Category Archives: Hardware

APN 3.0, Hardware, Multiprotocol Label Switching, Network management, Network management system, Networking, NMS, Talari

Talari Networks Upgrades Adaptive Private Networking for Mercury WAN Appliances

Talari Networks today announced APN 3.0, an upgrade to its APN (Adaptive Private Networking) operating software to support its family of Mercury WAN appliances. Talari is demonstrating APN 3.0 for the first time at Interop Las Vegas this week, Booth #2450.

With the introduction of APN 3.0, Talari’s WAN solution dynamically builds fully meshed connections in reaction to application demand across an aggregated virtual WAN consisting of  broadband, leased-line and other links. This allows enterprises to have a network that automatically adapts to changing traffic patterns and bandwidth demands to ensure that mission-critical applications receive priority and real-time applications are provided the QoS levels they require to perform optimally. In the past, companies were only able to achieve this dynamic network architecture through a combination of disparate technologies or through an expensive fully meshed MPLS network.

Key new features and benefits of the APN 3.0 software release include:

  • Dynamic Conduits ? Allows the automated build up and tear down of a fully meshed network that reacts to changing traffic demands by creating best-path, multi-link tunnels across private or public Internet access links. As traffic from location to location exceeds bandwidth policy reservation thresholds or failures are detected, APN 3.0 builds a dynamic tunnel between those locations in real-time, allowing traffic to bypass some hops to decrease latency. All paths/links are monitored on a sub-second basis for quality, including the new ones, to ensure latency has been decreased. With dynamic conduits, network managers don’t have to anticipate traffic patterns and they can ensure adequate bandwidth exists for critical traffic and no sessions fail.
  • Single Point Configuration ? Talari’s WAN appliances communicate with one another to build an image of the network, the possible paths through the network, and the latency, loss and jitter of each path. This alleviates the need to configure each device within the network or to manually anticipate changing network demands.
  • Complete Network Visibility ? A new off-board Network Management System (NMS) provides full visibility of the Talari network, devices and all links, allowing network managers to easily visualize traffic patterns, quality issues and network outages.

APN 3.0 is fully compatible with leading network management and reporting tools. The operating software will be generally available in July 2013 and accessible via the Talari Customer Support Portal as a free upgrade for existing customers and the NMS will be sold as an optional add-on product.

Amazon, Amazon AWS, Amazon Web Services, AWS, Cloud & IT Management, Cloud computing, Data center, Disaster Recovery/Business Continuity, Hardware, James Hamilton, Networking

Wired Profiles a New Breed of Internet Hero, the Data Center Guru

The whole idea of cloud computing is that mere mortals can stop worrying about hardware and focus on delivering applications. But cloud services like Amazon’s AWS, and the amazingly complex hardware and software that underpins all that power and flexibility, do not happen by chance. This Wired article about James Hamilton paints of a picture of a new breed of folks the Internet has come to rely on:

…with this enormous success comes a whole new set of computing problems, and James Hamilton is one of the key thinkers charged with solving such problems, striving to rethink the data center for the age of cloud computing. Much like two other cloud computing giants — Google and Microsoft — Amazon says very little about the particulars of its data center work, viewing this as the most important of trade secrets, but Hamilton is held in such high regard, he’s one of the few Amazon employees permitted to blog about his big ideas, and the fifty-something Canadian has developed a reputation across the industry as a guru of distributing systems — the kind of massive online operations that Amazon builds to support thousands of companies across the globe.

Read the article.

 

Hardware, SED, Solid-state drive, Storage, Toshiba

Toshiba Announces Cryptographic-erase, Self-encryption Features for New Enterprise SSD, Mobile HDD

Toshiba Corporation today announced new enterprise SAS solid state drives (SSD), mobile SATA hard disk drives (HDD), including self-encrypting drive (SED) models in both product categories, and new enterprise-grade SATA SSD supporting cryptographic-erase. Select drives will start to ship in January with other models following later in the first quarter.

