Only a few vendors are the best for routing your internet signals and storing your files at the office. Here are PCMag readers' top picks.

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The average office computer jockey doesn't have a clue where that sweet, sweet interweb connection is coming from, but IT knows all about it. And those folks pick the routers and servers (and sometimes network-attached storage devices) to hold all the important data stored in the business.

That brings us to this year's Business Choice Awards for work routers and servers. Without them, we'd all be storing data on our hard drives and probably still using dial-up connections. These Business Choice results focus on the workplace, from SOHO (small office, home office) to SMBs (small-to-medium businesses) to enterprises. We asked admins and IT folks to share their favorites; below are the brands any biz would be happy to buy.

You can be part of Business Choice! Sign up for the Readers' Choice Survey mailing list to receive invitations in the future.

Intel's domination will continue as Qualcomm is set to quit after just seven months of trying.

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Back in early November last year, Qualcomm announced the world's first 10nm server processor family called the Centriq 2400. It was the culmination of four years "intense design, development and ecosystem enablement effort." However, less than seven months on, Qualcomm's presence in the datacenter looks set to end.

As Bloomberg reports, Qualcomm is thought to be planning an exit from the server chip market. Two options are being considered: shut down the server chip division of the company, or sell the division for someone else to take on and continue developer ARM-based server chips for the datacenter.

For now, Qualcomm isn't commenting, but seven month is not that long to decide whether a market is viable. That may be a sign of Intel's dominance, but only last month Qualcomm's CEO, Steve Mollenkopf, stated in the company's earnings report that spending was set to be reduced in "non-core product areas." Server chips clearly counts as one of those areas.

Bloomberg says People's Liberation Army operatives added tiny, nefarious microchips to server motherboards made by Super Micro and used by Apple and Amazon, among others. All three companies pushed back hard on the story.

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UPDATE 5 p.m. ET: Apple, Amazon, and Super Micro have all released scathing statements today refuting Bloomberg's article.

"There are so many inaccuracies in ‎this article as it relates to Amazon that they're hard to count," Amazon Chief Information Security Officer Steve Schmidt wrote in a Thursday blog post. "We never found modified hardware or malicious chips in servers in any of our data centers."

Claims that Amazon sold its Chinese server business due to the purported infection are "absurd," he added.

While it won't be ready until 2022, it will create hundreds of jobs, run on 100 percent renewable energy, and be the first data center to take advantage of a new StatePoint Liquid Cooling system that promises a 50 percent reduction in water use.

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Facebook announced today that it has decided the location for the company's first data center in Asia will be Singapore.

A number of factors helped Facebook decide, not least of which was the World Bank's recent naming of Singapore as the "number-one country in Asia to do business." But what really grabbed the social network's attention was the mix of robust infrastructure, existing communication lines, the local workforce, and help from both the Singapore Economic Development Board and the Jurong Town Corporation to make the project happen.

The end result is a 170,000 square-meter (1.8 million square feet) facility spread across 11 stories and built by Fortis Construction Inc. The investment required amounts to just over $1 billion and will in the process create hundreds of new jobs, not just during construction, but once the facility is operational.

The access was being sold on a Russian-language marketplace. The affected airport system was available on the open internet and may have been secured with a weak password.

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What can $10 buy you in a hacker marketplace? How about remote access to a major international airport.

A Russian-language site has been selling access to thousands of hacked computers, one of which connected to a US airport's security and building automation systems, according to new research.

The sale was noticed by cybersecurity firm McAfee, which has been investigating underground marketplaces that specialize in selling remote access to compromised servers.

Microsoft realizes you can use the sea as a giant heatsink and save a small fortune in cooling costs.

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Data centers consume a lot of energy and produce a lot of heat from all those servers running 24/7. Energy consumption costs can be cut by using ever more efficient hardware, but also by tapping into renewable energy sources. Heat is a more difficult problem, though. Microsoft's latest idea to deal with it is by placing a data center on the sea floor near Orkney.

As the BBC reports, this experimental data center is called Project Natick and takes the form of a sealed cylinder packed full of 12 racks of servers. Because it's sealed, Microsoft sucked all the oxygen and water vapor out of the atmosphere inside, therefore reducing the chances of corrosion. A power and data link is maintained using an undersea cable hooked up to the cylinder and feeding back to Orkney.

