Today’s topics include Intel and Micron developing durable solid-state storage for data centers and memcached DDoS attacks slowing down.
Intel and Micron have developed a new type of storage for data centers called 3D Xpoint, which greatly improves the speed of storage by reducing processor wait times, improving latency, and saving and retrieving data much faster than today’s solid-state drives.
3D Xpoint memory doesn’t depend on electron flow or transistors, which have a physical speed limit and wear out. Therefore, 3D Xpoint memory will last much longer than flash memory. Intel is selling 375- and 750-gigabyte drives for data centers in various form factors and standard PCIe interfaces under the Optane brand name, as well as workstation drives with 280- or 480-gigabyte capacities.
Micron’s QuantX 3D xPoint storage devices will show up in laptop and desktop computers this year.
Attack sizes of memcached distributed denial-of-service attacks have been declining since the March 5 Netscout Arbor Networks report of a 1.7-Tbps DDoS attack, the largest in internet history.
Steinthor Bjarnason, senior network security analyst at Netscout Arbor, said, “We’re still seeing lots of [DDoS attacks], but their average size is considerably smaller due to ongoing cleanup and mitigation efforts.”
Memcached is a widely deployed open-source tool for distributed memory object caching. Attackers aim for servers left open and exposed to the internet, sending UDP traffic that is then reflected to a target victim.
The first attacks using the memcached DDoS reflection tactic were reported at the end of February, with attacks ranging from 190 Gbps to 500 Gbps. Attack bandwidth escalated rapidly, culminating with the March 5 attack.