There has been a spate of press releases and news in and around the industry over the last few weeks that bear further consideration. They could actually solve some of your current cloud and virtual environment issues while opening new doors for future expansion. As an architect and analyst, I find these technologies very interesting for their possible impact on the future of virtual and cloud environment not to mention data center designs.
Piston Cloud announces their Lights Out Software Define Data Center Piston Enterprise 2.0. This product is intriguing in that it combines OpenStack, Open Source KVM, and Closed Source extensions to KVM to provide more functionality. This mix of open source and closed source approaches to building a turn key IaaS cloud. When you look at the details, they include quite a few things out of the box that are very useful for a DevOps Team. In essence, Piston Cloud has taken taken the science experiment feel of Open Stack and made it enterprise ready. For more information please see the official press release.
Simplivity provides a data center class solution for remote office/back office (ROBO) and small office/home office (SOHO) situations. By combining storage, networking, and compute into one form factor they provide an easier to manage and maintain. Simplivity focuses on storage and data protection by providing synchronous replication between multiples of their Omnicube products located within the same location and asynchronous for those over a WAN. Their goal is to make the hard disks less significant and to concentrate of VM centric tools.
Edgewave provides a unique gateway device that is designed to protect the corporate identity by inspecting social media content before it hits the social media service. This way you can perform some level of DLP, as well as inspection for a set of well known ‘bad’ words or misrepresentations of the corporate assets. While targeted at corporate social media accounts, there is a secondary use for Edgewave. That use is for education where Edgewave’s iPrism is used to catch cries for help, cyber bullying, as well as predatory and violent language.
Vormetric has come into the news lately via VirtuStream. Vormetric underpins some of VirtuStream’s encryption technology for SAP databases. Vormetric’s Data Security Manager underpins all their tools which provide key management, a key material vault (for you non-vormetric keys such as web server SSL credentials), encryption, and their own toolkit to manage and interact with their systems. I find the key material vault quite interesting as it would allow me to set up warnings on when certain keys will expire, etc. while having all the key material and other data needed to recreate the key material in a secure location. Vormetric provides in App in VM encryption which has very specific uses and in most cases would prevent the cloud administrator from seeing the underlying data while also providing encryption at rest.
Nakivo is one of the up an coming virtualization backup players designed around ease of use, a tablet ready web 2.0 interface, and the use of transporters that can transport backup data to and from the cloud, other systems, and backup sites. Their transporters run within virtual machines, so any place you can put a virtual machine is a place to which you could backup virtual machines. Out of the box they include EC2, vSphere, and other hypervisors.
Mobile Iron has an intriguing MDM solution that leaves the end user in control. For BYOD EUC solutions, Mobile Iron protects corporate data. Mobile Iron can be set up to wipe out corporate data but leave personal data alone, if there is a corporate application in use. Privacy is crucial for Mobile Iron, so the end user is in control, while they could deactivate Mobile Iron, they would also deactivate access to corporate data. This is an intriguing view of BYOD and leaving the control in the end users hands. Ultimately, it is their device and Mobile Iron realizes that concept.
Data Guise provides a way to protect big data by either masking off data that should not be visible (such as personal identifiable information) or by encrypting the line of data containing the detected text. The do this by providing a custom search tool that itself is built upon hadoop to find the sensitive data (based on templates) then remediate by either encrypting, tokenizing, or masking the data found. For new data, this process would happen on data ingest. Since it knows what it has already found, the runs get progressively faster.
This is the technology update based on information received. Each of these tools could be used within any cloud or virtual environment. Let me know if you have any other finds that are of interest or even how these or others have solved your own cloud environment issues.