MapR Technologies Releases MapR-XD

MapR Technologies, Inc. has announced MapR-XD, a cloud-scale data store to manage files and containers. As part of the MapR Converged Data Platform, MapR-XD uniquely supports any data type from the edge to the data center and multiple cloud environments with automatic policy-driven tiering from hot, warm or cold data. MapR-XD enables customers to create vast, global data fabrics which are inherently ready for analytical and operational applications making it easier to operationalize data.

“MapR-XD will deliver a single view of data activity, which is critical for immediately identifying potential fraudulent payments,” said BD Goel, chief product strategy and innovation officer, Paysafe. “The ability to unify, manage and act on data very quickly — whether it originated from the cloud, on-premises or at the edge — is a compelling value proposition for us. Reliably delivering a millisecond advantage in data analysis is how MapR helps us stay several steps ahead of cybercriminals.”

“As applications become more intelligent and take advantage of more diverse data in real time, for both analytical and operational uses, there arises the need for new approaches to data processing,” said Matt Aslett, research director, data platforms and analytics, 451 Research. “MapR-XD is designed to eliminate data silos and support new use cases as they emerge that require data processing from the edge, data center and to the cloud.”

Storage and data management are in-the-midst of a generational re-platforming to leap forward into the data age. Key shifts underway include rapidly appealing economics of flash and NVME technologies; the adoption of clouds and IoT at the edge; evolving use cases and workloads; new demands imposed by deep learning technologies; and the radical change in scale and types of data.

“MapR-XD is the result of years of technical innovation and collaboration with our customers to develop a mission-critical modern data platform,” said Anil Gadre, chief product officer, MapR Technologies. “By providing a robust solution to manage data movement across multiple locations with security, high performance and multi-tenancy, we believe MapR is a strategic solution for enterprises embarking on crafting and implementing a next gen data strategy. Our unique Converged Data Platform enables creating data fabric with a global view of data and metadata, supporting a wide diversity of data types for both analytics and operations.”

“Cisco UCS provides the ideal platform for data intensive workloads, while MapR-XD Cloud-Scale Data Store creates the data fabric for managing files, and containers for these workloads and legacy applications,” said Raghunath Nambiar, CTO, Cisco UCS. “This represents a positive direction for the industry in the continuing evolution of Software Defined Storage.”

The new MapR-XD Cloud-scale Data Store includes:

• Files, Container Support: MapR-XD eliminates data silos and simplifies management across files and containers. MapR-XD provides unified security, data protection and high availability across diverse data types. The same underlying data can be accessed through a wide range of industry standard APIs including NFS, POSIX and HDFS to simplify development, administration and eliminate data sprawl.
• Global Exabyte Scale: MapR-XD easily scales to support trillions of files, exabytes of data, on thousands of commodity servers or cloud instances, all accessible through a single global namespace. Additionally it reduces operational complexity and provides a single, scalable view of resources, simplifying access for users, applications and containers.
• Cloud-grade Reliability: MapR-XD delivers high availability, data protection and disaster recovery with no single points of failure, fully distributed metadata, point-in-time snapshots and high-performance, distributed mirroring.
• Speed at Scale with Flash: MapR-XD utilizes the full power of network interconnects and takes advantage of the available performance of underlying heterogeneous hardware, such as disk and flash to meet the demands of GPU-based architectures. Automated capabilities, such as logical partitioning, parallel processing for disparate workloads, and bottleneck avoidance with I/O shaping and optimizations, ensure maximum performance across a cluster. MapR-XD includes an extremely high-performance POSIX Client that provides up to 10x the performance of a typical NFS gateway.
• Stateful Persistence for Containerized Applications: MapR-XD includes a secure, optimized container client for providing containers with access to persisted data. The client supports both legacy and new containerized event-based microservices applications; multiple data types of files, containers, database and event streams; works with multiple schedulers such as kubernetes, mesos and docker swarm; and across any infrastructure such as on-premises, multiple clouds and edge.
• Flexibility to Leverage Multiple Infrastructures: MapR-XD supports edge, on-premises and cloud environments with the same platform. It enables multi-temperature capabilities across flash, disk and cloud tiers with support for containers and automated data movement to address performance, cost and compliance concerns.
• IoT Edge Made Easy: MapR-XD for the edge provides the ability to deploy processing and storage capabilities close to an IoT data source, such as in a car, medical device or jet engine. MapR-XD can store and process machine or sensor-generated data for seamless integration with a centralized Converged Data Platform where global aggregation and analysis would be performed.
• Extensible Architecture: MapR-XD is a powerful component of the Converged Data Platform enabling customers to easily and seamlessly leverage additional capabilities including database, stream processing and integrated analytics on the same platform.