Microsoft has been working on a subsea data center for a few years now. Orkney is actually Phase 2 of the project, with Phase 1 taking place off the coast of California back in 2016.

The high-end discrete graphics cards will reportedly target the PC gaming market and data centers, putting pressure on AMD and Nvidia. Intel hired a former AMD exec to lead the effort.

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Intel plans to release its first discrete GPUs in 2020, the chip maker said in a Tuesday tweet.

"Our plan is to introduce high-end discrete graphics solutions for a broad range of computing segments, including both the client and datacenter businesses," Intel added in a statement.

According to MarketWatch, the new GPUs will also target gaming, a market AMD and Nvidia have long dominated with their Radeon and GeForce products, respectively.

Originally announced in February 2015, Apple is giving up on trying to build the new facility.

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The town of Athenry was at one point set to be home to Apple's next $1 billion data center, but after three years of trying to build it, Apple has given up and will go elsewhere.

As Reuters reports, plans for an Athenry data center were first announced in February 2015. The location was chosen mainly because of easy access to green energy, but what Apple didn't expect was the delays due to appeals by locals not to allow it to be built.

It was argued that the data center would have a negative impact on local animal populations, increased the chances of local flooding, and the proximity of the site to a nuclear power plant was also used in an attempt to thwart Apple's planned construction. It worked, as Apple is now walking away.

Advanced Micro Devices has had the sort of week that might make a computer chip company wonder if Murphy's Law was running the show instead of Moore's Law.

AMD CEO Lisa Su's spilling the beans about the month Microsoft plans to release Windows 10 was the most glaring misstep by the company. It was also by far the least worrisome, though we'd hate to have been the recipient of whatever choice words Redmond sent AMD's way over that goof.

AMD reported its first-quarter earnings last Thursday. Given Intel's own news earlier in the week that PC revenue was down considerably in the quarter, it was expected that the smaller chip firm would have struggled as well. But whereas Intel managed to boost its net income 3 percent from the year before on the strength of booming server chip sales, AMD stumbled to a $137 million loss, a major disappointment after the company managed a profit in the first quarter of 2014.

What's more, Su had some rather stunning news for investors who've perhaps become accustomed to the company's financial ups and downs, but expect AMD at least maintain a puncher's chance against rivals like Intel and Nvidia.

But AMD's client processor sales have been slipping and it's not clear whether the company's next-generation "Carrizo" chips will do much to turn things around any time soon. Su told investors she expected the PC market to "remain a challenge as our OEM customers and channel partners focus on carrying lean inventories based on the uncertain market conditions."

Applied Micro and Hewlett-Packard have teamed up to release the first commercially available 64-bit ARMv8 server, the ProLiant m400 cartridge for HP's Moonshot server framework.

The new server is based on Applied Micro's X-Gene System-on-a-Chip (SoC) and runs Canonical's Ubuntu operating system. Designed for primarily for Web caching workloads, the ProLiant m400 provides power, cooling, and space savings compared with traditional rack servers to the tune of an "up to 35 percent reduction in total cost of ownership," according to HP.

"ARM technology will change the dynamics of how enterprises build IT solutions to quickly address customer challenges. HP's history, culture of innovation, and proven leadership in server technology position us as the most qualified player to empower customers with greater choice in the server marketplace," Antonio Neri, senior vice president and general manager of HP's Servers and Networking business, said in a statement on Monday.

HP also announced the availability of the ProLiant m800, a 32-bit ARM-based server cartridge that is also intended for the Moonshot 1500 chassis, pictured above. The m800 is "optimized for real-time data processing of high volume, complex data such as pattern analysis." Both the ProLiant m800 and m400 extend the reach of HP's "Project Moonshot" initiative to introduce a radical new infrastructure framework for scale-out data center installations supporting Web hosting, cloud computing, search, general-purpose databases, logging, and other fast-growing "big data" activities.

But it's the ProLiant m400, pictured at right, which is the real milestone release. ARM's 64-bit instruction set has been used in consumer devices like Apple's iPhone for more than a year, but it's taken a bit longer for the first server products to hit the market. Along with Applied Micro, Advanced Micro Devices and the now-shuttered Calxeda were the main drivers of 64-bit ARM-based computing for the data center in recent years.

