This week’s News Bits we look at a number of small announcements, small in terms of the content, not the impact they have. ClearSky Data and Faction partner to deliver on-demand disaster recovery with VMware. Micron announced new edge storage microSD cards. WD announced security microSD cards. Commvault expands integration with Azure. Iron Mountain announces Iron Cloud for Video. SonicWall updates its portfolio. Cisco updates its routing portfolio. SecurityFirst enhances its DataKeep. SIOS awarded two patents.
This week’s News Bits we look at a number of small announcements, small in terms of the content, not the impact they have. ClearSky Data and Faction partner to deliver on-demand disaster recovery with VMware. Micron announced new edge storage microSD cards. WD announced security microSD cards. Commvault expands integration with Azure. Iron Mountain announces Iron Cloud for Video. SonicWall updates its portfolio. Cisco updates its routing portfolio. SecurityFirst enhances its DataKeep. SIOS awarded two patents.
ClearSky Data & Faction Partner To Deliver On-Demand DR With VMware
ClearSky Data announced that it has partnered with Faction to deliver disaster recovery on-demand with VMware. The new combined solution involves ClearSky’s hybrid cloud storage and Faction’s VMware-based Multi-Cloud Platform as a Service that the two companies claim will create on-demand DR that delivers guaranteed performance, operational consistency and native VMware toolsets. They go on to claim that customers can reduce costs by eliminating the need for secondary data centers, instead leveraging the cloud.
Micron Announced New Edge Storage microSD Cards
Micron released a new microSD card aimed at edge surveillance. Features include:
- Storage densities of 256GB, 128GB, 64GB, and 32GB, which enable more video to be stored at the edge, giving system designers increased flexibility
- At least three years of high-quality, continuous, 24×7 video recording in a wide range of temperatures and environments
- Technology for the cards to self-monitor and provide information on card usage and expected useful life remaining for each card
- Special firmware designed for continuous video recording, which minimizes frame drops and video loss
- A two million hours mean-time-to-failure (MTTF) or 0.44 percent annualized failure rate (AFR), which is equal or better than most surveillance Hard Disk Drive
WD Announced Security microSD Cards
Western Digital also released microSD cards designed specifically for surveillance, the Western Digital Purple microSD card. Highlights include:
- Robust Endurance for Continuous Recording: Supports up to 1,000 PE Cycles
- Card Health Status Functionality for Easy Card Maintenance: In compatible cameras, a unique health monitor offers reporting capabilities to provide users and system installers valuable information, including the card’s endurance and capacity status, enabling predictive maintenance and taking the “guess work” out of when to service the card.
- High Performance for Next-Generation Video: Offers speeds of up to 80 MB/s sequential read and 50 MB/s sequential write and supports Speed Class 10 and UHS Speed Class 1.
- Trusted Video Capture in Wide Range of Climates: Designed for use in temperatures ranging from -25°C to 85°C, it enables reliable video capture indoors and outdoors.
- High Capacity to Capture and Preserve Video if Connection to Network Connection is Lost: Offered in capacities up to 64GB
Commvault Expands Integration With Azure
Commvault announced that it has expanded its integration with Microsoft Azure Stack. Benefits include:
- Microsoft OneDrive for Business Content Data Indexing: Commvault now enables users to both index and search OneDrive for Business documents saved on Azure Stack hybrid clouds. OneDrive for Business content can easily be searched with other heterogeneous data including Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft SharePoint.
- Compliance Apps: Commvault’s new Compliance Apps enable enterprises to discover, monitor, and manage personally identifiable information (PII) on Azure Stack. With these apps, administrators can quickly process data requests from end-users and meet other data privacy regulatory requirements, such as those mandated by the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
- Live Sync SQL Databases in Full Recovery Mode: Commvault’s new Live Sync for Microsoft SQL Server automatically replicates changes captured by backups for a production SQL database on an Azure Stack private cloud to another SQL server, after every backup job, without any additional overhead to the production server.
Iron Mountain Announces Iron Cloud For Video
Iron Mountain introduced Iron Cloud for Video. As the name implies, this new secure cloud-based solution is all about storing and managing the ever growing amount of video data that includes drones, IoT, surveillance, and HD and ultra-HD recordings. This new solution gives customers a way to store their video data in a cost-effective manner that at the same time stays compliant and actionable.
Iron Mountain Iron Cloud for Video
SonicWall Updates Its Portfolio
SonicWall has updated its portfolio with its new paten-pending Real-Time Deep Memory Inspection (RTDMI) technology that is designed to enhance protection against malicious PDFs and MS Office files. To complement this new technology, SonicWall also enhanced its Capture Cloud Platform. New enhancements include:
- NSa Firewall Hardware with three new models offers more than double the number of SPI connections (up to 4 million) and quadruple the number of DPI-SSL connections compared to the previous generation.
- Capture Security Center is a single pane of glass management center that simplifies and automates tasks to promote better security coordination while reducing the complexity, time and expense of performing security operations and administrations.
- Virtual Firewall Series protects all critical components of private and public cloud environments, delivering the security advantages of a physical firewall with the operational and economic benefits of virtualization.
- Web Application Firewall (WAF) protects web applications running in private, public or hybrid cloud environments.
- Capture Client for endpoint protection including next-gen malware protection and support for visibility into encrypted traffic.
