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Looking to get control over your virtual infrastructure? Then consider the Hytrust Appliance, which allows you to set up policies, access rules, and other security measures to segregate your virtual infrastructure from your users. It comes with integration with Microsoft’s Active Directory users and groups, and a newly designed user interface with the ability to handle extremely large virtual installations.

We tested the appliance on a network of eight VM ESXi and ESX hosts during March 2010.

Pricing: Download for free, limited to managing three hosts
Standard edition $1000 per typical host
Enterprise: $1500 per typical host including federation across multiple appliances
Hytrust.com

SEPATON’s S2100 is a virtual tape library backup appliance that can work to significantly reduce backup completion and restore times and cut down on storage requirements. It has a flexible capacity to hold from 10TB to over 1 PB and a wide collection of policies that can be crafted to particular applications and circumstances.

We tested a unit on a live network with actual production data with Firefox running on Windows XP in March 2010.

Price: starts at $110,500.
Backup products supported include Symantec’s NetBackup, IBM Tivoli
Storage Manager, EMC NetWorker and HP Data Protector.

SEPATON S2100-ES2 v5
400 Nickerson Road
Marlborough, MA 01752
Sepaton.com
508 490 7900

Looking to do a better job monitoring all of your network’s applications portfolio? The GV-2010 is a unit designed to give you very granular control over how your end users use particular applications, and inspect all of your content leaving your network.

We tested the appliance on a small network in February 2010.

Global Velocity GV-2010
Globalvelocity.com
St. Louis MO
314 880 2900

Profiler makes it easier to troubleshoot and manage up to five McAfee Enterprise firewalls from one central console and help you keep up with changes to your network and applications. You can examine the implications to real-time changes in your network before you commit them and also quickly do ad hoc analysis on rule sets.

Version 1.5.1
Price: $19,500 for appliance model

http://www.mcafee.com/us/local_content/datasheets/ds_fw_profiler.pdf

This week I begin a new series of video screencasts for Dell’s IT Expert Voice Web site. The site has all sorts of useful information for corporate IT folks that are interested in migrating and using Windows 7, and my humble part will be to produce a regular series of videos similar to what I have been doing on my own here. Do check out this video which talks about the differences between Windows 7 and earlier versions when it comes to networking controls.

The 3X Systems Backup appliance is a great way to automatically backup a collection of PCs and servers across the Internet at reasonable cost.

We tested version 2.1.6 in August 2009 on a small network of Windows clients and servers.
Windows agents available for 2000 and later versions, including both servers and 64-bit OS’s.

Pros:
• Easy to setup and operate
• Simple and effective offsite backups
• Can scale up storage as disk requirements grow

Cons:
• Only Windows agents supported
• Require recent browser versions such as IE v7 and Firefox v2
• Restoring full domain controller or specific email messages could be easier

Price: base system starts at $2,495.00

3X Systems

1275 Kinnear Road,
Columbus Ohio 43212
614.372.6868

http://3x.com

PacketShaper 900
Blue Coat Systems
410 N. Mary Ave.
Sunnyvale, CA 94085
(408) 220-2200

http://bluecoat.com

Price: $2,500 base price

We tested a PacketShaper 900 on a small test network showing how it can discover, classify and prioritize application traffic. We address four different questions that IT managers have about understanding how bandwidth-consuming applications interact over their networks, and how individual applications can be controlled for particular use cases.

HyTrust offers managers and administrators of VMware’s ESX virtual infrastructure a centralized, single point of control for hypervisor configuration, compliance, and access management that is both secure and easy to use through ordinary Web browsers.

We tested the RC version of the product in March 2009 by making a remote connection to HyTrust’s own test lab.

Supports:

• ESX version 3.5 only (not ESXi)
• Works with Internet Explorer and Firefox, most current versions.
• Both Windows Server 2003/2008 domain controllers

Price: $7,500 for the appliance ($3,000 for software only) plus $500 per CPU ESX socket protected plus 25% for maintenance and support per year. Free version available to protect up to three ESX hosts but without any support contract.

Pros:

• A solid collection of tools to secure your VMware ESX infrastructure
• Integrates with Active Directory and VMware vCenter policies
• Fully functional freeware version allows for experimenting and learning before purchase

Cons:

• Limited to ESX currently
• Log viewer could be better integrated into the product

HyTrust Appliance 1975 W. El Camino Real, Suite 203 Mountain View, CA 94040 650-681-8100

hytrust.com

An online backup server that covers a wide range of servers and services, this latest version includes the ability to protect Microsoft SharePoint and Exchange servers, VMware Infrastructure, and other sophisticated environments.

We tested Version 12.5 on a small test network with Windows Server 2008 and Mac and Windows clients.

Requirements: Windows 2000/2003/2008 Servers,
Price: $995 for one license, additional agents varies in price from $395 to $3195, depending on what you need to backup.

Symantec Corp.

http://symantec.com/backupexec

20330 Stevens Creek Blvd.
Cupertino, CA 95014

Pros:

• Easy to setup and operate
• Free 60 day trial helps you test out the service and become familiar with its operation
• Granular Recovery Technology allows easy restoration of accidentally deleted files, emails, or documents.
• VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V virtual server data protection that is easy to manage
• Integrated online backup for flexible off-site data protection

Cons:

• Some of the menus are a bit densely packed, such as the Job Setup screens
• This is not a product for single server environments (there is a separate version for Microsoft’s Small Business Server that is more appropriate)

The suite covers three separate products that have been acquired over the years by Symantec for applications delivery via streaming or virtual layers and a connection broker technology that allows enterprises to manage the way their applications are packaged and delivered to users’ desktops.

We tested Version 6.1 on various test machines in February 2009.

Requirements: Windows XP SP 1 or better with Java J2SE Runtime 5.0 update 6, Windows Server 2003/2008, Windows 2000, Windows Vista

Price: $360 (concurrent license), $270 (per node) for entire suite, Streaming + Virtualization $68, Virtualization only $44. Substantial volume license discounts.

Pros:
• Powerful software management for multiple use cases so that enterprises can configure and deliver a wide variety of applications and situations
• Granular virtualization layer technology
• Competitive price for the features that are included
Cons:
• Complex setup with multiple moving parts
• No common policy management across the various software modules
• Multiple management consoles for each software module

Symantec Endpoint Virtualization Suite
Symantec Corp.

http://symantec.com/

20330 Stevens Creek Blvd.
Cupertino, CA 95014