PX02SMQ and PX02SMU series enterprise SED (eSED) deliver government-grade Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) 256-bit self-encryption and offer Trusted Computing Group (TCG) Enterprise SSC protocol self-encryption and cryptographic-erase support. These high-performance, 2.5 inch enterprise models with SAS interface, target high-end servers and data center applications and provide capacities ranging up to 1.6TB[1].

The PX02AMU value line of SATA eSSD models and the PX03ANU read-intensive line of SATA eSSD models, both for enterprise applications, feature cryptographic- erase for fast and secure media sanitization.

For mobile computing, the MQ01ABU***W series provides self-encryption, cryptographic-erase and TCG-Opal SSC protocol support in a slim 7mm height with up to 500GB[1] of storage capacity. The MQ01ABU***W series also supports Toshiba’s innovative Wipe technology, which adds security features that allows system designers to automatically cryptographic-erase sensitive user data if an unexpected host attempts to access the HDDs or if a defined number of authentication failures occurs.

Toshiba is also reportedly working on FIPS 140-2 certification[2] for select SED products to meet government-class security requirements.

Hardware, IceWEB, Storage

IceWEB Launches the IceWEB 6500

IceWEB, Inc. today announced the launch of the IceWEB 6500 Unified Data Storage appliances for cloud and virtual environments.

The IceWEB 6500 unified data system simplifies the management and efficiency of data center environments by providing all-inclusive storage for both block and file data across multiple protocols including Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server and Oracle databases, virtualized environments as well as unstructured data such as scanned images, files, videos, pictures, graphics, and voice – on IceWEB’s single enterprise-class platform.

Rob Howe, IceWEB CEO said, “The IceWEB 6500 is far more than just an addition to our product lineup. It’s full-tilt clustered storage at eye-popping low prices. The IceWEB 6500 offers simplicity, scalability, flexibility and advanced Integration. While that may just sound like a list of features, and it is; it’s a list of highly advanced features found only in unified storage systems that cost orders of magnitude more than the IceWEB 6500. That translates into massive savings for our customers who desperately need professional-level solutions to solve their storage requirements while they deal with frozen or fast-shrinking budgets. So this is not just another new product from IceWEB; this is an astounding amount of value for our customers at a time when they really need it that makes good business sense.”

 


Backup, Disaster Recovery, Disaster Recovery/Business Continuity, Hardware, IceWEB, NovaStor, Partnerships, Storage

IceWEB Adding NovaStor Backup to Storage Appliances

IceWEB Inc., today announced they will bundle NovaSTOR’s Advanced Backup software with IceWEB’s Unified Storage Appliances.

“NovaSTOR is an excellent companion product for our IceWEB appliances because of its broad set of market applications,” said Rob Howe, IceWEB, CEO. “Their products span the same market spaces as ours—small, medium, large and cloud-based enterprises. They cover Windows, Linux, VMWare and Unix servers and clients in a myriad of configurations, mirroring our model. Because it is not always possible or cost-effective for companies to enable total unified storage protocols everywhere in their enterprise, we are providing significant additional value to our customers by enabling them to utilize NovaStor to target an IceWEB appliance in their network in order to satisfy their backup and disaster recovery needs for every location. Enabling them to have the ability to utilize a world-class product like NovaSTOR is yet another area in which IceWEB brings them excellent value when they purchase IceWEB products,” Howe concluded.


Amazon AWS, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, Data center, Hardware, Servers

Contrarian: Building, Colocating Your Own Servers, No Cloud Involved

Jeff Atwood has a great post at Coding Horror talking about his penchant for building his own servers to rack at a colo. It tries to compare to the Amazon Ec2 alternative, all the while admitting it’s pretty much apples and oranges.

I want to make it clear that building and colocating your own servers isn’t (always) crazy, it isn’t scary, heck, it isn’t even particularly hard. In some situations it can make sense to build and rack your own servers, provided …

  • you want absolute top of the line server performance without paying thousands of dollars per month for the privilege
  • you are willing to invest the time in building, racking, and configuring your servers
  • you have the capital to invest up front
  • you desire total control over the hardware
  • you aren’t worried about the flexibility of quickly provisioning new servers to handle unanticipated load
  • you don’t need the redundancy, geographical backup, and flexibility that comes with cloud virtualization

It’s worth reading in its own right, but also because he does a pretty good job of outlining the pros and cons of cloud versus self-hosting. It’s also good thing to remember that no matter how “virtual” we get there’s still gotta be a bunch of hardware somewhere to make it all go.


