Infortrend optimizes data center footprint with high density 4U 60-bay storage

Infortrend Technology Inc. has introduced the 4U 60-bay unified storage system to address rapid data growth and limited datacenter space challenges. The 4U 60-bay EonStor GS Gen2 features advanced performance, and its high density enclosure can accommodate up to 896 drives in one system, delivering 10PB+ massive capacity for data-intensive applications.

EonStor GS 3000/4000 Gen2 is the latest generation of Infortrend’s high availability enterprise unified storage which integrates NAS/SAN/Cloud gateway into one system. 

Compared with the previous solutions, GS Gen2 NAS performance is improved by 60 percent, reaching up to 9,900/5,500 MB/s read/write throughput. It also supports 900K IOPS performance. Other enhancements include double memory capacity, four onboard 10GbE ports for high-speed I/O connections, and comprehensive form factors.

The EonStor GS 3000/2000 series are comprehensive enterprise solutions with exceptional SAN and NAS transmission performance to meet the storage needs of SMBs to large enterprises. Besides various form factors, they also offer up to 4 sets of modular host boards to fulfill the requirements of numerous applications or architecture transformation to allow more deployment flexibility. 

Furthermore, the system also comes with high expandability of more than 8PB storage capacity to easily meet the needs of future data growth. As such, its outstanding performance, flexibility, and high expandability can run critical applications for SAN and NAS on the market. The GS 3000 is perfect for the performance-conscious, while the GS 2000 is ideal for the budget—conscious as it can meet all general storage needs.

With the support of Intel’s advanced CPU platform, and the newly-released 4U 60-bay form factor, GS Gen2 is designed to empower customers to overcome the issues of rapid data volume growth in terms of storage performance and capacity, while optimizing datacenter space utilization.   

The EonStor GS 5000/4000 series forms the backbone of our high performance solution for enterprises with its powerful performance, flexibility, and high expandability to efficiently boost overall productivity. They can handle large amounts of I/O and file transfers even under high workloads, and are especially ideal for hybrid environments that adopt SAN, NAS, and cloud integration. 

The GS 5000 is perfect for those who want performance, capacity, and a high port count, while the GS 4000 is ideal for the budget-conscious as it can easily meet all general storage needs.

“Infortrend releases the 4U 60-bay GS Gen2 series to prepare businesses for the enormous data management requirements,” said Thomas Kao, senior director of product planning. “This new solution is especially future-proof for data-intensive applications, such as media & entertainment, surveillance, and HPC (high performance computing).”

PAC Storage enhances data storage performance with scale-out NAS, latest controllers, and 32Gb FC / 25GbE connectivity

PAC Storage (PAC) has announced three latest enhancements to their existing line of hardware: scale-out NAS systems, next generation controllers, and 32Gb FC and 25GbE host boards. Each enhancement dramatically accelerates system performance, providing tremendous benefits to a variety of industries and applications including database, analytics, virtualization, motion media, file sharing, cloud data integration, data science and AI.

The all-new Scale-Out NAS systems product line supports 100+ Gbps performance and scaling to more than 100 PB capacity. These solutions allow capacity and performance to be increased by horizontally adding another node (array) to the system.

PAC Storage is an enterprise data storage hardware solution. Since 2005, PAC SAN solutions have been data center cornerstones nationwide for primary, secondary, backup, and disaster recovery. In 2017, PAC introduced PS storage solutions which offer SAN and NAS, and include cloud gateway options. Offering the ideal price point, PAC feature-rich solutions are renowned for no single point of failure and scalability to petabytes of on-premise storage.

These scale-out NAS systems are joined by new Next Generation Controllers featuring up to twelve cores of the latest Intel CPU technology. Improvements also include doubling the controller cache to 512GBs, enabling PAC controllers to now boost performance by up to 80 percent, fulfilling the demanding requirements of today’s intensive enterprise data environments. 

Both PAC Storage PS and PAC All Flash product lines will feature the next generation controllers with all flash designed to deliver optimal SSD performance and response times of less than 0.35 milliseconds, as well as up to 900K IOPS and 10,000/5,500 MB/s read/write speed.

PAC Scale-Out NAS supports adding more nodes achieving more performance and capacity via a clustered system with up to 100 plus GBps read/write speed and more then a 100PBs of storage for the needs of future data growth.   

