LJ Archive

New Products

James Gray

Issue #283, November 2017

DivvyCloud Platform for VMware Cloud on AWS

DivvyCloud's unique niche in the IT ecosystem is helping organizations automate and manage their multi-cloud infrastructure at scale. The latest innovation from the company is the DivvyCloud Platform for VMware Cloud on AWS, a solution enabling consistent policy enforcement and automation of cloud best practices to customers of VMware Cloud on Amazon Web Services (AWS). VMware Cloud on AWS unites VMware's enterprise-class Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) software together with the elastic, bare-metal infrastructure from AWS, which results in a consistent operating model and application mobility for the private and public cloud. DivvyCloud maintains that its software is unique in the marketplace, due to its ability to track real-time changes across clouds and take customer-defined, autonomous action to fix problems and ensure policy compliance. Standard automation bots proactively address myriad security, cost and compliance challenges commonly faced by any organization adopting or expanding cloud-based infrastructure. The visibility and policy automation afforded by the DivvyCloud solution remediate security, cost and compliance issues, adds the firm.

https://divvycloud.com

NETGEAR 48-Port Gigabit Smart Managed Plus Switch (GS750E)

More than ever, small to mid-sized businesses demand and rely on their networks to carry out mission-critical business activities. As always, however, budgets and expertise constrain these companies from using complex managed switches to run their networks. Extending a hand to assist is NETGEAR, Inc., whose new NETGEAR 48-port Gigabit Smart Managed Plus Switch (GS750E) provides an easy, reliable and affordable connectivity solution for expanding networks for workstations/servers, Network Attached Storage (NAS) and PCs. NETGEAR's “industry-first” GS750E 48-port switch is designed to meet current and future needs of any IP network, enabling network optimization and eliminating bottlenecks and featuring a leading speed/affordability ratio. The device, with its convenient web-based management, further helps companies in need of network intelligence to separate and prioritize voice and video traffic from data to support applications, such as VoIP phones and IP cameras, on its Ethernet infrastructure. The fanless GS750E supports VLAN, QoS, LAG and IGMP management capabilities and includes a full set of configurable advanced L2 features, such as traffic prioritization and link aggregation.

https://www.netgear.com

Zentera Systems, Inc.'s CoIP Security Enclave

On the heels of being crowned “Cool Vendor in Cloud Security” by Gartner, Zentera Systems, Inc., announced an upgrade to its flagship CoIP Security Enclave solution. The solution enables enterprises to specify their micro-segmentation policies, which the Enclave software automatically converts into application-aware segmentation rules that protect application workloads in unified virtual overlay networks called “enclaves”. Those workloads can be running anywhere, including on-premises and across any cloud, hybrid and multicloud environments. This new release extends the flagship application with CoIP Smart Discovery capability, which self-scrutinizes workload behavior to uncover existing application compute flows and behavior. Based on this intel, enterprise IT security teams then can complete micro-segmentation definitions and find any potential gaps in their segmentation implementation quickly. Such intelligent automation saves teams considerable time and effort, especially in a hybrid environment where numerous applications and workloads are combined. The Smart Discovery functionality is fully integrated with CoIP Application Interlock, an existing security capability that allows companies to specify which authorized applications in a specific CoIP enclave are allowed to access the enclave's network. All other applications are locked out, greatly enhancing enclave security. With CoIP Secure Enclave, says Zentera, a hybrid or cloud environment is no different from on-premises, and enterprises maintain complete control over connectivity and security to implement one unified security policy across all environments.

https://zentera.net

IBM's LinuxONE Enterprise System

Plentiful new capabilities are to be found in the newly unveiled next generation of the IBM LinuxONE Enterprise System, which Big Blue describes as “the industry's most advanced enterprise Linux platform”. The new system provides capabilities that will boost the security of popular open-source-based container technologies like Docker and Kubernetes significantly, thanks to IBM Secure Service Container technology running on LinuxONE. Applications running in a container solution take on the security capabilities of Secure Service Container without any change to the software. These new features remove the burden of building security into applications, allowing developers to spend their time innovating instead. IBM LinuxONE Secure Service Containers provide applications significant protection against external and insider threats, including automatic encryption of data in-flight and at-rest, and tamper-resistance during installation and runtime. Also new to the platform is the LinuxONE Emperor II, based on IBM Z mainframe technology and featuring the industry's fastest microprocessor, running at 5.2GHz, and a highly engineered, scalable system structure. LinuxONE Emperor II can support the following: a 17TB MongoDB Enterprise instance in a single system with up to 10x better read/write latency than an x86-based implementation; certified infrastructure for Docker EE with integrated management and scale tested up to two million containers; vertical scale to 170 cores and industry-leading performance for Java workloads; integrated pause-less garbage collection and up to 2.6x better performance than x86 alternatives.

