New Products

James Gray

Issue #282, October 2017

iStorage diskAshur Storage Drives

With software-free setup and operation, the new iStorage diskAshur group of ultra-secure storage drives works across all operating systems, including Linux, macOS, Android, Chrome, thin and zero clients, MS Windows and embedded systems. Available in HDD and SDD versions, these high-speed USB 3.1, PIN-authenticated, hardware-encrypted portable data storage drives feature iStorage's unique EDGE technology. iStorage calls the EDGE technology—short for Enhanced Dual Generating Encryption—super-spy-like, due to the advanced security features that make diskAshur the “most secure data storage drives available on the market”. For one thing, without the PIN, there's no way in! diskAshur's dedicated, hardware-based secure microprocessor (Common Criteria EAL4+-ready) employs built-in physical protection mechanisms designed to defend against external tamper, bypass laser attacks and fault injections. The drives feature technology that encrypts both the data and the encryption key, ensuring that private information is secure and protected. Other security features include a brute-force hack defense mechanism, self-destruct feature, unattended auto-lock and a wear-resistant epoxy-coated keypad. The diskAshur drives are elegantly designed and available in four striking colors and in capacity options from 128GB to 5TB.

https://istorage-uk.com

LINBIT's DRBD Top

Many proprietary high-availability (HA) software providers require users to pay extra for system-management capabilities. Bucking this convention and driving down costs is LINBIT, whose DRBD HA software solution, part of the Linux kernel since 2009, powers thousands of digital enterprises. The cost savings originate from LINBIT's DRBD Top, a new software tool to simplify the management of the LINBIT DRBD application. Via DRBD Top's unified graphical interface, administrators can navigate their DRBD resources conveniently without typing multiple commands. Available on Github, DRBD Top provides critical status, assessment and troubleshooting capabilities for administrators who manage HA clusters, especially those with greater than two nodes.

https://www.linbit.com/en

Datamation's “Leading Big Data Companies” Report

The Big Data market is in a period of remarkable transition. If keeping tabs on this dynamic sector is in your wheelhouse, Datamation has made your homework easier by developing “Leading Big Data Companies”, a report that provides “a snapshot of a market sector in transition”. Ranging from established legacy vendors to start-ups, this report details the numerous strategies that are exploited in today's Big Data landscape. The core technologies employed by this diverse group of vendors include cloud, open source, AI and several others. This report belongs to Datamation's ongoing focus on the latest emerging tech for the enterprise. In the mere seven years that have passed since Yahoo! introduced Hadoop, Big Data has burgeoned in popularity as ever more firms seek insights from the massive amounts of data at their disposal. Because Big Data has matured differently from most technologies in that no single leader has emerged after nearly a decade, the analytics industry finds itself still in growth mode, making it dynamic and challenging for those trying to make sense of it on their own.

www.datamation.com

PSSC Labs' PowerServe HPC Servers and PowerWulf HPC Clusters

In its quest to provide customers the latest and best computing solutions that deliver relentless performance with the absolute lowest TCO, PSSC Labs has supercharged two server solutions with next-generation processing power. The breakthrough technology of Intel's new Xeon Scalable Processors has been integrated into PSSC Labs' PowerServe HPC line of servers and the PowerWulf line of HPC clusters, a move that guarantees performance capable of handling cutting-edge computing tasks, such as real-time analytics, virtualized infrastructure and high-performance computing. Besides the advanced architecture, the new processors offer a diverse suite of platform innovations for enhanced application performance including Intel AVX-512, Intel Mesh Architecture, Intel QuickAssist, Intel Optane SSDs and Intel Omni-Path Fabric. Both PSSC Labs solutions are designed for reliable, flexible, HPC solutions targeted at government, academic and commercial environments. Some examples of sectors that will benefit from the new performance include design and engineering, life and physical sciences, financial services and machine/deep learning.

www.pssclabs.com

Lotfi ben Othmane, Martin Gilje Jaatun and Edgar Weippl's Empirical Research for Software Security (CRC Press)