PAC also supports auto-balancing function that supports distribution of data across all nodes in the system. When a large number of users access data simultaneously, the system share the workload through parallel processing, solving the problem of a single node performance limitation and improving the access e­­fficiently.  

To prevent critical data loss and ensure continuous storage services PACs Scale-Out system is designed with the support of multi-layer data protection on hard drives, notes, and cluster levels. If any of the elements fails, neither the data will be lost nor the performance will be affected.  

If a single node failure is detected, PAC initiates self-healing function to recover the data from the faulty node. On a cluster level, users can use the Rsync feature for remote backup of the cluster file to remote cluster or remote NAS.   

Rounding out the new PAC Storage enhancements are 32Gb FC and 25GbE host boards which enable enterprise customers to migrate to the new networking standards for data access acceleration. The 32Gb FC and 25GbE host connectivity more than double system bandwidth via a single lane, making the storage infrastructure more scalable and flexible. 

"With this solution, we’ve truly hit it out of the park,” said PAC CEO Rick Crane. “The new scale-ut version of NAS is an outstanding and innovative alternative for our Isilon customers looking for a scale-out environment that’s simple to administer and easy on their budget. Even better, they can take advantage of the Next Generation technology in this product, as well as in our existing portfolio of SAN/NAS."

Samsung Research Centers earn top places in leading AI challenges

Samsung Electronics’ Global Research & Development (R&D) centers play a key part in developing artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities for real-world usage. A credit to the work this advanced R&D branch of Samsung undertakes, both Samsung R&D Institute Poland and Samsung Research America AI Center have recently won two prestigious global challenges.

2019 marks the third year in a row that Samsung R&D Institute Poland, in partnership with the U.K.’s University of Edinburgh (UEDIN), has received accolades at the International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT), one of the top two global workshops on automatic language translation, along with the Workshop on Machine Translation (WMT). 

This year, Samsung R&D Institute Poland won first place in two categories, the first being text-to-text translation from English to Czech and the second – an end-to-end system translating English speech into German text.

For the text-to-text translation category, researchers worked to develop a model to translate the transcript of a spoken English-language TED Talk into Czech. Developing their winning model required the Samsung team to develop large, filtered corpora from which to work and generate as much synthetic data as possible. 

The work done by the Samsung R&D Institute Poland team, together with additional modeling help from UEDIN, was selected as the best in the challenge by human evaluators. This means that the translations produced by Samsung R&D Institute Poland’s system scored the highest both in fluency and adequacy.

Samsung R&D Institute Poland’s participation in their second winning category this year, the end-to-end translation system from English to German, was a first for the team. 

The task was to produce a German-language transcription of an English-language TED Talk audio recording. This task required the development of a single model that could take an audio file input and subsequently produce a translated transcription. It was made more difficult by the deficiency of the provided audio sources, compared to typical speech recognition task. 

Samsung R&D Institute Poland proposed several innovative methods for end-to-end speech translation that mitigated this source paucity, obtaining a state-of-the-art result with their final system that won them first place in the challenge.

This October, researchers from Samsung Research America’s AI Center received first place in the International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)’s challenge: Linguistic Meets Image and Video Retrieval (Fashion IQ). ICCV is a premier international computer vision conference that took place in Seoul, Korea, this year.

The challenge Samsung Research America AI Center took part in, sponsored by IBM research, aims to develop conversational shopping assistants that are more natural and real-world applicable. The task given to Samsung Research America AI Center‘s team, the ‘Superraptors’, belonged to the domain of image retrieval. 

In the task, an input query was specified in the form of a candidate image as well as in two natural language expressions that describe the visual differences of the search target. The goal of this challenge was to gather opinions and experience from researchers on the emerging space of visual content retrieval with a natural language interface.

Samsung Research America AI Center’s submission to the challenge, “Multimodal Ensemble of Diverse Models for Image Retrieval Using Natural Language Feedback”, blended the given data in different modalities with multiple deep learning models. 

The team’s win marks the first time a Samsung Research team has won a multimodal (language and vision) challenge; previously, Samsung AI Center Moscow, Samsung R&D Institute Poland and Samsung R&D Institute China-Beijing have received awards in single modality challenges.

Panda Security reveal that cyber criminals are targeting Olympics, as state hackers target sporting organisations

As a celebration of international sport, the Olympic Games is famously non-political. By inviting every nation to participate, the Games are intended to bring the entire world together, promoting peace and harmony through a celebration of sport.

