Although it’s too early to tell how successful
the iPhone will be in the enterprise market,
there’s little doubt that Apple has made all
the other players in the industry take notice.
“Apple’s doing what they have repeatedly
done in the last seven years or so: introduce
a product that forces the entrenched market
leaders in that segment to hustle like mad to
catch up to both perception and reality,” says
Robichaux. “The iPhone has generated buzz
around smart mobile devices in a way that
nothing else has been able to.”
—Jeff James
See associated figure
Hardware Winners
Gold: Barracuda Spam Firewall
Barracuda Networks
www.barracudanetworks.com
Why it won: Spam management is a frustrating,
time-consuming process. The Barracuda
Spam Firewall’s appliance-based
approach takes the sting out of the task.
Spam continues to be a problem
for everyone who uses email.
What many users probably don’t
understand is the Herculean
effort that most administrators
put forth to combat the problem.
Boasting ease of use and affordability, the Barracuda Spam Firewall—an integrated
hardware/software solution for protecting
email servers from spam, viruses, and spyware—
is gaining remarkable traction.
With its hourly spam- and virus-definition
updates, the Barracuda Spam Firewall
requires very little maintenance and
administrative overhead. Compatible with
all email servers, the appliance can fit into
nearly any corporate or small-business environment.
And unlike software solutions,
it reduces the load on the email server by
offloading spam and virus filtering. The
product also includes essential outbound
filtering techniques.
To get a feel for the product in the real
world, I spoke with Kirk Whitham, a systems
administrator at North American Directory
Services. “I was a little apprehensive
about using a hardware solution for email
management, but the Barracuda has surprised
me. Installation was simple, and the
software tools are easy to understand. It’s
much smarter about spam filtering than any
software-only solution we’ve tried.”
Windows IT Pro contributing editor
Eric Rux agrees that the appliance does a
great job of filtering out spam and virusinfested
email. “But what really sets it apart
are its great features and outstanding support,”
Rux said. “I value its hourly and daily statistics graphs and its appliance-health
information—such as system load, CPU
temperature, and mail/log storage—and
I love the clustering option, which lets
multiple Barracuda Spam Firewalls share
configuration information. But my favorite
feature is remote troubleshooting, which
gives you online access to Barracuda support
technicians.”
—Jason Bovberg
See associated figure
Silver: Steelhead
Riverbed Technology
www.riverbed.com
Why it won: Riverbed’s Steelhead appliances
offer a scalable approach to
application acceleration across your WAN.
Our readers have sung the praises of the
Steelhead appliances, reporting incredible
compression and bandwidth savings after
installing them.
Bronze: HP ProLiant DL585
HP
www.hp.com
Why it won: If you’re looking for a rackmounted
enterprise-class server, you can’t
go wrong with the HP ProLiant DL585.
The system’s four-way dual-core Opteron
configuration provides amazing performance,
and HP’s Insight Manager and iLO
enable effective remote management for
enterprise deployments.
Interoperability
Winners
Gold: Centrify DirectControl
Centrify
www.centrify.com
Why it won: Centrify DirectControl easily
and seamlessly integrates Linux, UNIX,
and Mac OSs with Active Directory and
provides robust UNIX and Linux personality
management and strong migration
management.
As open-source and Macintosh
OSs become increasingly
enterprise-friendly and
widely used, IT administrators
will face growing interoperability
concerns. Centralized account
administration solutions can help you manage
mixed environments by enabling single
sign-on and controlling authentication,
access, and security policies for Windows,
Linux, UNIX, and Mac OSs.
Centrify DirectControl centralizes management
of disparate systems in Active
Directory (AD), providing a single point
of control over security and configuration
policies. With DirectControl, non-Microsoft
systems can join an AD domain so that you
can manage them by using Group Policy
and the other controls you use to manage
your Windows systems. DirectControl lets
you organize systems into logical groupings
that have a unique set of security policies, a
unique set of users and administrators, and
separate access rights. You can even specify
what action DirectControl should take in the
event of a conflict (e.g., between GUIDs).
Continue to page 3
Register