Source: CloudStrategyMag

NetApp Expands Collaboration With Microsoft On Hybrid Cloud Data Services

NetApp has announced plans to expand its strategic alliance with Microsoft to help enterprises accelerate digital transformation for hybrid cloud.

Customers are evolving their data centers to integrate hybrid cloud delivery models for greater agility. As they build out these more flexible architectures, they want to retain the benefits of proven on-premises methods that ensure data efficiencies, protection, and insight. These integrations, however, can create new compatibility issues, particularly with existing applications that depend on file services.

NetApp intends to expand its collaboration with Microsoft to include hybrid cloud data services, built on NetApp’s proven ONTAP® software, that will deliver enterprise-grade data visibility and insights, data access and control, and data protection and security for customers moving to Microsoft Azure.

Collaboration areas include:

• Developing new cloud data services, based on NetApp ONTAP innovation that will be offered on the Azure cloud.
• Engineering collaboration to deliver a solution architecture that will speed the migration of enterprise applications to Azure and Azure Stack so that customers can unlock greater value from their data.
• Integration of NetApp’s newly launched FabricPool functionality, which reduces the cost of cold data by automatically tiering it from on-premises to cloud, with Azure Blob Storage.
• Enablement of Azure as a backup destination for NetApp’s Cloud Control SaaS offering, which provides backup, archive and compliance services to enhance Microsoft Office 365 environments.

“Enterprises depend on Microsoft’s cloud innovation and its broad portfolio of Azure cloud-integrated services to keep them competitive in the fast-moving digital age,” said Anthony Lye, senior vice president, Cloud Business Unit, NetApp. “This new development in our strategic alliance will extend the reach of NetApp’s world-class data services for Azure cloud and support customers as they modernize their businesses and pursue new opportunities for growth.”

Scott Guthrie, executive vice president, Cloud and Enterprise Group, Microsoft Corp., added, “NetApp is a strategic hybrid cloud data services partner for Microsoft Azure and a company whose data solutions are used every day by enterprise customers around the world. Working together we will deliver new solutions that give customers using NetApp and Microsoft Azure even more freedom to build and deploy applications, however they want.”

Both companies share a deep understanding of the needs of global enterprises and offer numerous solutions that help customers maximize the power of their data to achieve competitive advantage. Their collaboration has helped to protect and increase the availability of Microsoft application data assets, and provides a flexible infrastructure to support virtualization and private cloud deployments.

NetApp provides a number of hybrid cloud data services today that support Azure:

• NetApp ONTAP Cloud for Azure, a virtual appliance that combines data control with enterprise-class storage features such as workload portability, dedupe, compression and backup. It works in combination with NetApp OnCommand® Cloud Manager to provide a simple, point-and-click environment to manage storage and ease control of data in Azure.
• NetApp AltaVault™ hybrid cloud appliances for Azure reduce time, cost, and risk with an efficient and a secure approach to backing up cloud-based workloads. Using customers’ existing backup software, AltaVault deduplicates, encrypts, and rapidly migrates data to Azure Storage.
• NetApp Private Storage for Microsoft Azure provides a cloud-connected storage architecture that allows enterprises to build an agile cloud infrastructure that combines the scalability and flexibility of Azure with the control and performance of NetApp on-premises storage hosted in a co-location facility. NetApp Private Storage for Azure solution architecture can be used with data controlled by the US International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) program.

The companies intend to provide additional updates on their hybrid cloud initiatives in the fall at Microsoft Ignite.

Source: CloudStrategyMag

CloudMigrator365 Celebrates Global Migration Milestone

CloudMigrator365 has announced it has successfully migrated over 6 million people to the cloud across 57 countries worldwide.

CloudMigrator365 simplifies and automates migration for clients to Office 365 with a growing number of IT partners as well as professionals worldwide relying on the solution.

Headquartered in Belfast, Northern Ireland, the cloud migration company provides simple, secure and cost-effective Microsoft-based migration for companies of all sizes with customers including global brand leaders to SMEs across all sectors.