Winning a gold medal may be the pinnacle of sporting achievements, but the competition promotes participation above all else. 

The Olympic Games’ creed states, “The important thing in life is not the triumph, but the fight; the essential thing is not to have won, but to have fought well.”

During the Cold War, many countries treated the Games as a propaganda exercise; winning the most gold medals was seen as a victory of ideology as much as sporting ability. Some countries even engaged in doping and cheating to gain an advantage.

The end of the Cold War hasn’t stopped state-sponsored doping programs however. The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) has begun proceedings against Russia which could see the country, and its athletes, banned from competing at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics because of irregularities in drug tests.

WADA suspects that tests have been tampered with – perhaps as an attempt to hide a state-sponsored doping program. This comes just one year after Russia was re-instated to world competition following a ban for doping offenses.

Since the announcement that WADA had opened new proceedings against Russia, the issue has quickly escalated. Microsoft has recently issued a short warning that official bodies associated with the Olympic Games are at increased risk of cyberattack.

According to Microsoft, state-sponsored organisations like the Fancy Bear hacking group have already begun launching attacks. As well WADA, Microsoft has detected another 15 organisations that have been targeted.

Sporting bodies are being warned to improve their security provisions or risk falling victim to data theft, disruption and damage to their reputations.

Microsoft’s warning is quite specific – these are finely targeted attacks intended for specific organisations. Using techniques like spear phishing, hackers are focusing directly on a limited list of targets.

Due to this, ordinary web users are unlikely to be affected directly. Computer could probably will not become a direct target. As the hackers are out to cause maximum disruption, users may find that enjoyment of the Olympic Games is impaired.

Previous hacking attempts have crashed WiFi networks at Olympic venues, or even taken official websites offline. Annoying certainly, but not dangerous to your personal security or privacy.

WADA is only just beginning proceedings against the Russian Federation, so there is a penny of time for a resolution to be found before the games begin in July next year. In the meantime, any body associated with WADA or the Olympics will need to review and improve their cyber security defences to avoid becoming the next target of state-sponsored hackers.

U.S. Department of Justice takes evolution of unmanned aircraft systems in account; updates its policy documentation

The Justice Department announced publication of its updated policy on the Use of Unmanned Aircraft Systems. In light of advancements in unmanned aircraft system (UAS) technology, and lessons learned from the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s limited use of UAS, the policy enables the Department of Justice’s law enforcement components to safely and responsibly employ UAS technology within a framework designed to provide accountability and protect privacy and civil liberties.

The Policy permits the use of UAS only in connection with properly authorized investigations and activities.  It also requires compliance with the Constitution and all applicable laws and regulations, including regulations issued by the Federal Aviation Administration.  

Department of Justice components anticipate using UAS to support crime scene response and investigation, search and rescue, and site security, among other authorized uses. 

In order to ensure accountability and airspace safety, the Department requires UAS operations to be approved at an appropriate level and conducted by personnel who meet Department-wide training standards. Importantly, the new policy also requires components to evaluate UAS acquisitions for cybersecurity risks, guarding against potential threats to the supply chain and DOJ’s networks.  

“UAS technology assists the Department in protecting public safety and, most importantly, reduces risks to officers and the public,” said Beth A. Williams, Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Policy.  “Our new policy promotes the responsible, appropriate, and effective use of UAS by the Department and can serve as a model for our state, local, tribal, and territorial public safety partners as they develop their own UAS programs and best practices.” 

The policy reflects the department’s commitment to the protection of privacy and civil liberties, mandating annual privacy reviews of UAS programs and assessments of new UAS technology from a privacy perspective.  It also places limits on data retention, generally requiring privacy sensitive data to be deleted within 180 days, unless certain exceptions are met. 

In addition to utilizing UAS as a law enforcement tool, the Department takes seriously the threat posed by unlawful and unsafe uses of UAS.  The Department has trained federal prosecutors and agents across the country on the criminal and civil enforcement tools available to counter the misuse of UAS, such as the use of drones to smuggle contraband into prisons or violate restricted airspace.  

Department of Justice personnel have also trained and collaborated with senior state, local, tribal, and territorial law enforcement officials who face this new threat on a daily basis. 

