Promise Pegasus2 External RAID-5 With Thunderbolt 2

PROMISE Technology, Inc. announced the availability of Pegasus2, a storage solution designed to work with Thunderbolt 2 enabled systems such as the all-new Mac Pro, which is built for the creative experience of photographers, video professionals, power users, and more.

Thunderbolt 2 delivers 20Gbps of bandwidth, a game changer for content creators, allowing for simultaneous transfer and display of high-bandwidth 3D and 4K video files.
Pegasus2 maximizes the available line rate of Thunderbolt 2, providing fast throughput for remote site, on set, or remote office mobile storage in 4K rich media workflows, post-production or broadcasting.
The company develops high-performance solutions and Thunderbolt enabled devices optimized for the video bandwidth requirements in big data, rich media and the media and entertainment market.
Incorporating security, mobility, and the speed and versatility of Thunderbolt 2, Pegasus2 is an external RAID storage solution for marketing, advertising, or video-centric department that creates rich media video content such as training or commercials, and requires enterprise RAID protection.
Additionally, the combination of fast throughout and massive capacity makes Pegasus2 suitable for professional IT applications for workgroups, such as CAD engineering, CAE auto design.
"Pegasus2 is truly one-of-a-kind, as there has never before been a storage solution that offered such an incredible combination of performance, mobility, and simplicity," said James Lee, CEO, PROMISE. "We are thrilled that Pegasus2 is the first storage solution available with Thunderbolt 2 - this further illustrates PROMISE's position as a leader in Thunderbolt technology."
Pegasus2 Highlights

• Maximum throughput of Thunderbolt 2 (20Gbps) accelerated when attached to new Mac Pro
• Supports simultaneous streaming, editing, and backup of 4K video
• Dual Thunderbolt ports for daisy chaining Pegasus enclosure units, Apple Thunderbolt displays, or Mini DisplayPort devices
• Removable drive bays for drive access and serviceability
• Mobile, enterprise hardware RAID protection for offsite shoots
• Massive storage capacity for backing up creative projects and digital libraries
• Thunderbolt cable included

Top 10 Storage Disasters in 2013

2013 Top Ten List of Data Disasters Compiled by Kroll Ontrack

• 10. Long journey, broken drive (Hong Kong): When a world cyclist and photographer arrived in Hong Kong in May 2013, they discovered that the HDD with two years of photos and video of his 40,000 km cycle fundraiser around the world was broken. The Hong Kong team quickly got to work on this case, but it proved to be a very challenging recovery as the drive had major media damage in multiple locations on multiple surfaces. Trying every imaginable recovery technique possible, the Ontrack Data Recovery engineers were able to recover most of the images.
• 9. Movie mayhem (Poland): While producing a movie for a film festival, a team of filmmakers encountered an on-set disaster. They were backing up their laptop to an external drive during production one day, when one of the crew members accidentally kicked the table over. Both the laptop and external drive crashed to the floor making the data inaccessible. Eighteen months of production and investments gone with only two months until the festival. Kroll Ontrack was able to recover over 80% of the data, enabling the filmmakers to make the festival's deadline. It is listed in the credits as their technology partner.
• 8. Data gone wild (UK): A university student called looking for emergency service on her laptop. She had lost her year-end term paper, and needed it back to pass her class. When the engineers asked what happened to the laptop, she explained that the year-end party from the night before was the culprit. Her laptop was found drowning in spilled drinks.
• 7. Gamer's rage (France): One day, the mother of three children tried to start the family computer without success. Error message. She asked the children if something strange happened because they were the last to use it. No answer. She suspected something and asked again. The oldest sibling said her brother was so angry he lost a video game that he slammed his fists on the keyboard.
• 6. Foiled robbery (Italy): A thief took a laptop among other items from a home, but must have gotten scared off during the robbery. While fleeing, the thief abandoned the laptop in the garden. It was found by the owner after being out in the rain all night. Kroll Ontrack was able to recover the data from the SSD inside.
• 5. Use caution while under the influence (USA): After a night of partying, a man woke up in the middle of the night and used what he thought to be a restroom. In the morning, he discovered that it was not a restroom, and his laptop was a poor substitute for a toilet. Kroll Ontrack was able to recover 100% of the data.
• 4. Sabotage (UK): Kroll Ontrack received a package of HDD pieces. When engineers called the company to find out what had happened, the company explained that the drive had been hit repeatedly with a hammer. The company insisted Kroll Ontrack try to recover the drive data. One file was recovered. What the company learned from that one file was that an employee had tried to wipe a file and destroy evidence. The one file recovered was enough to prosecute the employee.
• 3. Natural disasters (USA): Unfortunately, some of the biggest data disasters stem from natural disasters. When one customer learned about looming Hurricane Sandy, they sprang into action and made a backup of all of their servers. However, they couldn't have predicted that the river half a mile from their office would have flooded to the extent it did, leaving all of their servers and backup tapes submerged in 28 inches of water. Kroll Ontrack was able to recover 100% of the office space design company's data, which had been in business since 1957. The company said that without data recovery, they would have had to rebuild their business from scratch.
• 2. Spiders! (Italy): Kroll Ontrack was called to work on a five-year-old server where the HDD had crashed. When the data recovery engineer opened up the drive, he found the nest and spiders inside. They also had a vacation home in the drive of the server right next to the parking area of the heads. 100% of the data was recovered.
• 1. A cell phone is not bullet-proof (USA): Enough said. Full recovery, 10GB of data total.

