Interop Building Blocks
In addition to scheduled keynote addresses from Juniper Networks Chairman and CEO Scott Kriens, CA President and CEO John Swainson and Symantec Executive Vice President and CTO Mark Bregman, a variety of vendors plan to expand their portfolios with product launches at the conference, which is produced by CMP Technology, CRN's parent company.
Citrix Systems is launching its WANScaler 8000 series of WAN optimization appliances—high-end offerings in a product line picked up through its recent acquisition of Orbital Data. With the 8000 series, Citrix is expanding capacity by adding multilevel, disk-based compression, and providing support for hundreds of branch offices, said Greg Smith, director of product marketing for the application networking group at Citrix, Fort Lauderdale, Fla. Available now, the WANScaler 8500 for branch offices starts at $8,500, while the 8800 data center model starts at $40,000.
Citrix's strategy to bolster its WAN optimization portfolio—including its complementary NetScaler application delivery technology— comes at just the right time, said Bill Botti, president and COO of Alternative Technology, an Englewood, Colo.-based solution provider that works with several WAN optimization lines, including Citrix's.
Recent activity in the space by networking market leader Cisco Systems is giving the overall WAN optimization market a boost, Botti said. "There will be a lot more adoption because a big dog in infrastructure has said WAN optimization and acceleration is a good thing."
Botti said he expects the new Citrix wares to help grow Alternative Tech- nology's already-booming WAN optimization practice, which will likely exceed $30 million this year.
Another vendor hoping to capitalize on the growing market for WAN optimization and acceleration technologies is Network Physics, which will be showcasing NetSensory 6.0, the latest version of its application delivery technology. The product also will be used as part of the infrastructure running the conference's own network.
The new version, scheduled to ship in the first quarter, adds management and troubleshooting capabilities for a number of applications, including VoIP, Microsoft Exchange and enterprise software from Oracle and SAP. The vendor also plans to launch its NP-3000, a high-end appliance that doubles the storage capacity and promises to deliver 25 percent more throughput than its predecessors.
GroundWork Open Source will be at the show spotlighting the latest version of its flagship Monitor IT management and MSP platform, said Tony Barbagallo, vice president of marketing at GroundWork, San Francisco. Version 5 introduces a host of new reporting and data mining features. GroundWork Monitor bundles free, open-source remote monitoring, reporting and remediation software into a single management console that can be readily employed by MSPs. With version 5, solution providers can create custom monitoring and management dashboards by simply dragging and dropping "a canvas of dashboard widgets" that represent a wide range of functions, Barbagallo said.
GroundWork also has added a new open-source reporting tool called Eclipse Birt, he said. "We created data sources that integrate right with the Birt reporting tool, so you don't have to make raw SQL queries into the database. We also created a half-dozen or so standard reports, such as host availability over the last six months, or suspicious log-in attempts, so you can make all sorts of interesting queries," Barbagallo said.
Avocent also will be on hand to introduce two products that enable remote management of servers through mobile devices such as smartphones. The Huntsville, Ala., company's SonicAdmin QR and SonicAdmin Pro are designed to give administrators the tools to remotely manage Microsoft Windows-based servers. SonicAdmin QR and Pro install on any Windows server and can be run from a BlackBerry or any Windows Mobile 5-based device. Annual renewable licenses for SonicAdmin QR are $99 per user; SonicAdmin Pro retails for $399 per user.
On the security front, identity and access management appliance vendor Imprivata, Lexington, Mass., will unveil OneSign Physical/Logical, an enhancement to its OneSign appliance that enables location-based authentication by linking an employee's physical access authentication to network and application access. The combination of physical and logical security creates a single security policy for each employee, from physical building, zone or room access straight through to networks and applications, the vendor said. OneSign Physical/Logical is slated to ship as an appliance pair with built-in failover, and is scheduled to be available in October for about $36,000 for a 1,000-user capacity.