SANTA CLARA—Applied Micro showed up at ARM TechCon with a new 64-bit ARM processor called HeliX, an embedded chip aimed at market segments like networking and communications, imaging, storage, and industrial systems.

"With the growth of I/O needs in switches etc., in storage with bigger Hadoop-type clusters, there's just pull here for 64-bit. Even for those apps that don't need the memory it's still nice having the tool set," said Applied Micro's Pat Patla.

The first HeliX series, which Applied Micro plans to ship by year's end, features 2.0GHz embedded processors with four and eight cores, 4-8MB of L3 cache, two channels of DDR3-1600 memory, 10-gigabit Ethernet support, plenty of PCIe 3.0 lanes, and support for two SATA 3.0 and two USB 2.0 I/O ports. First-generation HeliX chips are being manufactured at 40nm and will have TDPs ranging from about 20 to 30 watts, according to the company.

Things get even more interesting in 2015, when Applied Micro plans to roll out second-gen, 28nm HeliX chips which will include parts with up to eight cores and power draws as low as 8W, enabling fanless designs, according to Patla.

Applied Micro also made news ahead of the ARM Tech Con developer conference being held here this week, teaming up with Hewlett-Packard on the first commercial release of a 64-bit ARM-based server. HP's ProLiant m400 cartridge for its Moonshot server framework packs an Applied Micro X-Gene System-on-a-Chip (SoC) and runs Canonical's Ubuntu operating system.

Facebook this week unveiled a System-on-a-Chip (SoC) server solution based on Intel's new 14-nanometer Xeon D processors for "heavily parallelizable workloads" in the data center.

Facebook introduced its SoC microserver platform, code named Yosemite, at the Open Compute Project (OCP) Summit in San Jose, Calif., where the social network also announced open low-level motherboard management software for BMC processor-based systems called OpenBMC.

The Yosemite SoC platform is at the heart of a newly designed server card code named Mono Lake, which can support up to four independent servers. Facebook collaborated with Intel "for over 18 months on Yosemite," according to a news report from the OCP Summit.

Facebook has helped develop micro-server SoCs in the past—in addition to using Intel's x86-based processor technology, the company has been working on data center solutions based on ARM's 64-bit instruction set.

Charles King, principal analyst for Pund-IT, said Intel's new Xeon D line should prove attractive to big Web companies like Facebook.

Intel on Monday introduced its 14-nanometer Xeon D family of microserver processors, bringing System-on-a-Chip (SoC) capabilities to the company's Xeon line of datacenter products for the first time.

The first Xeon D products are the quad-core Xeon Processor D-1520, priced at $199, and the eight-core Xeon Processor D-1540, priced at $581. Both new SoCs are available today. More than 50 new systems using Xeon D chips are currently being designed by Intel OEM partners, with about three-quarters of those developing network, storage, and Internet of Things (IoT) systems.

Intel said Cisco, Hewlett-Packard, NEC, Quanta Cloud Technology, Sugon, and Supermicro are among the companies designing microservers based on Xeon D.

The first Xeon D processors have industry-standard x86 cores and support two 10GbE Intel Ethernet ports, as well as supporting I/O such as PCIe, USB, SATA, and more, Intel said. The Xeon D-1520 and D-1540 support "up to 128GB of addressable memory" while only drawing 20 watts of power to operate, according to the company.

"The growth of connected devices and demand for more digital services has created new opportunities for information and communication technology," Diane Bryant, senior vice president and general manager of Intel's Data Center Group, said in a statement. "By bringing Intel Xeon processor performance to a low-power SoC, we're delivering the best of both worlds and enabling our customers to deliver exciting new services."

Eight years ago, author and business strategist Fred Reichheld published The Ultimate Question: Driving Good Profits and True Growth. In it, he detailed the meaning of "bad profits," or a company that is making money while its reputation goes down the tubes.

It happens for a number of reasons: Misleading prices, poor customer service, or bad products. Customers feel marginalized, misled, and mistreated. As Reichheld says, "bad profits are about extracting value from customers, not creating value."

When it happens, customers can do two things: say nothing, or say something negative about the company. Only a lucky few brands actually get recommended by their customers.

