Oracle makes it to DISA Impact Level 5 provisional authorization for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

Following closely on the heels of Oracle achieving FedRAMP authorization, Oracle announces Tuesday three new government regions: Ashburn, Virginia; Phoenix, Arizona; and Chicago, Illinois. These regions have achieved DISA Impact Level 5 provisional authorization (IL5 PATO), providing a cloud environment where U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) and other federal customers can harness the power of Oracle Cloud to unlock innovation, improve mission performance, and enhance service delivery.  

This is an important milestone in Oracle’s journey to deliver innovative cloud services with consistent high performance and exceptional security to the entire U.S. government. In 2020, Oracle plans to bring additional full-scale Gen 2 Cloud Regions online to support the classified missions of the US Government.

“U.S. DoD and other Federal customers are continually looking for new, secure ways to improve citizen services and keep our nation safe,” said Don Johnson, executive vice president, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. “Oracle’s Generation 2 Cloud was engineered to deliver highly secure, high-performance, cost effective infrastructure that helps government organizations address the needs of the nation today and tomorrow.” 

Oracle has been a key technology partner of the U.S. government. Currently, more than 500 government organizations take advantage of Oracle’s technologies and superior performance. State, local and federal government customers using Oracle to modernize their technology include Defense Manpower Data Center (DMDC) and the U.S. Air Force.

The Department of Defense recently awarded a contract to Oracle for its Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to support a large portion of the enterprise human resource portfolio. The award modernizes existing infrastructure and will assist the Defense Manpower Data Center in providing necessary human resource services and capabilities to its military members, veterans and their families.

With Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, customers benefit from best-in-class security, consistent high performance, simple predictable pricing, and the tools and expertise needed to bring enterprise workloads to cloud quickly and efficiently. In addition, Oracle now provides organizations with a complete set of solutions for any high performance computing (HPC) workload, enabling businesses to capitalize on the benefits of modern cloud computing while enjoying performance comparable to on-premises at a lower cost.

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure has achieved certifications and attestations for key security standards and compliance mandates. These independent third-party assurance programs demonstrate Oracle’s commitment to security and to meeting the needs of the public sector. These IL5 PATO government regions will launch with initial Oracle services including VM and bare metal compute (CPU and GPU), storage (including archive, block, and object storage), database, identity and access management, key management service, load balancer, and Exadata cloud service.

“Oracle Cloud Infrastructure brings incredible performance, flexibility, security, and cost-savings benefits to our federal civilian, commercial and higher education customers,” said Paul Seifert, federal sector president, Mythics. “Mythics’ DoD customers will now be able to leverage Oracle Cloud to better serve the unique requirements of the DoD at home and abroad.”

“We’re excited to see the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure achieve DISA Impact Level 5 provisional authorization, as it provides additional options that our federal government clients—especially those seeking to migrate large and complex Oracle-based solutions to the cloud—can leverage,” said Anthony Flake, managing director of Accenture Federal Services’ Oracle practice.

NVIDIA releases Magnum IO software line to help reduce data bottlenecks for data scientists and AI, HPC researchers

NVIDIA introduced NVIDIA Magnum IO, a suite of software to help data scientists and AI and high performance computing researchers process massive amounts of data in minutes, rather than hours. This offering ahs been developed in close collaboration with vendors in networking and storage, including DataDirect Networks, Excelero, IBM, Mellanox and WekaIO.

Optimized to eliminate storage and input/output bottlenecks, Magnum IO delivers up to 20 times faster data processing for multi-server, multi-GPU computing nodes when working with massive datasets to carry out complex financial analysis, climate modeling and other HPC workloads.

At the heart of Magnum IO is GPUDirect, which provides a path for data to bypass CPUs and travel on “open highways” offered by GPUs, storage and networking devices. Compatible with a wide range of communications interconnects and APIs — including NVIDIA NVLink and NCCL, as well as OpenMPI and UCX — GPUDirect is composed of peer-to-peer and RDMA elements.

Its newest element is GPUDirect Storage, which enables researchers to bypass CPUs when accessing storage and quickly access data files for simulation, analysis or visualization.

Magnum IO integrates infrastructure elements to maximize storage and network I/O performance and functionality. It optimizes IO performance by bypassing the CPU to enable direct IO between GPU memory and network storage. It also relieves CPU contention to create a more balanced GPU-accelerated system and delivers peak IO bandwidth with up to ten times fewer CPU cores, and provides optimized implementation for current and future platforms, whether the data transfers are latency sensitive, bandwidth sensitive, or collectives.