Cisco Updates Its Routing Portfolio
Cisco announced that it has updated it routing hardware and software to address challenges such as IoT, video, and 5G. The new portfolio includes:
- Routing hardware additions include:
- Cisco NCS 500 Series: Featuring a unified, single operating system (Cisco IOS XR), it addresses converged wireline and wireless 5G-ready requirements for mobile x-haul and future evolutions of carrier ethernet networks; It addresses various bandwidth needs ranging from 1 to 100 Gbps interfaces in small form factors.
- Cisco ASR 9901: Also featuring a unified, single operating system (Cisco IOS XR), it supports applications such as distributed provider edge, Internet peering, metro aggregation and broadband network gateway (BNG) in a space-optimized platform; It delivers 456 Gbps of port capacity while also providing flexibility in terms of port speeds ranging from 1 to 100 Gbps with industry-leading MACsec encryption support across all ports.
- Cisco NCS 5500 Series: New components include:
- Two fixed chassis supporting 24 and 36 100GE ports
- A 36 100GE ports line card targeted at high-density core, mobile backhaul and data center interconnect use cases; Offers flexible port configuration supporting 10G/25G/40G and 100G per port with enhanced scale capabilities (external TCAM)
- A compact 2RU router targeted at high-density metro aggregation, mobile backhaul networks and long-haul connectivity use cases; Delivers maximum flexibility with the support of Modular Port Adapters (MPA) with options of different port types and MACsec encryption support.
- Routing software additions include:
- Segment Routing: Offers service providers more control over Internet traffic by delivering a unified transport fabric across aggregation, edge, core and data center network domains with unmatched simplicity, resiliency and scalability; With Segment Routing Flexible Algorithm, a new addition to the Cisco Segment Routing Traffic Engineering toolkit, service providers can:
- Optimize the same physical network infrastructure along various dimensions such as low-latency, bandwidth or path disjointness.
- Custom fit 5G network slices to specific applications
- Ethernet VPN (EVPN): Cisco is now offering seamless integration with Virtual Private LAN Service (VPLS), helping service providers speed up migration from VPLS to EVPN as another method to provide Ethernet-based multipoint to multipoint communication over IP or MPLS networks; EVPN offers improved scalability, optimal forwarding and helps prevent traffic floods.
- Segment Routing: Offers service providers more control over Internet traffic by delivering a unified transport fabric across aggregation, edge, core and data center network domains with unmatched simplicity, resiliency and scalability; With Segment Routing Flexible Algorithm, a new addition to the Cisco Segment Routing Traffic Engineering toolkit, service providers can:
SecurityFirst Enhances Its DataKeep
SecurityFirst announced that its data-centric security solution, DataKeep, has been enhanced with the addition of a multi-tenant, highly available Object Store Agent. Benefits include:
- Greater Autonomy – From supporting Bring Your Own Key (BYOK) through to creating policies that dictate more granular access permissions, the Object Store Agent gives companies expanded enterprise-level control and capabilities. The Object Store Agent enables organizations to encrypt data and maintain complete control of encryption keys on the client side before sending to local or cloud object storage within Amazon S3 environments.
- Cost Optimization – Companies across industries such as financial, legal, insurance, medical, government and others, who are required to archive large volumes of data for long periods of time, can now benefit from a smarter, infinitely scalable, low-cost storage alternative to premium cloud, disk or tape storage.
- Enhanced Backup and Restore Capabilities via DataKeep File and Volume Agents – Allows companies to easily copy, move, restore or conduct an encrypted full or incremental backup of files. This capability, coupled with the Object Store Agent, provides the most practical ransomware mitigation strategy.
- Increased Resiliency and Improved Data Loss Prevention (DLP) – Leveraging the Object Store Agent’s ability to support M of N distributed shares, companies can encrypt, split (or shard) and distribute data across multiple cloud environments, on-premises or any combination for high availability. For example, SecurityFirst’s patented M of N structure in the Object Store Agent, such as 2:3, shards the data in three but only needs two to recover the data. When combined with the File or Volume Agent’s native encrypted copy capabilities, companies can leverage the Object Store Agent’s secure cloud backup and archival capabilities to help improve resiliency, especially when guarding against ransomware attacks.
SIOS Awarded 2 Patents
SIOS Technology Corp announced that it has been awarded two new patents from the United States Patent and Trademark Office surrounding machine learning and analytics. These include:
- U.S. Patent No. 9,772,871, titled “Apparatus and method for leveraging semi-supervised machine learning for self-adjusting policies in management of a computer infrastructure,” is the first of eight core innovations developed and implemented in SIOS iQ and covered by this patent. It validates the ability of SIOS iQ to perform unsupervised learning of an environment and its behaviors for use in IT operations for purposes such as automating performance root cause analysis, while permitting human input to be used to adjust its models.
- U.S. Patent No. 9,910,707, titled “Interface for orchestration and analysis of a computer environment,” covers the Graphical User Interface (GUI) design in SIOS iQ. Specifically, the GUI is configured to provide a user with a single point of view into the computer infrastructure by converging application, compute, storage, and network behavioral attributes into higher order descriptive dimensions of IT operational quality covering performance, efficiency, reliability and capacity. With this configuration, the end user to can readily review the state of the computing environment in a single glance and efficiently explore and interact with the GUI to identify issues threatening operations and obtain recommended solutions.
