Storage, Security Products Take Center Stage At AWS Summit 2013

AWS Summit 2013 Highlights: Storing, Securing And Sharing Data In The Cloud

Storing, sharing and securing data in the cloud is constantly evolving as clients look for new ways to take advantage of the cloud to add flexibility to and remove costs from their IT infrastructures.

The Amazon Web Services (AWS) Summit 2013, held this week in San Francisco, is bringing together several of Amazon's technology partners to showcase a variety of new ways to move and secure their data in the cloud, and as it is migrating to and from the cloud or between clouds.

For a quick look at how five of those vendors are enhancing the storage, security and manageability of data in the cloud, turn the page.

Aspera Updates File Moving, Sync Software

Aspera, an Emeryville, Calif.-based developer of software for high-performance movements of large data sets, used AWS Summit 2013 to preview a number of new solutions.

Aspera Drive provides high-performance synchronization of data from the desktop to the cloud. It is integrated with the Aspera high-speed platform to add integrated desktop and mobile browsing of remote files, drag-and-drop high-speed upload and download from cloud storage and background synchronization. Aspera Drive also works with the company's Faspex person-to-person and file-sharing and collaboration web application to provide package-based sending and delivery of files, with automatic download of extremely large files and data sets.

Aspera also previewed Faspex 4.0 which adds a new project-based approach to file sharing that combines users and user groups with file and directory resources (’Shares’) into project collaboration spaces. Beta versions of both applications are expected to be available this summer.

Eucalyptus Systems: Improving AWS Cloud App Development, Testing

Goleta, Calif.-based Eucalyptus Systems unveiled Eucalyptus 3.3, targeting the acceleration and simplification of development and testing of applications built for Amazon Web Services by enabling more consistent environments across private and public clouds.

New capabilities in Eucalyptus 3.3 include auto scaling, which allows application developers to scale Eucalyptus resources up or down based on policies defined using Amazon EC2-compatible APIs and tools; elastic load-balancing for improved application fault tolerance in AWS-compatible applications; CloudWatch, an AWS-compatible service for collecting metrics, setting alarms, identifying trends and taking action to ensure applications run smoothly; resource tagging to allow application developers and cloud administrators to build reports for management and monitoring of specific resource collections; and expanded instance types to more closely align to those available in Amazon EC2.

Librato: New Dashboard For CloudWatch Data Collections

Librato, a San Francisco-based developer of software for monitoring and understanding cloud metrics, introduced the beta version of Librato for AWS, a turnkey solution for Amazon CloudWatch users looking to get more out of the data CloudWatch is collecting for them.

To use, a customer enters read-only credentials for their AWS account and automatically gets preconfigured graphs and dashboards for all EC2 metrics. Librato for AWS also improves on CloudWatch with such capabilities as one-year data retention, easy combining of any grouping of metrics into one graph, customized dashboards based on any metrics desired, realtime updates and the ability to annotate events.

The beta version is available for AWS customers hosting applications in U.S. East, with support for additional AWS regions and other AWS services planned for the near future.

Trend Micro Enhances Security Of AWS Instances

Cupertino, Calif.-based cloud and data center security developer Trend Micro is enhancing its offering with Trend Micro Deep Security as a Service, a comprehensive suite of security capabilities built for the cloud, including AWS environments. The new service can be instantly and automatically turned on when a new AWS instance is created, regardless of deployment method, to help remove the risk of time lag between creation and security tuning.

Deep Security delivers AWS-recommended capabilities for host-based intrusion detection/prevention and firewall, along with complementary capabilities for securing servers like whitelisting, antimalware and file-integrity monitoring. Deep Security offers customizable policy templates and automatic rules, all managed from a single administrative console. Also included is AutoSync to dynamically detect new AWS instances and enable a single, consistent view of the computing environment.

Zadara Storage: Replication Between AWS Regions For DR, Other Purposes

Irvine, Calif.-based Zadara Storage is using AWS Summit to demonstrate remote asynchronous replication between storage volumes in AWS U.S. East and AWS U.S. West regions for its enterprise-class Zadara Storage Virtual Private Storage Arrays (VPSA), making it possible to do seamless application failovers for AWS regions in a disaster.

Zadara's on-demand VPSA block and file storage solution features virtual SAN and NAS with dedicated drives, dual controllers, RAID level selection, volume-wise IO throttling, volume sharing and clustering, full performance metering and hourly usage billing.

Zadara Storage provides security and data privacy with both at-rest and in-flight encryption. The new asynchronous remote mirroring capability helps customers quickly switch applications between regions in order to better handle disaster recovery, shifts in regional demand, planned downtime and outages or slowdowns.