NVIDIA Magnum IO software is available, with the exception of GPUDirect Storage, which is currently available to select early-access customers. Broader release of GPUDirect Storage is planned for the first half of next year.

Intel debuts GPU architecture with HPC and AI acceleration, and oneAPI software stack for heterogeneous architectures

Intel unveiled its vision for extending its leadership in the convergence of high-performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI) with additions to its data-centric silicon portfolio and an ambitious new software initiative that represents a paradigm shift from single-architecture, single-vendor programming models.

Addressing the increasing use of heterogeneous architectures in high-performance computing, Intel expanded on its existing technology portfolio to move, store and process data more effectively by announcing a new category of discrete general-purpose GPUs optimized for AI and HPC convergence. 

Intel also launched the oneAPI industry initiative to deliver a unified and simplified programming model for application development across heterogenous processing architectures, including CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs and other accelerators. The launch of oneAPI represents millions of Intel engineering hours in software development and marks a game-changing evolution from limiting, proprietary programming approaches to an open standards-based model for cross-architecture developer engagement and innovation.

The oneAPI initiative Intel launched will define programming for an increasingly AI-infused, multi-architecture world. oneAPI delivers a unified and open programming experience to developers on the architecture of their choice without compromising performance and eliminating the complexity of separate code bases, multiple-programming languages, and different tools and workflows. oneAPI preserves existing software investments with support for existing languages, while delivering flexibility for developers to create versatile applications.

oneAPI includes both an industry initiative based on open specifications and an Intel beta product. The oneAPI specification includes a direct programming language, APIs and a low-level hardware interface. Intel’s oneAPI beta software provides developers a comprehensive portfolio of developer tools that include compilers, libraries and analyzers, packaged into domain-focused toolkits. 

The initial oneAPI beta release targets Intel Xeon scalable processors, Intel Core processors with integrated graphics, and Intel FPGAs, with additional hardware support to follow in future releases.

EXTEN Technologies and AIC to deliver NVMe-oF storage offerings optimized for supercomputing

AIC and EXTEN Technologies have partnered to provide a dense and scalable, software-defined NVMe-oF solution with record breaking performance, advanced management, provisioning, and RAID data protection services. This disaggregated storage based on the AIC Shark server provides industry leading price performance for HPC, analytics and ML/AI applications.

The AIC Shark server is ideal for dense computation, networking, and storage scalability. Four AMD EPYC processors manage storage processing for up to 24 local NVMe drives in its 2U enclosure. The AIC Shark server is an ideal scale-up (add JBOFs) and scale-out (add servers) platform for high-bandwidth shared storage applications that have a variety of data processing requirements.

The EXTEN HyperDynamic datapath running on Shark nodes creates a powerful data processing system with less than one microsecond of software overhead. This enables blistering performance with the lowest latency available. With simple striping, the 2U system achieves bandwidth of over 80GB/s. EXTEN supports both RDMA and TCP in parallel for maximum flexibility.

The EXTEN HyperDynamic software management suite offers a single REST interface to manage a cluster of NVMe-oF targets. This allows administrators to provision and manage the AIC Shark with the simplicity of a single machine, while maintaining the shared-nothing, linear scalability of NVMe-oF block storage performance. The EXTEN management framework is standards-based which ensures future-proof compatibility. Together, EXTEN software and the AIC Shark provide a perfect framework for implementing any reconfigurable, software-defined NVMe-oF solution.

Utilizing standard MPIO and Linux drivers, the Shark solution provides a robust storage platform built on standard tools that provides fault tolerance at both the target and drive level. EXTEN software ensures high performance resilience features including mirroring and dual parity RAID within each Shark node and volume replication across nodes without using client-side resources such as CPU, memory and I/O bandwidth.

Embarcadero releases InterBase 2020, its database management system with Tablespaces and patented Change Views technology

Embarcadero, a division of Idera, announced InterBase 2020, the latest release of its database management system including support for tablespaces. InterBase is a light, ultra-fast, embeddable SQL database with commercial grade data security, disaster recovery and change synchronization. 

The solution leverages multi-core CPUs and multi-CPU systems, along with a unique versioning approach and advanced disk I/O caching to retrieve and update data quickly. With a small footprint and fast install, it is ideal for use in mission-critical contexts such as patient management, railways, medical labs, multi-national POS, CRM, and emergency response systems.

In previous versions of InterBase, all files for a SQL database had to be mapped to the same physical storage, either a fast but small SSD or a large but slow HDD or SAN. With InterBase 2020, support for tablespaces maps individual tables and indexes to specific files and storage for improved performance and more balanced, optimized use of hardware technologies. These include SSDs for key tables and indexes and HDDs for larger but less commonly used tables.

