News

IT Weekly Roundup, August 12

From the business wires this week: Two companies put support behind Microsoft's Virtual Disk Service; high-availability tool and a slew of security tools get updated.

• By Michael Domingo
• 08/12/2004

Two companies have announced built-in support for QLogic's SANsurfer, a GUI front end to the Virtual Disk Service in Window Server 2003:

• Nexsan Technologies' InfiniSAN line, which includes the ATAboy2 series of advanced, scalable ATA disk-based solutions to the ATAbaby, an ATA storage platform for small to medium business environments. http://www.nexsan.com
• Engenio Information Technologies' Engenio VDS Provider, which, with SANsurfer, can be used to manage Engenio's line of storage devices. http://www.engenio-it.com

SANsurfer is available at http://www.qlogic.com.

askSam Systems released a public beta of SurfSaver, an application that works much like favorites, archiving visiting Web sites. Beta features include: browsable folders of saved pages; QuickSearch; Search tab for toggling between folders; and Windows Explorer compatibility. http://www.askSam.com/beta/surfsaver6

Vircom's VOP Radius 4.0, the name of a line of RADIUS applications for access, authentication and accounting servers, has been updated with: multithreaded design; multi-CPU support; background monitoring with VOP Watch for continuous uptime; authentication caching and fallback; expanded authentication protocol support, including MS-CHAP and EAP-MD5; mixed data source authentication for roaming users and support for more database and directory service types; and menu-driven configuration support for more vendors (Colubris, Cisco, Propel, Redback). http://www.vircom.com

Network Instruments has a line of Full Duplex Probe Appliance specifically designed to passively monitor and maintain 10/100 full duplex links at wire-speed. It works in tandem with the company's Observer console, which provided detailed views of full duplex links, with more than 30 real-time statistics, packet captures, and an Expert Analysis system that can monitor more than 500 Expert events. It's $4,995 and includes a 100Mb full duplex TAP. http://www.networkinstruments.com/

Interlink Networks' LucidLink Wireless Security provides with secure, easy-to-setup 802.11 WLAN connectivity for small businesses. Included: 802.1X RADIUS authentication; two-click user administration; guest authorization; and automatic access point configuration. Starts at $449 for 10 users. http://www.lucidlink.com/

Procera Networks released OptimIP Port Lockdown Authority, a suite of Procera's security tools for protecting networks that use OptimIP intelligent network appliances against viruses. OptimIP appliances start at $3,495. http://www.proceranetworks.com/

Data On Call has updated UniFax, one among a line of the company's online fax services. Version 4 includes performance enhancements, including support for faxing at V.34/33.6 Kbps; an e-mail address format for sending faxes via e-mail and the ability to receive inbound faxes as PDFs; an FTP option for automated fax delivery; and more data security and encryption options, including PGP. http://www.dataoncall.com

PerformanceIT's ProIT 3.1, a server monitoring suite, has been updated to support IBM pSeries (RS/6000) servers via the application's IBM AIX 5.x agents. Also new: SNMP enhancements and a graphical LAN/WAN linking tool. ProIT also adds an Impact Analyzer that measures effect of network changes. http://www.performanceit.com/

XOsoft has enhanced its WANSync and WANSyncHA, which provide disaster recovery and high-availability protection for LANs/WANs, with: AIX support, support for Microsoft's Delegated Security model; performance benchmarking and reporting tools; customizable synchronization scheduler for prioritizing bandwidth for replication; and an API. http://www.xosoft.com/