With product announcements ranging from the trivial to the bizarre, the Editor distils theessence of those that are of interest to the Networking community.

SECURITY

FrontRange Solutions has released DeviceWall 5.0, the latest version of its award-winning endpoint security solution. Offering the ability to extend the product's USB control and data encryption capabilities to PCs running the Vista operating system, it gives security managers a single heterogeneous solution. SECUDE International has released FinallySecure 9.2, also offering Vista support with centralised management. It claims to be "the world's only hybrid software (or hardware) based Full Disk Encryption." It will enable early adoption and migration to the upcoming wave of hardware-based FDE technologies such as Seagate Momentus Full Disk Encryption (FDE) disk drives.

MANAGEMENT AND SUPPORT

EMC has bolstered its commitment to automation and end-to-end IT Service Management, by unveiling new levels of integration between two of the company's core IT management offerings. Increasing integration between EMC Smarts Application Discovery Manager (ADM) and EMC Infra, customers can now apply the power of automated application discovery to support dependency driven change management, impact analysis, and Configuration Management Database (CMDB) population. Senior VP, Chris Gahagan says, "IT departments across the globe are fast approaching a breaking point as they attempt to manage their ever expanding universe of business-critical information … companies require a clear line-of-sight across their IT infrastructures and how they relate to the services they deliver." Endace has announced enhancements to their leading NinjaProbe appliance, allowing the platform to capture, store and replay network traffic at speeds approaching 10Gb/s. These capabilities permit network operators to replay events on their network exactly as they occurred, providing the ability to recreate real network scenarios, identify the cause and effect of alarm conditions, load and test networking and security equipment and actively study user experiences for services like video on demand. Until now, testing has relied on expensive equipment to generate synthetic test patterns; an approach that does not reflect real world traffic conditions and therefore fails to allow for proper network optimisation.

INFRASTRUCTURE

Cisco and VMware are to collaborate to deliver joint data centre solutions designed to improve the scalability and operational control of virtual environments. The Cisco Nexus 1000V distributed virtual software switch is expected to be an integrated option in VMware Infrastructure. Cisco and VMware will also combine their expertise to introduce a new set of multidisciplinary professional services and reseller certification training in support of customers' data centre virtualisation strategies. And VMware has also announced its vClient strategy, allowing users to access their virtual desktop from any location. Desktop virtualisation offers organisations the chance to streamline management overheads and centralise IT operations. VMware will also bring out offline VDI, supporting users that are out of the office, but still require access to their virtual machine. As if to underline the virtual story, Compellent Technologies is extending the simplification and automation of thin replication for disaster recovery. Announcing plans to seamlessly integrate its Storage Centre storage area network (SAN) with VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) the VMware global technology alliance partner, will deliver a fully automated business continuity solution based on its thin replication software and VMware SRM. It will offer disaster recovery capabilities including non-disruptive, live testing and automated failover. WatchGuard Technologies has previewed its first extensible threat management (XTM) network security appliance, the WatchGuard XTM 1050. Designed for enterprise campuses, data centres and other high-performance network environments, it sets a new standard for high security and high performance by achieving 10Gbps firewall and 2Gbps IPSec throughput with dual quad-core Intel processors and advanced crypto-acceleration hardware. VP, Eric Aarrestad said "…it embodies our vision of bringing extensible protection and networking in one high-performance, easy to manage and easy to own appliance." THUS has launched a Managed Ethernet Access and Service. Using the latest Ethernet management standards it is now offering enhanced SDH-like management for Ethernet access and connectivity services. As Ethernet becomes the predominant fixed access technology to next-generation networks (NGN), supporting the networking of a variety of converged communication services and solutions, managing the crucial first mile from customer site to its NGN, should provide its customers with greater serviceassurance and reliability. NC