Silver Peak Boosts WAN Performance with New Products

Silver Peak Systems has released new hardware and software to improve WAN performance. The company said its NX-11K hardware appliance delivers 5Gbps of WAN capacity and up to 20 Gbps of optimized throughput for TCP and non-TCP applications. The 2U hardware appliance supports 512,000 simultaneous connections.

Silver Peak also unveiled two software data accelerators: the VX-8000 and VX-9000. The latter delivers more than one Gbps of WAN performance, the company said. Both accelerators work in conjunction with Silver Peak's VX virtual software, which run on any standard hypervisor including VMware vSphere, Citrix XenServer, Microsoft Hyper-V and KVM. Both can be downloaded from the Silver Peak Marketplace for a free 30-day trial.

Pricing for the VX-8000 is $38,731 per year while the VX-9000 is $55,331 per year. The NX-11K will be available in June for $399,995.

Ubuntu Server Emphasizes High Availability with OpenStack

The latest release of Canonical Ubuntu Server is geared for hyperscale data centers and deployment in production OpenStack clouds. The company said Ubuntu Server 13.04 is the only distribution of OpenStack that makes high availability a standard feature. Enterprises currently using 12.04 LTS can upgrade to the latest OpenStack version, dubbed "Grizzly", from the Ubuntu Cloud Archive.

In addition to high availability, enterprises adopting Ubuntu Server 13.04 can benefit from Canonical's collaboration with VMware to enable enterprises to link OpenStack clouds to vSphere and Nicira NVP. Other new features in Ubuntu Server 13.04 include enhancements to the Juju Orchestration interface, which provides a visual representation of cloud-based services running on clouds such as OpenStack or Amazon EC2.

In addition, the collection of Juju "Charms" – a collection of open source workloads for developers – has grown to more than 130. It includes all major Web development frameworks, including Ruby on Rails, Django and Node.js.

Ubuntu Server 13.04 also addresses scale-out storage with fully integrated and supported implementation of services such as Ceph alongside SWIFT with support for Ubuntu-related issues from Inktank, the provider of Ceph.

Jeda's Software Controller Creates Storage Fabric

Jeda Networks has unveiled what it said is the first software-only controller that creates high-performance storage networks over an Ethernet fabric. Its Fabric Network Controller (FNC) resides in the network as a virtual machine, decoupling and extracting the storage networking control plane from the physical hardware; this turns the Ethernet fabric into a scalable storage networking fabric, allowing network administrators to dynamically define a storage network overlay in software.

Jeda's FNC can be installed a virtual appliance for VMware ESX and installed on any virtualized server that has access to the network. FNC supports FCoE-enabled devices and integrates with multi-vendor 10Gb and 40Gb data center Ethernet switches. The company claims FNC will be able to accommodate future speeds of 100 Gbps and beyond.

Acxiom's PrivateCloud Bundles Security Features

Acxiom has introduced a new cloud service offering aimed at organizations with the most demanding security requirements. Acxiom PrivateCloud incorporates managed firewall, vulnerability scanning and enterprise ant-virus as standard services.

In addition, it provides a virtual private data center dedicated to each tenant. The company's secure multi-tenant platform can logically isolate tenants and create multiple zones within the virtual data center.

Acxiom's PrivateCloud can be configured to meet specific requirements, whether it is for long-term hosting of critical business applications or short-term computing for application testing and development. Customers can provision resources through a self-service portal and access real-time monitoring data.

Tenable Beefs Up Reporting with Nessus 5.2

Tenable Network Security has expanded automated analysis and reporting in its Nessus 5.2 vulnerability scanner. The latest release gathers information and stores it as attachments within scan result reports to provide quick access during vulnerability investigation and documentation.

Scan results now contain remote screenshots via Remote Desktop Protocol and VNC, as well as "pictures" of scanned websites. It also features a new post-scan plugins capability that generates security tips based on an analysis of scan results.

Nessus 5.2 has expanded OS support and integration with the addition of Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 platform support, better Max OS X integration and IPv6 scan support on all platforms. Other additions and changes include digitally-signed Nessus RPM packages for supporting distributions, a smaller memory footprint and reduced disk space usage, and a faster, more responsive interface that uses less bandwidth.

Nessus 5.2.0 is available for download now.