The recently launched Optane 900P solid state drive is Intel’s first consumer storage product to depart from the use of conventional NAND flash and instead utilise Intel’s much newer 3D XPoint technology.

3D XPoint promises higher random I/O performance (up to 550K read IOPS), lower latencies and far better endurance.

In this post I’ll be installing an Intel Optane 900P SSD in my HomeLab and taking a look at its real world performance within a VMware ESXi environment. Most importantly, we’ll see how the added performance translates into real-world improvements with Windows virtual machines.

Shortly after publishing my previous blog post, I accidentally stumbled upon Barkly. They represent a new breed of security technologies which have departed from traditional signature based detection methods and instead utilise machine learning and behaviour analysis for malware prevention.

At the time, I hadn’t heard of Barkly before. After a quick search online I found no independent reviews or any real exposure within IT communities such as Reddit’s /r/Sysadmin, /r/NetSec or Spiceworks. This needed to change, so I reached out to Barkly for a review copy and they were kind enough to hook me up with a trial.

In this post I’ll be putting Barkly through its paces and seeing how well it performs against a variety of threats, including ransomware, trojans, and exploits.

About two years ago, I stumbled upon Cylance. They marketed their product, CylancePROTECT, as being ‘next
generation’ security software, utilising artificial intelligence and machine learning to beat malware and other online threats. Instantly I was intrigued. Wanting to know more, I started looking online for community reviews and/or downloadable trials. Unfortunately neither seemed to exist, so I put a bookmark in my browser and decided to return again another day.

Fast track to today, and things have changed. There’s been a public AMA on Reddit, NSS Labs and AV-TEST have tested the product, and best of all, it can now be purchased for use on individual PCs via MalwareManaged.

In this blog post I’m going to be testing the security effectiveness of Cylance PROTECT, and putting it head to head with other competing products from TrendMicro, ESET, Sophos, Webroot and Malwarebytes.