The department welcomes lawful and beneficial uses of UAS, which promise to enhance the economy and transform the delivery of goods and the provision of critical services ranging from search-and-rescue to industrial inspections. At the same time, the department will not hesitate to take action against those who threaten the safety of skies and the public. 

The updated policy announced draws on the department’s long history of leveraging technology to protect the public, while promoting values and the rule of law.  

International Medical Solutions launches CloudSync for Google Cloud healthcare customers transitioning to the cloud

International Medical Solutions (IMS), a Google Cloud Partner, announced a solution that will enable radiologists and other healthcare clinicians to transition to the cloud. 

The IMS CloudSync enables radiology sites to transition to the cloud and continue to use their legacy on-premise workstations and DICOM viewers. The front-end solution designed with the needs of initial Google Cloud Platform (GCP) users in mind uses an implementation that enables GCP to be added to an on-premise legacy viewing workflow, where GCP would act as the archive. 

The plug-and-play solution works out-of-the-box and allows PACS sites to sync their on-premise storage of medical images with their cloud storage. The added benefit is the sites can continue to use their legacy PACS workstations to view images stored in the cloud. 

"IMS has been working closely with Google Cloud to solve unmet needs for customers who are starting to transition to the cloud. CloudSync™ is an out-of-the-box, cost-effective solution that improves clinician workflows while enabling them to use on-prem legacy systems at the same time," says Vittorio Accomazzi, CTO of International Medical Solutions. Accomazzi adds, "Also, CloudSync inherently provides image sharing as it allows multiple sites to share and exchange images on GCP."

IMS CloudVue will also be featured at RSNA this year. The solution, which launched earlier this year, is a cloud-based viewing platform that provides the experience of an installed application on any device or workstation. CloudSync and CloudVue can also be used as a disaster recovery solution since CloudSync will upload the on-premise data onto GCP, which can be accessed using CloudVue. At any given time, the user has two copies of the data and at least two ways for accessing it.

Over the last year, IMS has worked closely with Google Cloud to enhance the integration with the Google Cloud Healthcare API, including integrating with machine learning backend.

stackArmor debuts stackArmor OpsAlert offering to reduce cloud costs by detecting and eliminating idle capacity

stackArmor has unveiled stackArmor OpsAlert cloud operations management solution for busy product managers, product owners and business managers with a stake in financially optimized cloud hosting. 

stackArmor OpsAlert provides actionable intelligence on cloud utilization and cost using simple business oriented metrics. These metrics allow business managers and product managers to detect idle capacity and improve utilization thereby increasing margins for cloud-based products.

Continuous monitoring of cloud operations and costs is a critical need for government program managers, who must stay compliant with Antideficiency Act requirements. It also comes with the capability to monitor cloud costs, detect cloud resource idling, and track cloud contract data in a single dashboard provides situational awareness and transparency.

stackArmor OpsAlert has been designed from the ground up to meet the needs of government agencies in monitoring cloud costs in compliance with FedRAMP, FISMA and DFARS requirements through its unique "ibn-boundary" deployment model. The "in-boundary" deployment model ensures that all operational and cost data remains within the system boundary, unlike SaaS solutions that install agents and are not FedRAMP-accredited.

stackArmor OpsAlert is geared for management oversight using easy to understand business metrics drive accountability. The stackArmor Cloud Idle Score provides an instant and easy to understand metric for detecting idle capacity that is being paid for but not utilized. 

It also aids in  accountability using simple categorization of cloud instances into highly idle, moderately idle or low idle allow managers to ask the right questions and drill-down to eliminate wastage, and increase margins. SaaS product hosted on AWS can improve their margins by improving operational efficiency of cloud assets by eliminating idle capacity.

The ability to interpret complex cost, operations and utilization data is essential for effective management. Using advanced data aggregation, integration and data science methods, stackArmor OpsAlert shows utilization, idle and cost data side by side to enable decision making.

stackArmor OpsAlert include actionable insights with proven algorithms to detect idle and waste to help product managers, SaaS CFO’s and business managers track cloud spend and bring it under control. It offers accountability across distributed teams with dashboards and emails to help agile product teams quickly see cloud spending and eliminate wastage using the Cloud Idle Score across Regions and AWS Accounts.

stackArmor OpsAlert is tailored for fast growing organizations that are unable to dedicate full-time resources for cloud cost and utilization management. Its fully managed billing and cloud operations support services are cost-effective tools for busy cloud product owners, product managers and program managers looking for force-multipliers.