Developing truly secure software is no walk through the park. In an effort to apply the scientific method to the art of secure software development, a trio of authors—Lotfi ben Othmane, Martin Gilje Jaatun and Edgar Weippl—teamed up to write Empirical Research for Software Security: Foundations and Experience. The book is a guide for using empirical research methods to study secure software challenges. Empirical methods, including data analytics, allow extraction of knowledge and insights from the data that organizations gather from their tools and processes, as well as from the opinions of the experts who practice those methods and processes. These methods can be used to perfect a secure software development lifecycle based on empirical data and published industry best practices. The book also features examples that illustrate the application of data analytics in the context of secure software engineering.

https://www.crcpress.com

Neuranet's Flexitive

The new Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) Standard Ad Unit Portfolio's support for flexible ads is intended to improve the ad experience for users and boost revenue potential for advertisers. An updated solution from Neuranet, its Flexitive 2.0 responsive design software is designed to solve today's design challenges and give media companies and agencies a significant advantage in adapting to the IAB's new Flex Specifications and Lean Guidelines that were released in summer 2017. Flexitive 2.0 is the next generation of Neuranet's HTML5 cloud-based platform that supports more advanced responsive design capabilities for building high-quality, animated HTML5-based designs that adapt to unlimited sizes across any device, operating system, app or browser. The new standards were designed to promote user-friendly digital advertising that can scale across device types easily. Flexitive also incorporates the LEAN principles of lightweight, encrypted, AdChoices-supported and non-invasive advertising. Neuranet emphasizes other key features of Flexitive 2.0, such as an easy-to-use drag-and-drop interface that requires no coding knowledge, unlimited sizing of a single design, two-click creative design variations with instant scaling, export for use in more than 30 ad servers and more.

https://flexitive.com

InfluxData

What is ephemeral data, you ask? InfluxData can supply the answer, because handling it is the business of the company's InfluxData open-source platform that is custom-built for metrics and events. Ephemeral data is transitory, existing only briefly, and is becoming vital for modern applications built where containers, microservices and sensors can come and go and are intermittently connected. The updated InfluxData 1.3 Platform can handle a billion (yes, with a “b”!) unique time series, making it easier to handle ephemeral data coming from containers or adding and removing sensors in IoT-tracking systems. InfluxData addresses the explosion of data points and sources, monitoring and controls requiring nanosecond precision coming from sensors and microservices. The InfluxData platform provides a comprehensive set of tools and services to accumulate metrics and events data, analyze the data and act on the data via powerful visualizations and notifications. New features in release 1.3 include time-series indexing, high-availability anomaly detection, query language improvements and automatic cluster rebalancing. InfluxData calls the new release “one of the most significant technical advancements in the platform to date”.

https://www.influxdata.com

Galit Shmueli et al.'s Data Mining for Business Analytics (Wiley)

The updated 5th edition of the book Data Mining for Business Analytics from Galit Shmueli and collaborators is a standard guide to data mining and analytics that adds two new co-authors and a trove of new material vis-á-vis its predecessor. R is a free, open-source and popularity-gaining software environment for statistical computing and graphics. Trailing with the subtitle Concepts, Techniques, and Applications in R, the new 5th edition of Data Mining for Business Analytics continues to provide an applied approach to data-mining concepts and methods, using the R software as a canvas on which to illustrate. With the book, readers learn how to implement a variety of popular data-mining algorithms in R to tackle business problems and opportunities. Material covered in-depth includes both statistical and machine-learning algorithms for prediction, classification, visualization, dimension reduction, recommender systems, clustering, text mining and network analysis. The new 5th edition includes material from business, government, a dozen case studies demonstrating applications for the data-mining techniques described, and exercises in each chapter that help readers gauge and expand their comprehension and competency of the material. Data Mining for Business Analytics can serve as either a text book or a reference for analysts, researchers and practitioners working with quantitative methods in myriad fields.

wiley.com