New Products

James Gray

Issue #279, July 2017

Mistral Solutions' 820 Nano SOM

One of the smallest System on a Module (SOM) solutions currently available in the market—measuring a mere 51mm x 26mm—is Mistral Solutions' 820 Nano SOM. The company predicts that its new 820 Nano SOM solution is “destined to be a preferred SoM in the industry”. The 820 Nano SOM is Mistral's latest small-form-factor, high-performance SOM and is based on the powerful Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 processor, which enjoys an ecosystem of technology providers using the latter company's solutions. The 820 Nano SOM supports latest platform features like Type-C functionality, 4K Encode/Decode and integrated 9-axis MEMS on a very small footprint, making it ideal for development of wearable headset computers, AR/VR glasses, drones, high-end cameras, media gateways, assistive devices and other smart gadgets needing a significant processing power on a small package footprint. Application development on the 820 Nano SOM is facilitated on Android Nougat and embedded Linux using a feature-rich carrier board that enables quick prototyping. Mistral further offers optional adaptor boards, such as LCD, camera, sensors and battery charger for increased ease of development around the 820 Nano SOM.

https://www.mistralsolutions.com/product-engineering-services/products/sd820-nano-som

Applied Expert Systems, Inc.'s CleverView for TCP/IP on Linux

The contemporary data center is typified by an ever-increasing amount of traffic occurring between servers, observes Applied Expert Systems, Inc. (AES), sagely. Fulfilling the logical need to facilitate improved server-to-server communications, AES created CleverView for TCP/IP on Linux, now at v2.7. CleverView provides IT staff access to current and historical server performance and availability details from not only their browser desktops but also their mobile phones via the CLEVER Mobile for Linux app. This version 2.7 features enhancements to DockerView, namely container details including resource utilization and process information, with the ability to drill down into specific containers, and image details, including repository and image ID with historical details. Finally, new options to the Enhanced Dashboard include the ability to download a graph image, manipulate graph formats, display raw data and a zoom feature with one-click navigation to view Alert Details from the Alerts Summary graph.

www.aesclever.com

Celtra's AdCreator Platform

Mobile advertising campaigns today are often hampered by broken, non-viewable ads with a poor UX experience. An important open-source initiative aimed at solving this problem and making the web better for all is the AMP Project, which enables the creation of websites and ads that are consistently fast, beautiful and high-performing across devices and distribution platforms. Now, Celtra AdCreator, a SaaS creative management platform for digital advertising, integrates support for the creation of AMP Ads, a new standard for making ads faster, lighter and more secure. Celtra foresees a transformative power in this new product, because AMP helps pave the way for better creative, a significantly improved customer experience and higher mobile ad engagement rates and resulting ROI. Celtra AdCreator overcomes the barriers of cost of data and slow network speed that make it difficult to engage with viewers meaningfully.

www.celtra.com

Rogue Wave Software's Zend Studio

The quick pitch for Rogue Wave Software's Zend Studio, recently updated to version 13.6, is “the PHP IDE for smarter development”. Zend Studio 13.6, says Rogue Wave, offers 3X faster performance in indexing, validation and searching of PHP code, and it allows users to code faster, debug more easily and leverage the massive performance gains in PHP 7. It is the next-generation PHP IDE designed to create high-quality PHP apps while boosting developer productivity. The platform automatically scales according to the DPI settings of the underlying operating system and supports HiDPI monitors. The main focus in this new release is the support for PHP 7.1, which contains useful language improvements like nullable types, void return type and catching multiple exception types. Additional feature improvements relate to Composer and JavaScript tooling, and Zend Studio 13.6 takes advantage of the tern.js intellisense engine, providing intellisense for a long list of JavaScript frameworks, namely AngularJS, Closure, CordovaJS, Dojo, ExtJS, jQuery and Node.js. Finally, the release comes with the latest and greatest release of the Eclipse Platform, Neon.3, which brings with it its own slew of improvements.

www.zend.com

Pydio

Pydio describes itself as the world's largest open-source file sharing and synchronization project for the enterprise, and the newly announced Pydio 8 boasts a new user experience that the company says extends the platform's lead in design and simplicity, oversight, security and control. Pydio 8 adds EasyTransfer, a new, intuitive drag-and-drop web interface for organizations in need of an easy-to-use sharing tool. Meanwhile, the aforementioned full UX redesign, based on Google's Material Design principles, builds on Pydio's already smooth and efficient design and simplifies the ability to white-label Pydio. The new Share Tracking Tool rounds out the new feature set, providing end users with the ability to send a single link to many different people and track exactly who accessed it. Pydio can be deployed on-premises or in a private cloud.

https://pydio.com

Gabriel Ford, Sadie Ford and Melissa Ford's Hello, Scratch! (Manning Publications)

In the new book Hello, Scratch!, parents and kids work together to learn programming skills, but not in just any old way. They create new versions of old retro-style arcade games with the Scratch open-source visual programming language from the MIT Media Lab. Author Melissa Ford teamed up her two children, Sadie and Gabriel, to write Hello, Scratch!, and the intergenerational trio begins by introducing the basic Scratch workspace, art editor and the most common computer science concepts used in the projects, along with interesting exercises centered on the games. The subsequent game chapters are broken into two manageable parts with the initial, shorter section focused on background and prep, and the second, longer section focused on coding. The authors also explain how to make game art, including backgrounds and sprites (the game pieces) in a pixel art style directly in the Scratch editor. Upon finishing the book, readers will have the skills to create their own games and understand the basics of computer programming and game design.

https://www.manning.com

PSSC Labs' Eco Blade 1U

Arguably “the greenest blade server on the market”, PSSC Labs' new Eco Blade 1U rack server offers power and performance with energy savings of up to 46% over competing servers, says the company. Engineered specifically for high-performance, high-density computing environments, the Eco Blade is a unique server platform that simultaneously increases compute density while decreasing power use. The solution offers two complete and independent servers contained in 1U of rack space. Each independent server supports up to 64 Intel Xeon processor cores and 1.0TB of enterprise memory for a total of up to 128 Cores and 2TB of memory per 1U. A unique design feature—the lack of a shared power supply or backplane—provides for the bulk of Eco Blade's power savings and thus lower long-term TCO. PSSC Labs calls on the IT industry to contribute its share to reducing its environmental footprint. The Eco Blade enables organizations to obtain the performance needed to fuel cutting-edge research and groundbreaking enterprises while significantly reducing the power used and, thanks to the 55% recyclable material content, waste generated via the data center. The Eco Blade 1U server is certified compatible with Red Hat CentOS, Ubuntu and Microsoft operating systems.

www.pssclabs.com

Kodiak Data's MemCloud

Scientists working with big data regularly confront the high cost of acquiring the computational power needed to push the boundaries and innovate in data science. In an effort to bridge the Big Data infrastructure chasm, Kodiak Data—a leader in cluster virtualization technology—presents MemCloud, an innovative IaaS solution that accelerates the entire big data-deployment chain. MemCloud is also “the first memory-speed cloud infrastructure solution for big data scientists and software developers” that provides big data analytic clusters “at up to one-fifth the cost and five times the performance of typical leading cloud hosting services”. MemCloud is built on Kodiak Data's Virtual Cluster Infrastructure platform, “the only solution capable of in-software provisioning of compute, networking, storage and data at the cluster level within minutes”. Besides the hosted cloud service option, MemCloud also is available as a compact on-premises appliance for private clouds, an industry first, asserts Kodiak.

www.memcloud.works