Networking and Infrastructure News Roundup: October 30 Edition

IT professionals are used to change. But we’re living in extremely unusual times. Work from home is likely to extend well into 2021, edge applications are exploding, the move to cloud and cloud-native applications continues, new connectivity options like 5G and Wi-Fi 6 are emerging, and most companies are undergoing a digital transformation.

Keeping up with these changes and the slew of new 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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IBM announced a strategic expansion of capabilities to provide businesses with the flexibility to choose where to deploy workloads, from on-premises to the IBM public cloud, and drive the journey to the hybrid cloud. The new and enhanced solutions include containerized software across IBM IT Infrastructure via IBM Cloud Paks and advancements in data storage for containers. New and upcoming capabilities designed to help clients implement hybrid cloud with IBM IT Infrastructure, including:

Amazon Web Services announced the general availability of AWS Nitro Enclaves, a new Amazon EC2 capability that makes it easier to securely process highly sensitive data. AWS Nitro Enclaves helps customers reduce the attack surface for their applications by providing a trusted, highly isolated, and hardened environment for data processing. Each Enclave is a virtual machine created using the same Nitro Hypervisor technology that provides CPU and memory isolation for Amazon EC2 instances, but with no persistent storage, no administrator or operator access, and no external networking. This isolation means that applications running in an Enclave remain inaccessible to other users and systems, even to users within the customer's organization. With this isolation, the AWS Nitro Enclave owner can start and stop, or assign resources to an Enclave, but even the owner cannot see what is being processed inside of AWS Nitro Enclaves. AWS also announced the launch of AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) for Nitro Enclaves, a new Enclave application that makes it easy for customers to protect and manage Secure Sockets Layer/Transport Layer Security (SSL/TLS) certificates for their web servers running on Amazon EC2.

Schneider Electric announced a partnership with EdgePresence and Accu-Tech to deploy edge points-of-presence (PoPs) to help businesses use edge computing. Through the partnership, EdgePresence will nationally deploy edge data centers that include a fully integrated Schneider Electric EcoStruxure Data Center solution. As the IT distributor, Accu-Tech will simplify the deployment model to enable increased speed-to-market. Working together to provide robust edge modules, Schneider Electric, EdgePresence, and Accu-Tech will provide customers with the connectivity needed to implement dynamic edge strategies in locations across the U.S.

Spectra Logic introduced enhancements to StorCycle, its software solution for storage lifecycle management. The software scans primary storage for inactive files and migrates them to a lower cost tier of storage, which includes any combination of cloud storage, object storage disk, network-attached storage (NAS), and object storage tape. StorCycle migrates data without changing original formats and allows easy access to all data, including data migrated to higher latency storage mediums like cloud "cold" tiers and tape. Other data management solutions typically time out and error when retrieving files from these longer-latency, lower-cost storage targets. The latest release, StorCycle 3.2, offers enhancements to ensure that an organization's data is identified, migrated, accessed, and protected on the right tier, at the right time, throughout its lifespan, providing maximum value to organizations that rely on data to drive their business.

WekaIO (Weka) announced a cloud-native storage solution underpinned by its high-performance file system, WekaFS. Weka has developed reference architectures (RAs) with leading object storage technology alliances, like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Cloudian, IBM, Seagate, Quantum, Scality, and others in Weka’s Technology Alliance Program. For example, with regard to AWS, extending the WekaFS namespace from high performance flash to an Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) REST-enabled cloud object storage system offers organizations a simpler and more cost-efficient way for managing petascale datasets without compromising performance. The filesystem metadata resides on flash while seamlessly extending capacity over object storage, private or public. All the I/Os are serviced by the flash tier while leveraging the object tier for capacity scaling. WekaFS allows data portability across multiple consumption models supporting both private and public clouds with the ability to extend the namespace across both. A cloud-first model delivers the best storage efficiency and TCO across consumption models and data tiers.

Sycomp introduced an IBM Spectrum Scale solution on Azure. Sycomp Storage Fueled by IBM Spectrum Scale lets organizations use different storage tiers, whether they incorporate the on-prem IBM Spectrum Scale with Azure or deploy a cloud-only solution. Sycomp offers a new way for organizations to use Azure as a burst platform within a few minutes to a few hours for modern workloads such as High-Performance Computing (HPC), Artificial Intelligence, and Machine Learning (AI/ML). Sycomp Storage Fueled by IBM Spectrum Scale is available on the Microsoft Azure Marketplace.

StorCentric announced the acquisition of Violin Systems. The Violin Systems portfolio of all-flash NVMe SSD-based architecture expands StorCentric's all-flash offerings. Enterprise customers will now be able to address any performance, scale, and economic needs of their diverse workloads with a wide-ranging portfolio of all-flash storage. The acquisition expands the StorCentric portfolio to now cover all enterprise workload demands.

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