This week’s News Bits, our 100th, we look at a number of small announcements, small in terms of the content, not the impact they have. AMD EPYC Secure Encryption Virtualization VM are now generally available on Google Compute Engine. Nutanix partners with Azure and releases new products. Cloudian introduces flash-optimized software. LTO Program releases specifications for the upcoming Generation 9. And quantum makes the LTO-9 available for Scalar.
This week’s News Bits, our 100th, we look at a number of small announcements, small in terms of the content, not the impact they have. AMD EPYC Secure Encryption Virtualization VM are now generally available on Google Compute Engine. Nutanix partners with Azure and releases new products. Cloudian introduces flash-optimized software. LTO Program releases specifications for the upcoming Generation 9. And quantum makes the LTO-9 available for Scalar.
AMD EPYC Secure Encryption Virtualization VM Now GA on GPC
AMD announced that its Confidential virtual machines (VMs) are in beta availability on Google Compute Engine. The VMs are powered by the 2nd gen AMD EPYC processors. Benefits include:
- Real time encryption for data in-use
- High-performance VMs
- Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV)
- Lift and Shift Confidentiality
AMD Confidential VMs on Google
Nutanix Partners With Azure & Releases New Products
At the Nutanix .NEXT event the company announced a partnership with Microsoft Azure to deliver a hybrid solution with seamless application, data, and license mobility as well as unified management across on-premises and Azure environments, using Nutanix Clusters on Azure. The company announced updates to its popular HCI software and a new Kubernetes-based multicloud Platform-as-a-Service, Karbon Services.
New HCI updates include:
- 50% Faster Performance — Nutanix advanced its HCI architecture to exploit the latest in storage technologies, including NVMe devices and Intel Optane SSD drives, resulting in lower latency that will deliver up to 50% faster performance for I/O intensive workloads. The advancements also improve VM density to lower the overall total cost of ownership (TCO) for all applications.
- Simplified Zero-Trust Security — A Zero-Trust strategy requires granular network policy controls, and the ability to monitor and update those controls in real-time. Nutanix Security Central provides customers with a hub for their security operations so they can easily assess the overall security posture of their Nutanix deployments, generate detailed recommendations to bring environments into compliance, and provide the network visibility and context needed to secure private and public cloud networks and applications through Nutanix Clusters.
- Virtual Networking to Simplify Cloud Deployments — New virtual networking capabilities in Nutanix Flow, which are natively integrated into the Nutanix HCI software stack, are under development. Based on well-understood VPC (virtual private cloud) constructs used by major public cloud providers, Flow Networking will simplify the tasks of creating, isolating, and managing software-defined networks that connect applications running in private data centers and in public cloud environments, significantly simplifying networking for hybrid and multi-cloud deployments.
- Applications Insight and Automation — Nutanix also announced enhanced infrastructure operations management to better serve IT teams and application developers. Prism Ultimate, a new edition to Prism, adds advanced application insights and automation for troubleshooting application-related infrastructure bottlenecks. It also offers visibility of cloud IT resource consumption for targeted IT cost reductions and more accurate budgeting. Additionally, Nutanix Prism can also monitor non-Nutanix environments, including popular virtualization stacks, giving Nutanix customers a single pane of glass for their entire infrastructure, including legacy infrastructure environments.
Karbon Services include:
- Rich Managed Services: This PaaS offering enables rapid development and deployment of applications ranging from simple stateful containerized applications to complex web-scale applications by leveraging simple, open abstraction of rich services. Specifically, Karbon Services include: managed Kubernetes, Containers-as-a-Service (CaaS), functions, AI, message bus, ingress, service mesh, observability and security services.
- Extensible Hybrid PaaS: Karbon Services provides cross-cloud data mobility and hybrid app management through transparent, WAN-optimized data pipelines and extensible data interfaces. This feature gives enterprises the flexibility to bring their own services and leverage the broader Kubernetes ecosystem.
- SaaS-based Multicloud Operations: Ops teams benefit from simplified operations and uniform application, data, and security lifecycle management, regardless of the underlying cloud, at scale leveraging the SaaS-based infrastructure lifecycle manager. Developers benefit from the rich platform services to write applications once and deploy in any cloud through the SaaS-based application lifecycle manager.
- Enhanced Security Posture: With Karbon Services, IT operations teams can leverage a consistent security and API model with unified observability for data and applications across any cloud. It provides automated, system-managed security with built-in multi-tenancy and role-based access control (RBAC) for the rich services.
Cloudian Introduces Flash-Optimized Software
Cloudian announced that its HyperStore object storage software is now flash-optimized. This brings new levels of performance to data analytics, AI/ML, cloud-native applications and rapid backup and recovery. Cloudain states that they can deliver 3x price/performance compared to competitive flash-based object storage. And if an integrated appliance is more your thing, Cloudain offers HyperStore Flash 1000 offers 77 TB and 154 TB capacities in a 1U form factor.
LTO Program Releases Specifications For Upcoming Generation 9
The LTO Program (along with HPE, IBM, and Quantum, see below) announced the specifications for the LTO Ultrium format generation 9. The first thing everyone wants to know is how big are they? It is tape after all. The LTO 9 goes up to 45TB capacity when compressed, a 50% improvement. New features include multi-layer security support via hardware-based encryption, WORM (Write-Once, Read-Many) functionality and support for Linear Tape File System (LTFS). They will be fully backward read and write compatibile with LTO generation 8 cartridges.
Quantum Makes The LTO-9 Available For Scalar
Building off of the announcement above, Quantum will be making the LTO 9 tapes available for its Scalar i6 and Scalar i6000 tape libraries. This gives customers secure, high capacity storage for their tape libraries. The LTO 9 in Scalar i3, Scalar i500, and SuperLoader 3 are expected to be available in the first quarter of 2021.
