Managing your firewalls with McAfee Firewall Enterprise Profiler

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

Windows 7 networking controls

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.

Using OpenXchange to manage your communications

A flexible unified communications service for collaborative workgroups that can share files, import and export contacts and calendars from a wide variety of data sources and Web services, including Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google’s Gmail. Entirely open-source based.


Price: Begins at $5/user/month for hosted version; $1095/yr for 25 users for server-based software version
Requirements: Works on a wide variety of browsers and operating systems. We tested it on IE 7, Firefox 3 and Mac Safari 4 in October 2009.

OpenXchange Inc.
303 South Broadway
Tarrytown, New York 10591
914 332-5720
http://ox.io

Find and manage your enterprise desktops with Altiris Client Management Suite from Symantec

An enterprise desktop discovery, inventory, remote configuration, deployment, and patch management utility that supports a wide range of client operating systems.

Pricing: $95 per client, quantity discounts available
Desktops: Windows client versions support XP with SP2, 2000 with SP4, Vista with SP1, Server 2003, 2008 and Mac OS with 10.3.9 or later, Red Hat and SUSE Linux as well
Management console has special requirements that include IE7 and .Net framework 3.5
Symantec Corp.
20330 Stevens Creek Blvd.
Cupertino, CA 95014
http://www.symantec.com/business/client-management-suite

We tested version 7.0 in September 2009 on a small network of mixed Mac and Windows machines with purposely really old application versions.

New features in Altiris Client Management Suite from Symantec

This is the second of two videos on Altiris CMS, an enterprise desktop discovery, inventory, remote configuration, deployment, and patch management utility that supports a wide range of client operating systems. This video goes into more detail on three of its newer features.

Pricing: $95 per client, quantity discounts available
Desktops: Windows client versions support XP with SP2, 2000 with SP4, Vista with SP1, Server 2003, 2008 and Mac OS with 10.3.9 or later, Red Hat and SUSE Linux as well
Management console has special requirements that include IE7 and .Net framework 3.5
Symantec Corp.
20330 Stevens Creek Blvd.
Cupertino, CA 95014
http://www.symantec.com/business/client-management-suite

We tested the latest SP1 version 7.0 in September 2009 on a small network of mixed Mac and

Painless offsite online backups using 3X Backup

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://www.trustyd.com/

Using Sendmail’s Sentrion for enterprise messaging management

A fairly sophisticated messaging server that has wide-ranging policy management for data leak protection, message encryption, email sender reputation, and message routing purposes.

Price: Less than $13 per user, with a minimum of 1000 users.

Pros:

  • Very complex message routing processes can be constructed for a wide variety of purposes
  • Compliance and governance can be built into messaging infrastructure
  • Sendmail is a leading email server software and supports a large number of third-party applications

Cons:

  • Still some integration into a single Web server for management purposes
  • Policies can be fairly complex and require careful debugging

Version 4.0 was tested on a small network in August 2009.

Sendmail Inc.

6475 Christie Ave., Suite 350

Emeryville, CA  94608

510-594-5400

http://sendmail.com

How to use Symantec products to stop buying (more) storage


Symantec Corp.
20330 Stevens Creek Blvd.
Cupertino, CA 95014

We looked at several products available from Symantec to help provide insight into how to reduce overall enterprise disk storage requirements and cost. The video touches on several strategies that enterprise IT managers can employ to analyze their storage use.

Symantec NetBackup Pure Disk v6.5
http://www.symantec.com/business/netbackup-puredisk

Veritas Command Central Storage v5.1
http://www.symantec.com/business/commandcentral-storage

Symantec Enterprise Vault v8.0
http://www.symantec.com/business/enterprise-vault

Veritas Storage Foundation v5.0
http://www.symantec.com/business/storage-foundation