s certainly a time and place for DAS, especially now with the proliferation of eSATA. G-Technology’s G-Speed eS capitalizes on eSATA, sharp looks, and a custom controller card that screams scalability.

The top-end 4TB G-Speed eS centers on a four-drive external enclosure with a quartet of 1TB drives. Each disk drive module is hot-swappable, as is the included cooling fan. A single cable originating from the enclosure’s port multiplier connects it to a host system with G-Technology’s optional RAID controller. The PCI Express x4 card features four eSATA ports. So, in theory, you can connect up to four G-Speed eS boxes totaling 16TB of directly connected storage space.

Beyond its sexy hardware specifications, the G-Speed fully supports Windows 2000/XP/Vista and OS X 10.5. It also includes a Web-based configuration utility and is protected by a two-year warranty. As a complete hardware solution, the G-Speed gives you a great way to get into SMB-class eSATA.

SUPERMICRO
H8SMi-2 Workstation Motherboard: $269
www.supermicro.com

IF YOU THOUGHT THAT AMD’S AVS program was good news for resellers in the desktop market, you should check out the workstation version. The program includes two workstation motherboards thus far, one of which is Supermicro’s H8SMi-2. What does it take for a workstation board to qualify for AVS approval? According to AMD, the vendor must enable Opteron 1000 or Athlon 64 support on a Socket AM2 interface and have an NVIDIA chipset, dual Gigabit Ethernet ports, ECC memory support, RAID storage, remote management capabilities, WHQL certification, and RoHS compliance. For all of that, AMD guarantees a stable platform until August of 2009. And as with the other AVS boards, AMD’s advanced replacement will take care of business if your customer runs into trouble.

Of course, Supermicro goes above and beyond AVS, including an ATI graphics controller, 28 lanes worth of PCI Express expansion, and a handful of optional remote management controllers. Talk about a great way to capitalize on AVS at the workstation level.

AMD
Opteron 2350 Quad-Core Processor: $389
www.amd.com

THE NEWEST AMD OPTERON PROCESSORS ARE THE COMPANY’S FIRST with four cores. Despite the internal advances, they still drop right in to the Socket F interface AMD has been using for more than a year now.

The 2000 series is AMD’s dual socket-capable models. These server and workstation platforms are armed with eight total cores and lots of memory. In fact, the 2000 series Opterons sport the same integrated 128-bit memory controller featured on past designs. AMD officially supports 667 MHz DDR2 modules, but in order to populate eight slots per chip, you’ll need to adopt DDR2-533.

AMD’s Opteron 2350 is the family’s current flagship—-and one of the most attractive chips in the Opteron lineup at $389. Running at 2 GHz, the 2350 trades raw frequency for higher efficiency. Power consumption drops to 75W thanks to AMD’s new 65nm manufacturing process. At the same time, the chip wields 128KB of L1 cache, 512KB of L2, and 2MB of L3 to speed data transfers along.

TALKSWITCH
240VS Small Business Phone System with Two Lines: $695
www.talkswitch.com

BALANCING COST AND FUNCTIONALITY MAKES FINDING THE RIGHT small business telephony solution a tad tricky. But TalkSwitch’s lineup of phone systems is very well suited to the SMB space, with a nice spread between available features and moderate price tags that will suit just about any customer.

The TalkSwitch 240VS is the entry-level system that supports two traditional phone lines, four extensions that can be connected to analog or IP phones, and 12 pure IP extensions. Take a quick look at the switch’s rear ports and it’s quite apparent that setup is straightforward. There are two incoming phone line jacks; four jacks for telephones, fax machines, and modems; a music-on-hold jack; an Ethernet connection; and a USB connector. Hook the Ethernet port up to a switch with IP phones attached and you’re looking at a very robust combination of traditional and brand-new technologies that can support a small office for less than $700.