News
IT News: Zune Drops in Time for the Holidays
Plus, new Forefront Security beta launches, IT governance software, more.
Microsoft made it official: You can get its Zune media player and online music
service in the U.S. on Nov. 14, 2006, with pricing for the basic model starting
at $249.99. The 30GB media player will allow wireless sharing with other Zune
players and comes equipped with an FM tuner and some preloaded songs, movie
shorts and images. Microsoft will also launch a browsable, subscription-based
music database at $14.99 per month.
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/presskits/zune
Forefront Security for SharePoint Beta Launches
Next on the Microsoft front is the company's launch of Forefront Security for
SharePoint beta, now available for download at Microsoft's Web site. Using up
to five anti-virus tools, including the new Microsoft Antivirus engine, this
latest version of Forefront was designed for increased protection against malware
and for integration with SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services
3.0, both of which should be out by the end of 2006. http://www.microsoft.com/forefront
New Products: IT Governance Tools, Tape Indexing, More
IT governance issues can be a bewildering responsibility for company stakeholders.
To ease the confusion, IT consultant Steve Moir and writer Alan Calder have
created the IT Governance Framework Toolkit. The 98-section CD walks users through
the process, providing them with governance templates, guidelines and planning
tools. The Toolkit, priced at $1,810.90, includes electronic copies of Calder's
books: "IT Governance: Guidelines for Directors" and "IT Governance
Today: A Practitioner's Handbook." http://www.itgovernance.co.uk
A user accidentally deletes one file, but it often means you're losing precious
daylight doing a full recovery from tapes. What if you could recover just the
file your user needs? That's the aim of Index Engine's offline eDiscovery Tape
Engine, which lets companies search through backup tapes for specific files,
e-mails or other data without resorting to a complete restore. Starting at $29,500
to support a network of up to 4 million files, the eDiscovery Tape Engine automatically
indexes existing backup tape archives, making them searchable. Type in a query,
and eDiscovery will send you an e-mail when it locates the file, with information
on how to restore it. http://www.indexengines.com/
You can take it with you: UltraBac now has a version of UBDR Gold, the
image-based recovery software, that fits on a bootable USB flash drive. The
company says booting from its USB drive can cut recovery time by as much as
75 percent, and the auto-restore function can allow up to 100 percent scripted
restores. UBDR Gold on the USB flash drive goes for $1,045 per server.
The company also unveiled a version of UBDR Gold for Microsoft Small Business
Server. At $495 per server, the SBS Edition uses the same image-based recovery
features as UBDR Gold and is capable of restoring images to machines with dissimilar
hardware. http://www.ultrabac.com
Also new for SBS users is Iomega's new REV SBS Data Protection Solution package.
Starting at $399, the package includes two removable REV disks, CA BrightStor
ARCserve Backup (which includes backup agents for Exchange, SQL Server and SharePoint)
and CA eTrust Antivirus for the server as well as up to five attached clients.
http://www.iomega.com
Two backup vendors, CommVault and Symantec, have gone virtual ... sort of.
They've both announced support for the VMware Consolidated Backup. Using virtualization
technology, VMware Consolidated Backup offloads backup to a centralized server,
which can reduce the backup load on production servers and minimize hardware
dependencies. http://www.vmware.com
Aladdin Knowledge Systems, which provides identity and password authentication
software, says that its Aladdin eToken will be fully compatible with Windows
Vista. Current and future customers of the USB- and "smart card"-based
eToken should be able to integrate Vista with the authentication program with
no complications, claims the company. http://www.aladdin.com