The great eye of scrutiny has been most recently aimed at big data, the concept of storing unfathomably large quantities of data used for everything from social media to advertising. Of course, the difficulty of big data is that it is so large it often is beyond the scope of manageability, leaving large chunks of sensitive information vulnerable to criminals.

Altera's partnership with Secturion Systems, Inc. is a step toward securing massive data sets. Altera, known for PLDs, has an exceptional line of FPGAs (field-programmable gate arrays) that will partner with Secturion's DarkStore secure network storage appliance product lines. DarkStor (which sounds, fittingly, like a play on the Death Star, without the fatal engineering flaw) is meant for storing, retrieving, and communicating secure data in high-bandwith network and storage applications.

"With Altera’s Arria 10 FPGA architecture, we have pushed big data network storage security to the next level of protection, performance, and flexibility,” said Richard Takahashi, Secturion Systems CEO and Founder. “We will migrate these capabilities to Stratix 10 FPGAs to take advantage of high-performance HyperFlex architecture routing and the new innovative security architecture to enable even more secure encryption at 400 Gbps and higher.”

How does it work? By utilizing multiple independent levels of security and eliminating the need for separate storage areas, which not only improves security, but cuts infrastructure costs. Arria--Altera's family of high-performance 20nm FPGAs--features "storage network packet processors, key handling and XTS-AES-256 encryption rates of 40-Gbps and 100-Gbps “full duplex” using unique patent-pending, systolic matrix architectures suitable for big data storage and IP network applications." Multi-tenancy and independent security may well be the way to secure big data against security breaches.