The company, led by Darren Mawhinney, managing director, is currently expanding its workforce and worldwide partnership network to meet global demand. CloudMigrator365 is growing rapidly, most notably adding world-class organisations including LinkedIn, YMCA (Canada) and The University of Bristol to its ever-expanding global client-list. The company’s current partners include multinational technology company IBM and international professional services company Capita.

“We are working with a growing number of IT partners and professionals internationally who recognise the importance of a comprehensive migration strategy and solution for Office 365. There is strictly no room for errors or half-measures when moving an organisation to Office 365 so we have worked extremely hard to develop and evolve our solution to ensure successful migrations every time,” said Mawhinney.

CloudMigrator365’s innovation, development and evolution has centered on providing a single solution, enabling IT partners, in-house professionals and users to keep fully in control during migration to the cloud, reducing the risk and uncertainty of outcome. The company’s accelerated expansion is largely due to demand from IT service providers who are investing in the product as they migrate companies’ email and data to the cloud.

Requiring no user downtime, CloudMigrator365 is priced at a fixed rate per mailbox, irrespective of how much data is involved, and works with all migration strategies and approaches. It simplifies exchange migrations and adheres to permitted data-routing policies and data sovereignty enabling organisations to ensure migration projects are fully compliant with the relevant policies.

Fully scalable for all migration projects from the smallest of just a handful of mailboxes to hundreds of thousands of mailboxes, CloudMigrator365 also provides system and user migration reports and metrics providing users with reassurance that all their data has been successfully migrated to Office 365.

In addition to its Belfast Headquarters, CloudMigrator365 is also located in London, Manchester, and Edinburgh.

Source: CloudStrategyMag

Short, Stealthy, Sub-Saturating DDoS Attacks Pose Greatest Security Threat To Businesses

The greatest DDoS risk for organizations is the barrage of short, low volume attacks which mask more serious network intrusions, according to the latest DDoS Trends and Analysis report from Corero Network Security (LSE: CNS), a leading provider of real-time DDoS defense solutions.

According to new Corero research, which highlights DDoS attack attempts against its customers, short, frequent, low-volume DDoS attacks continue to dominate. Despite several headline-dominating, high-volume DDoS attacks over the past year, the vast majority (98%) of the DDoS attack attempts against Corero customers during Q1 2017 were less than 10 Gbps per second in volume. In addition, almost three quarters (71%) of the attacks mitigated by Corero lasted 10 minutes or less.

Due to their small size, these sub-saturating attacks tend to go undetected by IT security staff and many DDoS protection systems. However, they are just disruptive enough to knock a firewall or intrusion prevention system (IPS) offline so that the hackers can target, map and infiltrate a network to install malware and engage data exfiltration activity.

Ashley Stephenson, CEO at Corero Network Security, explains: “Short DDoS attacks might seem harmless, in that they don’t cause extended periods of downtime. But IT teams who choose to ignore them are effectively leaving their doors wide open for malware or ransomware attacks, data theft or other more serious intrusions. Just like the mythological Trojan Horse, these attacks deceive security teams by masquerading as a harmless bystander – in this case, a flicker of internet outage – while hiding their more sinister motives.”

Sub Saturating DDoS Attacks: The Calm Before The Storm

In total, Corero customers experienced an average of 124 DDoS attack attempts per month, equivalent to 4.1 attacks per day during Q1 of 2017. This is a 9% increase in attacks over Q4 2016.

Stephenson continues: “Rather than showing their capabilities in full view, through large, volumetric DDoS attacks that cripple a website, using short attacks allows bad actors to test for vulnerabilities within a network and monitor the success of new methods without being detected. Most cloud-based scrubbing solutions will not detect DDoS attacks of less than 10 minutes in duration, so the damage is done before the attack can even be reported.”

“As a result, the raft of sub-saturating attacks observed at the beginning of this year could represent a testing phase, as hackers experiment with new techniques before deploying them at an industrial scale.”

While low volume attacks remain the norm, Corero recorded a significant (55%) increase in large DDoS attacks of more than 10 Gbps per second, in Q1 of 2017, compared to the previous quarter. In addition, while the majority of attacks recorded lasted less than 10 minutes, the data also revealed a slight increase in attacks lasting 20 minutes or longer, with these attacks now accounting for nearly a quarter (22%) of all the attacks recorded. 

Increased Risks For EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)

From May 2018, any organization that operates in Europe or has European resident data could be subject to severe penalties of up to 4 percent of global turnover if they fail to protect the data of EU residents.