Amazon AWS, Archiving, AWS, Disaster Recovery/Business Continuity, Document Retention, Glacier, Hardware

How Amazon Glacier Confronts Entropy

Keeping data around — and readable — for a long, long, time is tough. For users Amazon’s Glacier offers freedom from specific hardware issues. We will no longer be stuck with unreadable zip drives or tapes. But that just moves the problem to Amazon. This interview talks about how they are tackling that problem.

The interview also touches on Amazon’s expectation that if they provide the back-end third-party developers will step and provide archiving and indexing tools.


Business Processes, Customer Relationship Management, Enterprise resource planning, ERP, Hardware, Medical, Supply chain, SYSPRO, SYSPRO ERP

SYSPRO ERP Software Able to Facilitate Medical Device Unit Recalls

SYSPRO today announced that SYSPRO ERP software offers manufacturers extensive traceability capabilities to facilitate the ability of manufacturers to trace products from origin, through the manufacturing process, to their ultimate destination, fully maintaining assurance certification and tracking expiration dates. The reaffirmation of the extensive traceability functionalities inherent in SYSPRO ERP software was in reaction to the announcement that “over 123 million medical device units were recalled in the second quarter of 2012, reaching an eight-quarter high,” according to the quarterly ExpertRECALL Index released August 22, 2012.

SYSPRO lot traceability and serial tracking functionality afford extensive visibility up or down the supply chain, as well as providing specific component to parent tracking, thereby providing the means to expedite recalls, should the need arise. SYSPRO optionally allows specific traceable components to be reserved for specific work-orders, as well as providing the flexibility of specifying the parent traceable numbers at the beginning, during or the end of the manufacturing process.

The Associated Press article reporting the record number of recalls contains the following statement by Mike Rozembajgier, vice president of recalls at Stericycle ExpertRECALL, “The growing importance of this product category means that companies need to have a comprehensive recall plan in place that can be deployed within the blink of an eye and can effectively protect their customers…”

According to SYSPRO USA President Joey Benadretti, “The implementation of cost- effective SYSPRO software helps medical device manufacturers streamline their supply chains and also to employ extensive ‘backwards and forwards’ component and product traceability for speedy recalls.


Hardware, IdeaPad, Lenovo, Windows 8

Lenovo Calls it “PC Plus” Era, Releases PCs Primed for Windows 8

Today at the IFA consumer electronics show, Lenovo introduced a comprehensive update of its Idea-branded consumer PCs, including a new IdeaPad® U Series Ultrabook, IdeaPad Y and Z Series laptops, and IdeaCentre® A and B Series all-in-one (AIO) desktops. Powered by third generation Intel® Core™ processors or AMD A-Series processors, Lenovo’s new PCs offer consumers a variety of style, color and performance options, designed for the upcoming Windows 8 operating system.

“Our latest Idea-branded products offer more comfort, simplicity and responsiveness than ever before,” said Wei Jun, vice president, Idea Product Group, Lenovo. “Designed for an optimal Windows 8 experience, users can enjoy up to 10-finger multi-touch for versatile computing; Intelligent TouchPad for easy scrolling, zooming and rotating; Lenovo Cloud for media sharing between devices; and the Windows Store for access to thousands of entertaining and useful apps. These new Idea PCs embody our commitment to deliver products that reflect the style and energy of the user.”

The IdeaPad U510 will be available September 2012 starting at US$679.

The IdeaPad Y400 and Y500 will be available October 2012 starting at US$649.

The IdeaPad Z400 will be available November 2012 starting at US$549.

The IdeaPad Z500 will be available September 2012 starting at US$549.

The Lenovo IdeaCentre A520 will be available October 2012 starting at US$999.

The IdeaCentre B340 and B345 will be available October 2012 starting at US$599.

The IdeaCentre B545 was available in April starting at US$699.