Reichheld, working for consulting firm Bain & Company, helped create a metric to quantify this phenomenon. It's the Net Promoter Score, or NPS. It measures exactly how people feel about a business by asking one question: "How likely is it that you would recommend this company to a friend or colleague?"

Here at PCMag we do regular surveys for our Readers' Choice Awards and Business Choice Awards. In every questionnaire, we ask our readers that very question about the companies behind the products they use. Now, just in time for your holiday shopping, we've finished up the surveys and can share with you the tech companies most recommended by fellow readers, based on their NPS numbers.

Qualcomm CEO Steve Mollenkopf said Wednesday that the company intends to start building chips for servers using the processor architecture it has refined for mobile devices like smartphones and tablets.

Mollenkopf, pictured, was speaking at an analyst event in New York. He said Qualcomm was "in a unique position" to take advantage of cutting-edge semiconductor fabrication processes in order to sell its products into the data center for the first time.

But it will be awhile before Qualcomm has any server chips to sell, said Mollenkopf, whose comments were first reported by Barron's.

"The high end of the smartphone and the tablet really are starting to merge with what would be feasible in the data center," the site quoted the Qualcomm chief as saying. "It will take us awhile to build this business, but we think it's an interesting business."

Barron's didn't offer many more details about Qualcomm's presumptive plans to develop server chips, but it's probably safe to assume the company is eyeing ARM-based processors like several other companies looking to challenge the dominance of the x86 architecture in the data center.

AMD will be developing an exascale node architecture using its own Heterogeneous System Architecture-based APUs.

SANTA CLARA—There's an old story about a distinguished thinker—in some tellings, it's Bertrand Russell, in others, it's William James—who is confronted by a little old lady after a lecture on the nature of the cosmos. The woman objects to the scientist's description of star systems and galaxies, proclaiming that in fact, the Earth rests on the back of a giant turtle.

The scientist laughs and asks, "So what is the turtle resting on?" Another turtle, comes the confident reply. And what is that turtle standing on? "Oh, it's turtles all the way down," the little old lady says.

ARM CEO Simon Segars has his own variation of the turtle theory, only it's a lot more rooted in observable reality. And instead of turtles, it's ARM-based computer chips, which he believes will one day go "all the way down" —managing data every step of the way, from inside the servers powering the cloud, through networking and communications hardware, and out to mobile devices, embedded systems, and IoT devices on the edge of the network.

I had a chance to catch up with Segars this week at the ARM TechCon developer conference, where, during his keynote address, he rallied the troops with a call for a new wave of "invisible technology" which will make our homes smarter, our cars safer, our digital communications faster and more secure, and bring the power of computing to more parts of our lives, as unobtrusively as possible.

What he didn't talk about much was mobile, the market segment ARM has famously conquered over the past decade. The U.K.-based firm's processor architecture is used in chips powering the vast majority of smartphones and tablets which have been sold around the world.

Microsoft's Tuesday's event was all about the enterprise; Redmond's meat-and-potatoes base. A first look at the Windows Technical Preview for Enterprise client and Windows Server Technical Preview show a host of cosmetic changes designed to appease business customers who were outraged over the UI of Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012, both of which were criticized as impractical in enterprise environments.

And has Microsoft taken heed! Windows 10 Enterprise client and Server are step backs to the mouse-and-keyboard user experience of Windows 7, but retain the many security, performance, and ease-of-management capabilities that Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 delivered. In fact, the latest server OS has many under-the-hood enhancements that IT professionals have demanded.

Though both OSes are in their nascent, preview stages, I took an early look and installed and configured the enterprise client and server as Hyper-V machines in an existing Windows Server 2012 R2 domain. During my test drive one thing became clear: Both operating systems are positioned to become potential darlings to Microsoft's vast business customer base.

Windows Server Technical Preview
As of Oct. 1, MSDN subscribers can download several flavors of the latest Windows Server, including the Windows Server Technical Preview, Windows Server Datacenter Technical Preview, and Microsoft Hyper-V Server Technical Preview.

The Server Technical Preview is available as an ISO image, which was simple to install on Server 2012 R2's Hyper-V. The first thing most will notice is that the tile-based Start screen is nowhere to be found in the interface. Instead, the desktop appears with the familiar Start menu of pre-Server 2012 OSes.