Networking and Infrastructure News Roundup: November 27 Edition

Keeping up with today’s new technologies and the slew of products and services introduced to support them is a daunting task. Here is a brief list of some networking and infrastructure news of the week to help you navigate the choices.

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Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced the general availability of Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow (MWAA), a new managed service that makes it easy for data engineers to execute data processing workflows in the cloud. Apache Airflow is a popular open-source tool that helps customers author, schedule, and monitor workflows. With Amazon MWAA, customers can use the same familiar Airflow platform as they do today to manage their workflows and realize improved scalability, availability, and security without the burden of having to build, scale, and manage the underlying infrastructure. Amazon MWAA scales workflow execution capacity based on customer needs and integrates with AWS security services to provide secure access to customers' data. There are no up-front investments required to use Amazon MWAA, and customers only pay for what they use.

Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd. announced the development of technology to accelerate virtual routers, which play a major role in the functionality of networks in virtual environments. Specifically, Fujitsu Laboratories has developed technology to accelerate packet address control, which had been a performance bottleneck, while also offloading the processing of router functions in the virtual network to field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). This speeds up packet processing performance eighteen-fold compared with existing virtual routers, while reducing the use of CPU resources to about one thirteenth that of existing technology.

Wasabi, a hot cloud storage company, announced a new partnership today with Sidepath, an IT Solutions Provider and Technology Integrator aimed at helping companies leverage enterprise technologies to better align IT and business needs. Through the new partnership, Sidepath clients — typically small and medium-sized businesses — will have access to Wasabi’s high performance, scalable and flexible cloud storage enabling greater data accessibility either as a primary or hybrid storage option. Sidepath clients will also have the ability to reduce costs and stay within budget through Wasabi’s Reserved Capacity Storage offering.

Pure Storage, an IT leader that delivers storage as-a-service in a multi-cloud world, announced expanded Pure as-a-Service offerings. With Pure as-a-Service, companies only pay for what they use, ensuring they don't over-provision. Pure as-a-Service provides the economic benefits of cloud, along with the additional benefits of Evergreen architecture, including non-disruptive expansions and maintenance. This provides a subscription to innovation that can last a decade or more, true cloud elasticity, and with the addition of the Service Catalog provides a granularity of services along with the transparency that enterprises expect on-premises and in the cloud. Pure as-a-Service is delivered 100% via partners.

ODVA announces that user-level authentication has been added to CIP Security, the cybersecurity network extension for EtherNet/IP. Previous publications of the specifications for CIP Security included key security properties, including a broad trust domain across a group of devices, data confidentiality, device authentication, device identity, and device integrity. CIP Security now adds a narrow trust domain by user and role, an improved device identity including the user, and user authentication. Through this update, CIP Security now offers even stronger device-level security with a narrow trust domain by user and role, an improved device identity including the user, and fixed user authentication. ODVA continues to work to make sure that CIP Security stays on the cutting edge of device defense to best protect critical industrial automation assets to make sure that the promise of IIoT and Industry 4.0 can be fully achieved.

In case you missed it:

IBM last week announced a definitive agreement to acquire Instana, an application performance monitoring, and observability company. The acquisition will help businesses better manage the complexity of modern applications that span the hybrid cloud landscape. Today's news further advances IBM's Hybrid Cloud and AI strategy and strengthens its AI-powered automation capabilities. Financial details were not disclosed. With the acquisition of Instana, IBM will help companies overcome the challenge of managing application performance across multiple teams and across multiple clouds.

Vectra, a provider of network threat detection and response (NDR) solutions, last week announced broader and deeper cloud capabilities to track and link accounts and data in hybrid environments. Current security approaches lose visibility when environments expand to the cloud, where users leverage multiple different accounts and may access resources from shadow IT devices. Historically users and hosts were on-premises and tightly controlled. Vectra's enhanced capabilities offer an NDR solution that can detect and stop threats across the entire network, tying together attacker activities and progression between cloud, hybrid, and on-premises networks.

If your company has networking and infrastructure news, send your announcements to [email protected].