Stephenson states: “With GDPR on the horizon, the risk of data theft resulting from sub-saturating DDoS attacks is extremely serious, and claiming to be ignorant of malicious activity on your network will not substitute a defence. To keep up with the growing sophistication and organization of well-equipped and well-funded threat actors, it’s essential that organizations maintain a comprehensive visibility across their networks to detect and block any potential DDoS incursions as they arise.”

For access to the complete Corero DDoS Trends report, download it here.

Source: CloudStrategyMag

MapR Announces 81% Revenue Growth For First Fiscal Quarter

MapR Technologies, Inc. has announced 81% revenue growth for its first quarter of fiscal 2018, which ended on April 30, 2017, compared to the first quarter of fiscal 2017.  MapR achieved this revenue growth through new and expanded purchases by customers worldwide. The number of MapR customers and partners continued to grow as deployments of the MapR platform helped organizations derive greater business value from their data.

“We continue to see deployments of a new breed of intelligent applications that transform the way data is used by organizations to achieve greater efficiency and advantage,” said Matt Mills, CEO, MapR Technologies.  “MapR offers a unique production-ready data platform that can seamlessly support legacy and modern data technologies with the speed, scale and reliability needed by enterprise customers.”

Q1 Business Highlights:

• Announced that SAP selected the MapR File System to support SAP’s cloud infrastructure storage capabilities.
• Added new customers globally and expanded footprint with existing customers, including Aeroport de Paris, Cardlytics, Ericsson, Ingencio, IRI, Qualcomm, Sovrn, UnitedHealthcare, Wells Fargo, and Xactly.
• Extended relationships with companies such as Norcom to develop innovative, deep learning autonomous applications, and Outscale to offer big data as a service in the cloud to customers worldwide.
• Appointed software and cloud veteran Tom Fisher to role of Chief Technology Officer.
• Expanded the breadth and depth of the MapR ecosystem globally with a new Converge Partner Program that has increased the number of partners year over year by over 35%.
• Added George Roberts and Roger Siboni as two new board members.

Q1 Product Innovation:

• Shipped Converged Data Platform for Docker, the industry’s first persistent storage for containers that offers complete state access to files, database tables, and message streams from any location.

“We are using containers with the MapR Platform across all our applications to drive agility in a fast development environment,” said Gerard Paulke, enterprise architect, Quantium. “The ability to change direction rapidly for testing new software or deploying an application is a key advantage for us. MapR gives Quantium the speed, scale and efficiency that enables us to apply rigorous analytical techniques to consumer transaction data for a wide range of industries including retail, financial services and media.”

• Launched MapR Edge which addresses the need to capture, process, and analyze data generated by Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices close to the source.

“The use cases for IoT continue to grow, and in many situations, the volume of data generated at the edge requires bandwidth levels that overwhelm the available resources,” said Jason Stamper, analyst, Data Platforms & Analytics, 451 Research. “MapR is pushing the computation and analysis of IoT data close to the sources, allowing more efficient and faster decision-making locally, while also allowing subsets of the data to be reliably transported to a central analytics deployment.”

• Optimized product offering with TensorFlow deep learning capabilities added to the Quick Start Solutions family.
• Recognized for exceptional product innovation with the Infoworld Technology of the Year Award for 2017.

Source: CloudStrategyMag

Infinera Cloud Releases Xpress 2

Infinera has announced the general availability of the new Infinera Cloud Xpress 2, providing data center interconnect (DCI) operators 100 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) services with unmatched scale, simplicity, security, and efficiency. The Cloud Xpress 2 has already been deployed in major internet content provider (ICP) networks.

The Cloud Xpress 2 is the first platform deployed in live networks featuring the Infinera Infinite Capacity Engine (ICE4), powered by Infinera’s innovative FlexCoherent® Processor and fourth-generation photonic integrated circuit (PIC). The Cloud Xpress 2 is now generally available for a broad range of customers to benefit from its industry-leading capabilities:

