Reps. Michael McCaul, R-Texas; Mike Gallagher, R-Wis.; Jim Langevin, D-R.I.; and Cedric Richmond, D-La., intend to urge other lawmakers for network security support and boosted COVID-19 response across states, The Hill reported Friday.

The representatives plan to issue a letter that will address other legislators and request for support to fund state network security amid the pandemic.

The letter, scheduled for delivery next week, aims to include network security funds in the next COVID-19 stimulus package.

The bipartisan group authoring the letter noted that the digital infrastructure is deteriorating, as agencies, especially on state and local levels, use aging information technology systems.

Pavilion Data Systems has launched NVMeAcademy.com, which will provide easily consumed videos and papers for the design, implementation, and operation of the NVMe protocol and its networking counterpart NVMe-over-Fabrics, the company announced on Tuesday. 

“NVMe-over-Fabrics the defacto standard for next-generation storage networks.  We need to understand supported operating systems, network design, and deployment options.  That’s where NVMeAcademy.com comes in.  It provides insights to build NVMe-oF solutions that shatter performance expectations,” said V.R. Satish, CTO at Pavilion Data Systems. 

The new site will deliver in-depth technical education on protocols, deployment options, critical features for NVMe-oF storage system design and "how-to" articles for navigating the subtleties of NVMe-oF for TCP, RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) and use of NVMe technology with legacy networking protocols like iSCSI and NFS.

Pavilion’s third wave of storage began with NVMe, which the company announced in early May 2020. NVMe freed solid-state storage from the overhead of legacy disk interfaces. Hyperparallel Flash Arrays (HFAs) has eliminated the bottlenecks imposed by the dual-controller architecture of legacy All Flash Arrays (AFAs).

NVMe-oF and RoCE have enabled storage arrays to provide the same or better performance than direct-attached storage (DAS) solutions over a fabric. The third wave of storage gives organizations the performance of DAS with the efficiency and manageability of a SAN.

HPCInnovation.com will provide technical briefs, real-world customer use cases, white papers, links to industry organizations, and an ask an engineer questions function. Supported by Pavilion Data Systems, HPCInnovation.com presents the content for educational purposes.

As NVMe-oF and RoCE enable external storage arrays to provide the same or better performance than direct-attached storage (DAS) solutions over a fabric, the third wave of storage will enable organizations to utilize the performance of DAS with the efficiency and manageability of a SAN.

“The third wave of storage systems goes beyond just NVMe and includes Hyperparallel Flash Arrays, NVMe-oF, and fast networking, which combine to deliver the consistent, predictable, and scalable, high-performance storage modern scale-out applications require.”, said Chris Evans, founder of Architecting IT.  “NVMeAcademy.com provides essential content for anyone wanting to learn more about the impact of these disruptive technologies.”  

 About Pavilion

Pavilion is the inventor of the world’s first Hyperparallel Flash Array. Built for NVMe from the ground up, Pavilion brings unprecedented scalability, unmatched performance density, and an OpenChoice of NVMe SSDs and NVMe-oF topologies. Across a variety of industries, Pavilion has a proven solution that brings scale-up and scale-out storage to organizations worldwide.

Quantum Corp. has announced new advancements to its StorNext file system and data management software The new StorNext software, featuring, the company reported on Tuesday. 

"Quantum's StorNext file system has been widely adopted by the media and entertainment industry because of the way it maximizes performance for flash-based drives, high-resolution workflows, and multiple workstreams," said Tom Coughlin, President, Coughlin Associates. "By making hybrid and multi-cloud storage environments more accessible, the StorNext file system continues to evolve as a tool for enabling media and entertainment workflows."

Quantum’s StorNext system has been designed to make cloud content more accessible, with improved read and write speeds for any cloud and object store based storage solution. The hybrid-cloud and multi-cloud storage use cases will enable greater flexibility for media.

StorNext will also enhance entertainment and other data intensive environments such as genomics, academic research, video surveillance, oil and gas and government security. The improved StorNext software will advance Quantum's software-defined product portfolio strategy and extend Quantum's leadership in managing video and other unstructured data.

StorNext 6.4 software has incorporated self-describing objects to make cloud content more easily accessible, enabling new hybrid-cloud workflows. The software will enable the client to write files into the StorNext file system.

Then, StorNext 6.4 software copies files to the public or private cloud, with the option to include additional object metadata. Also, non-StorNext software clients and cloud-resident processes may now access objects directly, leveraging the new extended metadata.

Quantum has also integrated multi-threaded put / get operations to improve retrieval speed to and from large object stores and the cloud. Users will experience a 5 to 7 times performance increase with StorNext 6.4 software, depending on the size of their objects and other factors to enhance performance where single stream object performance is limited.

The company has also offered StorNext Dynamic Library Pooling to improve resiliency for large tape archives and enable the use of multiple libraries for performance and redundancy, including scale-out tape with vertical libraries like Quantum's Scalar i6 tape library. 

Customers will also be able to rotate file stores to different libraries to increase availability. Quantum's StorNext 6.4 software will add support for Amazon Glacier Deep Archive to StorNext's integration with Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and others.

"At this time when customers are forced to work remotely, the flexibility to move content between locations, both on-premise and cloud datacenters, is critical. This latest version of StorNext software adds new ways to archive content and access it in the cloud and is another step toward providing a seamless bridge between on-premise and the cloud," said Ed Fiore, Vice President and General Manager, Primary Storage, Quantum.

About Quantum

Quantum technology and services help customers capture, create and share digital content – and preserve and protect it for decades. With solutions built for every stage of the data lifecycle, Quantum's platforms provide the fastest performance for high-resolution video, images, and industrial IoT. That's why the world's leading entertainment companies, sports franchises, researchers, government agencies, enterprises, and cloud providers are making the world happier, safer, and smarter on Quantum.

The Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has issued a memo to election officials and digital voting providers warning them of “significant security risks" posed by online voting, CyberScoop reported Monday.

The return of ballots online by voters “faces significant security risks to the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of voted ballots,” CISA said in the advisory. “These risks can ultimately affect the tabulation and results and, can occur at scale.”

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the Election Assistance Commission signed off on the DHS memo.

“[W]e recommend paper ballot returns as electronic ballot return technologies are high-risk even with controls in place,” the agencies said in a joint statement. “Election officials are best positioned to evaluate the risks and make decisions accordingly.”

Rep. Jim Langevin (D-R.I.), a House Homeland Security Committee member, called on CISA to publicly release the document to better inform the voters of the potential risk associated with internet-connected voting. “Our intelligence community has warned that malicious state actors such as Russia are trying to interfere in our elections, and we must heed the recommendations of the experts at CISA to bolster our systems,” he said in a statement.