61% of Companies Suffered at Least One of Following Incidents in Last 12 Months

Unplanned downtime (37%), security breach (23%) or data loss (29%)

Results of an independent survey revealing fresh insights about IT strategies and infrastructures deployed within companies and governments throughout the world.

Most notably, respondents cite a startling lack of senior executive confidence that permeates organizations globally, specifically concerning readiness around the critical IT requirements of continuous availability; advanced security; and integrated backup and recovery. Reduced investment in these critical areas threatens the ability of IT infrastructures to withstand and quickly recover from disruptive incidents such as unplanned downtime, security breaches and data loss and underscores the need to adopt progressive strategies to achieve trusted IT infrastructures.

The Global IT Trust Curve survey, administered by independent market research firm Vanson Bourne, spans 3,200 interviews across 16 countries and 10 industry sectors.

China received the top maturity ranking: Chinese IT decision makers reported implementing the highest concentration of sophisticated continuous availability, advanced security, and integrated backup and recovery technologies. The United States ranked second in maturity on the IT Trust Curve. Underscoring swift and aggressive technology investments to solidify their world influence, three of the four most mature countries - China, South Africa and Brazil - are BRICS nations. Japan ranked last on the IT Trust Curve in the 16-nation survey.

The four big megatrends in information technology today are cloud computing, big data, social networking and mobile devices. Adoption and maturity of these trends must float upon a sea of trust - trust that my information is secure in the cloud, trust that my data won't be lost or stolen, trust that my IT will be operational when it needs to be - which, these days, is all the time. The more trust that can be earned and guaranteed, the bigger and faster the impact of these trends. Conversely, the less trust that is established, the more limited these trends will be. Where countries fall on the IT trust maturity curve could affect their overall ability to compete.

Chief among the findings are:
Lower levels of maturity permeate the globe:

• More than half (57%) of all respondents fall into the lower maturity categories, while only 8% place in the Leader category.
• The higher organizations land on the maturity curve, the more likely they are to have already implemented more strategic and technology projects such as big data analytics.

Lack of confidence in technology infrastructure:

• Nearly half (45%) of all respondents globally report that their senior executives are not confident that their organizations have adequate availability, security, and backup and recovery capabilities.
•  When asked about executive confidence levels, the percentage of all respondents within each maturity level who said their senior executives are confident that their organizations have adequate availability, security, and backup and recovery are: Laggard (39%), Evaluator (51%), Adopter (65%) and Leader (81%).
• Japan has the smallest percentage of respondents (31%) reporting that their senior teams have confidence in these key aspects of IT; Germany has the highest percentage (66%).
• 19% (nearly one in five) of respondents worldwide cite an overall lack of confidence in their technology infrastructure.