• Simple, open, automated. Like all models in the Cloud Xpress Family, the Cloud Xpress 2 is designed for plug-and-play installation with simplified provisioning and support for data center automation using open software-defined networking (SDN) application programming interfaces (APIs), zero-touch provisioning (ZTP) and streaming telemetry.
• Plug-and-play capacity-reach. The Cloud Xpress 2 is based on ICE4, which incorporates Infinera’s unique PIC technology to deliver a 1.2 terabits per second (Tb/s) super-channel output. Also, offering extended reach without external amplification, the Cloud Xpress 2 delivers the highest plug-and-play capacity-reach of any compact DCI platform, simplifying system design, deployment and operations.
• High density and low power. With 1.2 Tb/s of line-side capacity in a single rack unit, and very high power-efficiency, the Cloud Xpress 2 is designed to fit easily into space and power-constrained data center environments.
• Instant Bandwidth. The Cloud Xpress 2 incorporates Infinera’s unique Instant Bandwidth technology, the industry’s only software defined capacity (SDC) solution, allowing customers to software-activate line-side bandwidth in 100 Gb/s increments as and when needed in minutes, aligning with their bandwidth demands.
• Built-in encryption support. The Cloud Xpress 2 supports built-in hardware-based data encryption employing advanced industry standards and enabling 100% encryption of data transmitted between data centers. Built-in encryption support is an increasingly critical requirement for many DCI operators.

The Cloud Xpress 2 builds on the success of the market-leading Cloud Xpress Family. According to industry analysts, from its introduction in 2014 through the end of 2016, Cloud Xpress revenue was more than double the rest of the compact purpose-built DCI market combined.

“Infinera raised the bar in the industry with the Cloud Xpress, beating its competition to the market with a platform purpose-built for DCI,” said Andrew Schmitt, Founder and Lead Analyst at Cignal AI. “The general availability of the Cloud Xpress 2 places Infinera in a leadership position to continue meeting the challenging technical, cost and high-volume requirements of cloud and content provider networks.”

“Infinera has taken optical transport to the next level, by integrating ICE4 technology into Intelligent Transport Network platforms,” said Stuart Elby, Senior Vice President of Cloud Network Strategy and Technology at Infinera. “Major ICPs are deploying the Cloud Xpress 2 for its extreme simplicity, multi-terabit scalability and efficiency. The early adoption of the Cloud Xpress 2 underscores our customers’ need for a purpose-built DCI solution to enable continued rapid growth in their hyperscale networks.”

The Infinera Cloud Xpress Family delivers cloud-optimized metro wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) solutions to cloud service providers, ICPs, internet exchange (IX) service providers, enterprise network operators and other large-scale data center operators. The Cloud Xpress Family offers customers the choice of 10 GbE, 40 GbE and 100 GbE client interfaces to meet their specific requirements.             

Source: CloudStrategyMag

Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute Now Available At CoreSite’s Boston Data Center

CoreSite Realty Corporation has announced the availability of Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute through CoreSite’s Boston data center. Private connectivity to Microsoft Azure via ExpressRoute is now available in four of CoreSite’s markets, including through its Denver, Los Angeles, and New York data center campuses.

CoreSite customers in Boston may now privately connect to Microsoft Azure, Office 365, and Dynamics 365 via the CoreSite Open Cloud Exchange, which provides private, SLA-backed virtual connections and on-demand provisioning. The integration of Azure ExpressRoute and the CoreSite Open Cloud Exchange provides CoreSite customers with the opportunity to establish a fast and reliable connection into Azure, Office 365, and Dynamics 365 that bypasses the public Internet. With a dedicated, high-performance Azure ExpressRoute connection, customers have a natural extension of their data centers and can build hybrid applications that span on-premises infrastructure and Azure without compromising privacy or performance.

CoreSite customers in Boston, Denver, New York, and Los Angeles can efficiently transfer large data sets for high-performance computing, migrate virtual machines between dev-test environments in Azure to production environments housed in a CoreSite datacenter and optimize replication for business continuity, disaster recovery, and other high-availability strategies. Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute also enables Office 365 and Dynamics 365 customers to streamline network connectivity for Exchange, Skype for Business and SharePoint services.

“By providing our customers with direct connectivity to Azure ExpressRoute in our Boston market, we are enabling enterprises to more effectively deploy and realize the benefits of hybrid and multi-cloud solutions,” said Brian Warren, senior vice president of engineering & product at CoreSite. “Through the CoreSite Open Cloud Exchange, we are able to offer our customers flexible and reliable connections to the cloud, while ensuring security, optimal performance and scalability.”

CoreSite’s Boston data center (BO1) borders Cambridge and Boston’s central business district, serving the many health care, financial, technology, and educational enterprises located in the area, and currently provides access to more than 80 network, cloud and IT service providers. This strategically located colocation facility is tethered to regional communication hubs and offers customers secure, reliable, high-performance solutions for their mission-critical business applications.

Source: CloudStrategyMag