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August 1, 2017

DriveScale Expands Software Composable Infrastructure Platform

SUNNYVALE, Calif., Aug 1, 2017 — DriveScale today announced a new release of the DriveScale System. The latest enhancements include support for encryption of data at rest and in transit, along with support for data disposition and shredding. The new release provides enterprises with the security features they need to ensure their customer, personnel or other sensitive information is protected and safe from unauthorized viewing.

“Traditional commodity servers with direct attached drives, while capable of handling today’s business applications such as Hadoop, NoSQL databases or containerized applications, are inflexible in their configuration — leading to poor utilization of resources and expensive forklift upgrades,” said S.K. Vinod, Vice President of Product Management at DriveScale. “With the DriveScale System, IT administrators can easily disaggregate compute and storage resources into separate pools and combine them in any ratio to compose optimally-sized servers and clusters, on demand and under software control. We allow them to respond to changing workloads with the agility of a public cloud, while lowering infrastructure costs by avoiding over-provisioning and achieving higher utilization of their compute and storage infrastructure. This latest version allows customers to maintain privacy and compliance of their data while taking advantage of this high-performance, data center architecture.”

New Capabilities Enable Secure Environments

One of the primary concerns of many businesses — particularly those in industries that collect extremely sensitive data such as healthcare, advertising and finance — is data security. In order to help these organizations safeguard their data and adhere to strict guidelines and policies, DriveScale has added support for data encryption. This allows customers to quickly and easily compose nodes and clusters where data is automatically encrypted on all drives in the cluster, as well as when it is in flight. Users can also use a script to back up the encryption keys in the event a cluster is accidentally deleted. With these new capabilities, organizations are able to maintain data privacy and compliance as necessary for individual workloads.

Support for Data Disposition and Shredding

The latest advancements to the DriveScale System also include support for data disposition and shredding after a cluster is deleted and the resources comprising that cluster are returned to the pool for future use. When the drives are reused, the new cluster will not have any readable data from the previous cluster, helping organizations meet data compliance regulations and maintain the privacy of their end users’ data. Customers can specify how data on any individual drive should be handled when the cluster is deleted. The default is to take no action, but users can optionally specify that data on a node should be shredded, either for the entire drive or just for the first 128 MB of data so only the metadata along with the file system is destroyed. This latter feature is particularly useful for companies that reuse infrastructure frequently for short term projects, since shredding the first 128 MB would save a lot of time versus shredding the entire drive.

“Protecting sensitive consumer and corporate data is a critical need in today’s world,” said Timothy Smith, VP of Technical Operations at AppNexus. “Encrypting data on the wire and at rest greatly enhances security for a company and is one of the most important safeguards of the organization’s information. Any company dealing with big data needs to take security capabilities into consideration when designing systems and procuring storage to help the broader enterprise deal with today’s cyber threat landscape.”

Expanded Support and Maintenance Capabilities
In addition to features that support secure data centers, DriveScale also introduced the following capabilities:

  • Support for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. The DriveScale System now supports server and DriveScale Management nodes that run the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS operating system in addition to previously announced support for Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, CentOS 6 and CentOS 7.
  • Offline or Faulty Servers Can Now Be Easily Replaced. The new version of the DriveScale System allows customers to replace servers that are offline or marked faulty in a cluster with a single operation. When an offline or faulty server is replaced, all drives associated with that server will automatically be attached to the replacement server without affecting cluster performance and avoiding downtime.
  • Introduction of a Maintenance Mode for Clusters. DriveScale customers now have the ability to put clusters into maintenance mode, which detaches assigned drives from the servers and allows them to perform OS or application updates on the servers. When the updates are done, DriveScale’s Maintenance Mode ensures that the original server-to-drive mapping is maintained once the clusters are made active again without any corruption of data or requiring added data replication.
  • Availability of One Step Log File Bundling and Local Download Capabilities. In order to simplify the process of downloading log files from all the DriveScale managed elements, customers can now trigger automatic creation of a log package to be downloaded locally or sent directly to DriveScale Central for debugging by using a CLI script. This assists both customers and DriveScale in the ability to easily create and maintain a repository of logs and in diagnosing issues.

“At DriveScale, we continue to look for ways to improve our existing product offering to better serve a broad range of organizations and industries and solve the common challenges faced by IT administrators in their data center infrastructures,” said Vinod. “By adding capabilities that deal directly with compliance and security regulations experienced by enterprise organizations, our customers can safeguard their sensitive data while improving utilization of infrastructure resources and being more responsive to changing business requirements.”

About DriveScale

DriveScale is the leader in Software Composable Infrastructure for modern workloads. Our innovative data center solution empowers IT to disaggregate compute and storage resources and quickly and easily recompose them to meet the needs of the business. Enterprises can respond faster to changing application environments, maximize the efficiency of their assets, and save on equipment and operating expenses. DriveScale supports modern workloads such as Hadoop, Spark, Kafka, NoSQL, Cassandra, Docker, Kubernetes and other distributed applications at a fraction of the cost of alternative platforms. DriveScale, based in Sunnyvale, CA, is founded by technologists with deep roots in IT architecture that built enterprise-class systems for Cisco and Sun Microsystems. Investors include Pelion Venture Partners, Nautilus Venture Partners and Ingrasys, a wholly owned subsidiary of Foxconn. Visit www.drivescale.com or follow us on Twitter at @DriveScale_Inc.


Source: DriveScale

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