Tablespaces allow for better performance and more balanced and optimized use of the hardware. Technically this feature allow a database object definition to specify a storage location in a particular logical file collection. This is especially beneficial for disk technologies, allowing you to better mix the use of fast SSDs and large HDDs. This is a key difference, since prior to InterBase 2020, all of the files for a database had to be mapped to the same storage. 

A database administrator can leverage tablespace characteristics to optimize runtime database performance. Selective tablespaces including active data can be backed up and restored as needed to minimize backup/restore time.

InterBase 2020 expands the OS platform support. Embedded InterBase (IBLite and IBToGo) is now available for Android 64-bit and macOS 64-bit. This allows RAD Studio developers to build InterBase enabled 64-bit Delphi applications and target both the Google Play Store and macOS App Store. 

The full list of supported InterBase 2020 IBLite and IBToGo platforms include Windows, macOS, Linux, Android and iOS. Supported platforms for InterBase 2020 Server Edition include Windows with macOS and Linux support currently in beta and coming later.

InterBase 2020 comes in two versions: InterBase Server and Embedded InterBase (IBLite and IBToGo editions), the latter of which is now available for Android 64-bit and macOS 64-bit. IBLite and IBToGo can be used without InterBase Server as a stand-alone embedded database across multiple platforms, reducing costs and improving application speed and user experience with mobile data encryption support. Change Views provides the infrastructure for ensuring offline data is kept current with minimal effort.

InterBase Server powers Embarcadero’s RAD Server REST-service engine and the Embedded version is an integral part of RAD Studio which offers single-source applications for mobile and desktop operating systems.

Fortinet’s FortiGate 60F sets new benchmark for security compute ratings; boosts performance for integrated security and SD-WAN

Fortinet announced the FortiGate 60F Next-Generation Firewall, its latest desktop secure SD-WAN appliance. With over 1.5 million units sold worldwide, the FortiGate 60 series is the best-selling next-generation firewall and now includes Fortinet’s purpose-built system on a chip 4 (SOC4) security processor to achieve the highest Security Compute Ratings in the industry to support customers’ WAN edge transformation.

Digital innovation and rapid cloud adoption is changing the face of today’s business and has created significant challenges for organizations, such as poor user experience due to network bandwidth constraints and increased security risks with branches connected to the internet. 

Software-defined wide area networks (SD-WANs) have emerged as the favored solution to solve these issues while also reducing the costs associated with MPLS connections. 

However, not all SD-WAN solutions have risen to the requirements of existing WAN edge. Many SD-WAN solutions on the market are incomplete and do not adequately provide the right performance, visibility, or security to ensure a secure connection and high quality of user experience.

To continue its focus on supporting enterprises’ WAN edge transformation and delivering Secure SD-WAN, Fortinet is announcing the latest next-generation firewall to include its patented SOC4 security processor - the FortiGate 60F. 

FortiGate 60F now consolidates SD-WAN, advanced routing, and advanced security capabilities into a single appliance that enables network leaders to deploy Secure SD-WAN, while reducing complexity by consolidating point products into a single offering. This allows high performance and improved user experience at an optimal total cost of ownership (TCO).
 

To help customers maintain high quality user experience for their business critical traffic (be it SaaS, multi-cloud, or unified communications), FortiGate 60F delivers ideal application steering, giving visibility to all traffic (even if encrypted) without impacting performance and ensuring all critical applications are routed to their best path.
 

FortiGate 60F leverages Security-Driven Networking principals – powered by Fortinet’s patented SOC4 security processor – to deliver the fastest deep inspection of SSL/TLS encrypted traffic (including the industry’s first support for TLS 1.3) at 750Mbps, 11 times greater than the industry average. 

The FortiGate 60F offers comprehensive threat prevention with IPS, application control, and anti-malware at 700Mbps, four times greater than the industry average, to help customers protect their network without impacting performance.

Fortinet security processors radically increase the performance, scalability, and value of Fortinet solutions while greatly improving user experience and shrinking space and power requirements. Security Compute Rating is a benchmark that compares the performance of Fortinet’s purpose-built ASIC-based next-generation firewall appliance to other NGFW and SD-WAN vendors in that same price range that utilize generic CPUs for networking and security capabilities. 

“We hear from an increasing number of customers who are struggling to achieve the required level of user experience, visibility, and security at their WAN edge to support key business applications,” said John Maddison, EVP of Products and CMO at Fortinet. “With today’s introduction of the FortiGate 60F powered by our latest security processor, Fortinet continues its commitment to security innovation, setting industry records for performance to empower network leaders to truly transform their WAN edge.”