www.ibm.com/linuxone

Murat Yener and Onur Dundar's Expert Android Studio (Wrox Press)

Unleashing the potential of Android Studio is what developers can accomplish with Wrox Press' new book Expert Android Studio, states the tech publisher. This new resource from self-professed Android geeks Murat Yener and Onur Dundar, both based at Intel, plugs the holes in one's Android programing skills on the provided tools including Android Studio, NDK, Gradle and Plugins for IntelliJ Idea Platform. Filled with best practices, advanced techniques and tips on Android tools, development cycle, continuous integration, release management, testing and performance, this book provides professional guidance to experienced developers who want to go beyond the ordinary with the Android platform's developer tools. Readers of Expert Android Studio will master topics like the basics of working in Android Studio and Gradle, the application architecture of the latest Android platform, the Native Development Kit and its integration with Android Studio, the development lifecycle and both Gradle and custom plugins.

www.wrox.com/WileyCDA

vCISO Services, LLC's CISO as a Service

The bad guys know about and are exploiting the growing rift between the security officer “haves” and “have nots”. They target smaller businesses because they know that their information security programs are not as strong as the big companies' are. To level the playing field, vCISO Services, LLC, has begun offering CISO as a Service (CaaS) products, cost-effective packages of part-time, seasoned executive information-security expertise to organizations that lack the capacity to staff a full-time Chief Information Security Officer (CISO). These packages include blocks of ongoing virtual CISO time or on a targeted project basis. Because vCISO Services operates nearly 100% virtually, it saves businesses money by not passing on travel and other related face-to-face costs. The company typically reserves the on-site activities for when it matters most, such as interacting with auditors or presenting to the board of directors. The firm specializes in the executive components of information security management, such as risk assessments, policy and standard creation, vendor reviews, regulatory gap analysis and general interim and ongoing CISO activities.

https://vcisoservices.com

Attala Systems' Composable Storage Infrastructure

Upon its exit from stealth mode, Attala Systems revealed news of its new high-performance Composable Storage Infrastructure product. Attala Systems' NVMe over Fabric (NVMe-oF) solution product utilizes Intel FPGAs and NVMe Flash storage to provide “breakthrough performance” for its target customers, including cloud-service providers, e-commerce sites, managed-service providers, telco providers, financial services and real-time digital enterprises. The Attala Composable Storage Infrastructure, according to its creator, marks the start of a significant change in how storage is used for cloud and real-time analytics. Attala's FPGA-based fabric delivers advances in predictable storage latency, IOPS, agility and cost efficiency. With the complement of Attala's SPARA automation and management software, the result is a storage system with high and predictable performance and extremely simple management. The product utilizes a scale-out fabric running on standard 25, 40 or 50Gb/sec Ethernet to interconnect a data center's servers and data nodes. By eliminating legacy storage management layers, the Composable Storage Infrastructure product provides more than ten million IOPS per scale-out node and latencies as low as 16 microseconds at a per-gigabyte price lower than competitive solutions. The result is an adaptable storage infrastructure that is essentially an elastic block storage (EBS) solution “on steroids”, adds Attala.

https://www.attalasystems.com

VMware Workstation

While the two versions of VMware Workstation serve multiple end user types, both enable multiple operating systems to run as virtual machines on a single Linux or Windows PC. The updated VMware Workstation 14 Pro gives IT professionals and developers indispensable tools when designing, testing and operating data centers and networks. Key new features in version 14 include support for Virtual Based Security, a new Network Latency Simulator, an improved open virtual format and open virtual appliance support. Data-center administrators also can leverage advanced host power management to connect to VMware vSphere and VMware vCenter quickly to manage virtual machines and perform power operations to ESXi hosts remotely. Expanded operating support includes Ubuntu 17.04, Fedora 26 and Windows 10 Fall Creators Update. The streamlined offering is the VMware Workstation 14 Player product line that leverages the same hypervisor technology, complete with many of the same capabilities, such as the broadest OS support, high performance and the power to run restricted VMs that comply with corporate policy. The commercial solution, adds VMware, is ideal for businesses seeking to run a single virtual machine on a corporate or BYO PC. A free edition is available for personal, non-commercial use.

https://www.vmware.com

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