Significant disparity exists between how IT and business leaders perceive improvements:

• While 70% of IT decision makers consider the IT department to be the motivation/drive for future resilient and secure IT infrastructure, the number drops to 50% for business decisions makers when asked the same question.
• A similar perception gap extends in key disciplines such as security. While 27% of IT respondents report being victims of a data breach in the past 12 months, only 19% of business decision makers globally report being victims, indicating they are not aware of all technology incidents that impact the business.

Organizations with higher levels of maturity avoid - and recover more quickly from - disruptive incidents and with reduced consequence. For example, globally:

• 53% of organizations in the Leader segment of the IT Trust Curve reported data recovery time measured in minutes or less for their most mission critical applications. The percentage drops to 27% across all maturity tiers.
• 76% of companies in the Leader segment believe they are able to recover 100% of their lost data in every instance versus only 44% in the lowest maturity segment.
• Organizations in the lowest maturity segment (Laggard) lost one and a half times more money over the last 12 months as a result of downtime than those in the highest maturity segment (Leader).
•  Security breaches were the most costly events suffered by respondents, who reported an average annual financial loss of $860,273 due to breaches, followed by $585,892 and $497,037 respectively for data loss and downtime.

Widespread unplanned downtime, security breaches and data loss:

• 61% of all respondents' companies have suffered at least one of the following incidents: unplanned downtime (37%), security breach (23%) or data loss (29%) in the last 12 months.
• Top 4 consequences across organizations experiencing at least one of the above incidents within the last 12 months were loss of employee productivity (45%), loss of revenue (39%), loss of customer confidence/loyalty (32%) and loss of incremental business opportunity (27%).

Budget constraints (52%) reigned as the #1 obstacle to implementing continuous availability, advanced security, and integrated backup and recovery solutions. Resources and/or workload constraints (35%), poor planning (33%) and knowledge & skills (32%) rounded out the top four. China was the only country that did not report budget as the #1 obstacle.

Top security concerns identified across all respondents were third party application access (43%) and protection of intellectual property (42%), pointing to the need for more advanced technology and intelligence-driven models:

• There remains a heavy reliance on "prevention-oriented" security tools, with more than 80% of respondents using anti-virus and firewalls as the 2 most popular security solutions.
• Just 18% have adopted Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) and even fewer, 11%, have adopted Governance Risk and Compliance (GRC) solutions, which provide the necessary monitoring and response capabilities needed to defend against more advanced threats.

Highly-regulated industries throughout the world displayed proportionally higher maturity levels:
In addition to the IT and Technology (#3) industries, the remaining Top 5 most mature industries globally are the highly-regulated financial services (#1), life sciences (#2), healthcare (#4) and public sector (#5).

Most IT practitioners do everything within their power and control to protect the enterprise. Where breakdowns can occur is in communicating up to business leaders, executives, Boards and audit committees. We hear it from Boards all the time. Practitioners need to be able to demonstrate to leadership that they have a governance process whereby they can adequately instill confidence that risks are being addressed in line with the organization's overall risk appetite and profile. Success against a particular threat is not just an accident or good luck, but the result of a solid process that continually monitors and addresses new risks and threats to the enterprise."
 

The time has come for the industry to double down. It's impossible to deliver advanced security if we lack foundational maturity. Without a predictable environment, or understanding of where our assets are, or an ability to pick up on nuances and detect behavioural anomalies, we will be unable to defend the organization. That baseline of foundational maturity is an absolute enabler of effective security and establishing overall trust.

 Among the many powerful insights that flow from this global study, the rampant lack of senior executive confidence stands out as both alarming and, unfortunately, a sign of the times. Nearly half of respondents say their senior management has zero confidence that their organizations are prepared with adequate availability, security, and backup and recovery. That one startling fact stands as a wakeup call for company boards to make the necessary investments to brace against both external and self-imposed disruptions and threats to their IT systems and data.