News

Altair Launches New HPC Tools

Altair Engineering recently announced the release of two new applications to help manage HPC workloads: Compute Manager and PBS Desktop.

According to the announcement, Compute Manager is the first foundational block in Altair's plans to build a modern, web-based enterprise simulation platform, providing an affordable solution to increase HPC productivity. Compute Manager, which is offered as part of Altair's HyperWorks Enterprise service-oriented architecture (SOA) platform, lets users submit, manage, and review workloads on distributed resources and streamline complex analysis with a few mouse clicks.

Compute Manager provides a complete set of capabilities to configure and maintain settings in an HPC environment, as well as a web-based interface for submitting and monitoring jobs in PBS Professional clusters.

Additionally, Altair has released the PBS Desktop app, which is a job submission tool for supporting PBS Professional jobs from the desktop. PBS Desktop, which is free with the purchase of Altair's PBS Professional, allows users to submit jobs for processing with a simple drag and drop.

PBS Desktop runs on both Windows and Linux operating systems and lets users eliminate the practice of submitting jobs through the command line and manually transferring files in and out of the system. It lets users inspect running jobs and automatically returns a copy of all the files to the user's desktop when the job is completed. For more information about these products, visit http://www.pbsworks.com/.

Akamai Introduces Kona Site Defender

Akamai Technologies Inc., a provider of web security solutions, has introduced the Akamai Kona Site Defender service, which is designed to protect websites, applications, and data from complex attacks. Kona Site Defender bundles real-time web security monitoring, adaptive rate controls, and other powerful features into a single, always-on, cloud-based solution that can protect an enterprise's online business functions.

According to the company, Akamai's approach to web security can protect customers without incurring the performance penalty often associated with other methods, such as traffic scrubbing. Akamai seeks to deliver protection natively in the existing traffic path, thereby eliminating the need for rerouting, mitigating latency, and incurring no single point of failure.

The Akamai Intelligent Platform delivers always-on protection with industry-leading scalability. According to the company, every Akamai edge server can act as a Kona Site Defender policy enforcement point, which allows Akamai to scale up defenses rapidly against attacks aimed at customers. Kona Site Defender also helps protect customers from some potential costs resulting from high-volume attacks by capping traffic burst fees.

The new Kona Site Defender provides real-time visibility into security events as well as the ability to drill down into attack alerts to retrieve detailed information about the attack. It also provides a new set of web defenses based on detecting and blocking clients that exhibit malicious behavior. The platform monitors the rate of requests coming from individual IP addresses and allows customers to block any IP address that is behaving in an abusive way.

Akamai Kona Site Defender will be generally available April 11, 2012. For more information, visit http://www.akamai.com/.

Symantec Releases NetBackup 7.5 and Backup Exec 2012

Symantec Corp. recently announced the global availability of Symantec NetBackup 7.5 and Backup Exec 2012. Symantec also announced an agreement with NetApp to resell the new NetBackup Replication Director option. According to the announcement, Replication Director lets organizations reduce management costs and complexity by recovering and managing backup and replicated snapshots from a single NetBackup management console.

According to the company, Backup Exec 2012 and NetBackup 7.5 provide solutions to reduce the complexity, time, and resources required to manage the backup process. The announcement states that NetBackup 7.5 increases backup speeds up to 100 times, improves the ability to recover, and makes it possible to integrate NetApp Snapshots with backup.

Backup Exec 2012 reduces complexity across physical and virtual environments and provides highly comprehensive disaster recovery. Backup Exec 2012 is also VMware Ready Data Protection certified for vSphere 5.0. This certification includes support for new features in vSphere 5.0, including the Hardware Version 8 format of virtual machines, datastore clusters, vSphere Storage DRS, and Storage vMotion.

Additionally, according to the announcement, Symantec's new Backup Exec Cloud DR Option, powered by Doyenz, is expected to be available in the first half of FY13 and will enable cloud-based application recovery in less than 15 minutes. More information is available at http://www.symantec.com.

Internet Grows to More Than 225 Million Domain Names

Nearly six million domain names were added to the Internet in the fourth quarter of 2011, bringing the total number of registered domain names to more than 225 million worldwide across all domains, according to the latest Domain Name Industry Brief published by VeriSign Inc.

According to the brief, the increase of 5.9 million domain names equates to a growth rate of 2.7 percent over the third quarter of 2011, and marks the fourth straight quarter with greater than 2 percent growth. New .com and .net registrations totaled 7.9 million during the quarter, which is a 4 percent increase year-over-year in new registrations. The .com/.net renewal rate for the fourth quarter was 73.5 percent, up from 73.3 percent for the third quarter.

The latest brief focuses on "domain name hijacking," a technique by which perpetrators fraudulently transfer domain names by password theft or social engineering. The brief analyzes how attackers use a wide range of techniques to hijack domain names – from spyware and keystroke loggers to "social engineering," in which scammers impersonate registrants, registrars, or other entities to gain access to passwords and personal information.

According to the brief, although the danger of domain name hijacking is significant, the threat can be significantly reduced with proper planning and mitigation techniques, such as: researching a registrar's security offerings, employing password best practices for domain name registrations, determining whether a registry is using two-factor authentication, and using services such as Verisign's Registry Lock, which allows registrants to set the conditions under which their registration information can and cannot be changed.

You can download the entire brief from http://www.verisigninc.com/DNIB.

Silver Tail Announces Profile Analyzer

Silver Tail Systems has announced Profile Analyzer, which, according to the company, is the world's first product to provide real-time analysis of both individual user behavior and crowd behavior on websites to identify malicious activity online.

According to the announcement, Profile Analyzer builds upon Silver Tail Systems' ability to identify anomalous web session behavior by modeling users' behavior against their own past usage history on the website to determine if their activity is legitimate or suspicious. This approach combines the baseline established by the entire crowd's website history with the context of specific users, increasing accuracy and response times to online threats.

Profile Analyzer also includes Silver Tail Systems' Parameter Injection detection technology. According to the company, Parameter Injection detection utilizes analytics to identify users being targeted by malware. Such malware might, for example, modify legitimate website content in the browser to request sensitive information, such as social security numbers, debit card numbers, and more, without the users' knowledge. For more information, visit http://www.silvertailsystems.com.